Wang Chong

Wang Chong the Chinese philosopher and sceptic of the Eastern Han dynasty (27-97 AD) whose great work, the Lunheng or Balanced Discourses, attacked superstition, divination and the fashionable beliefs of his age and argued that natural events follow regular causes rather than moral or magical ones. He is remembered as one of the most independent and critical thinkers of the Chinese tradition.

Early Life and Education

Wang Chong was born in 27 AD in Kuaiji, in the region of present-day Zhejiang, in troubled circumstances. His family, once of modest standing, had fallen on hard times, and tradition records that he grew up in poverty. He was nonetheless able to study, and he distinguished himself as a young man by the breadth of his reading and the sharpness of his mind.

He travelled to the capital of Luoyang to study at the imperial academy, where he encountered the leading scholarship of the day. He is said to have been too poor to buy books and to have read them in the bookshops instead, memorising passages on the spot. He absorbed the classical texts and the debates of the schools but was never content to accept received opinion without examination.

His teachers recognised his talent, but his temperament set him apart. He refused to flatter or to trim his views to please those in power, and he formed the habit of testing every claim against evidence and reason. This independence became the defining feature of his thought and the source of both his originality and his isolation.

The Lunheng

Wang Chong's great work is the Lunheng, usually translated as Balanced Discourses or Critical Essays, a lengthy collection of essays in which he examines a vast range of beliefs and practices. He wrote it over many years, revising and expanding it, and the surviving text preserves more than eighty chapters. Its governing purpose is to weigh claims about the world and to separate what can be justified from what cannot.

He attacked the belief in portents, the idea that unusual natural events are omens sent by heaven to warn or reward rulers, and he argued that such events are simply occurrences of nature and carry no moral message. He rejected the practice of divination by omens and the search for immortality, and he criticised the fear of ghosts and spirits as contrary to reason and experience.

His style is blunt, systematic and often polemical. He set out the view he opposed, examined its grounds, and then refuted it point by point, a method that marks him as an early practitioner of disciplined, adversarial argument. Though he drew on the classics, he was willing to question even their authority when he found their claims unsupported.

The work was not widely read in his own lifetime and did not bring him fame or office. It survived, however, and in later ages it was valued as a storehouse of independent criticism and as a rare voice of systematic scepticism in the Chinese tradition.

Natural Philosophy and the Theory of Qi

Wang Chong developed a naturalistic account of the universe grounded in the concept of qi, the vital stuff or energy of which all things are composed. He held that the world is a self-generating order of material processes and that events arise from the interaction of natural forces rather than from the intentions of a personal heaven. This monistic materialism set him apart from thinkers who saw moral purpose woven into the cosmos.

He applied this view to a wide range of phenomena. He explained the eclipses and other heavenly events, the formation of rain, the occurrence of droughts and floods, and the anomalies of human appearance and lifespan as results of natural causes. He denied that the gods intervene in human affairs in response to sacrifice or prayer, and he held that human fortune is governed by circumstance and chance rather than by moral desert.

He was especially critical of determinism of the crude kind that read success and failure as rewards and punishments. Yet he also denied that virtue guarantees earthly reward, a position that made him sceptical of the comfortable piety of his contemporaries. His universe is orderly in its processes but indifferent to human hopes, a conception that anticipated later strands of naturalistic thought.

Critique of Contemporary Belief

Much of the Lunheng is directed against the beliefs and customs that surrounded Wang Chong. He denied the efficacy of sacrifice, prayer and the summoning of rain, arguing that the natural order does not bend to ritual appeals. He rejected the claim that the virtuous rainmaker persuades heaven and that the performance of the rites is followed by the fall of rain.

He criticised the popular accounts of ghosts and apparitions and the fear that the dead can harm the living. He argued that when people die their vital energy disperses, and that reports of ghosts arise from illness, imagination and the vividness of memory. This denial of ghostly agency was a striking position in a culture that took the spirit world for granted.

He also attacked the veneration of prodigies and the belief in auspicious and inauspicious times, and he ridiculed the elaborate arts of divination and geomancy. His commitment was to a consistent standard of evidence, and he repeatedly insisted that a claim should be believed only when it can be supported. He was, in this sense, a moralist of belief as well as a critic of particular doctrines.

Influence and Legacy

Wang Chong was little honoured in his own day. He held only minor offices and spent much of his life in retirement, writing and studying. Yet his work slowly gained recognition, and in later centuries it was admired for its courage and its clarity. Commentators came to see in the Lunheng a rare and valuable current of rational criticism within the Chinese tradition.

His scepticism about omens, ghosts and divination anticipated later debates about the relation between nature and human affairs, and his naturalistic account of the world influenced subsequent thinkers who sought to explain phenomena without recourse to spirits. His insistence that beliefs must be examined and that authority is no substitute for evidence gave him a lasting place in the history of Chinese philosophy.

He died around 97 AD, having lived through decades of intellectual ferment and political trouble. He is remembered as a solitary and uncompromising figure, a thinker who preferred the discomfort of doubt to the comfort of received opinion, and whose questioning spirit remains one of the more striking voices of the Han age.

See also

• Lunheng
• Chinese philosophy
• Scepticism
• Qi