Wang Chong

Works

• c. 80Balanced Inquiries (Lunheng)

  Eighty-five essays, one of them lost, that test the beliefs of the Han age – portents, ghosts, the omniscience of the sages – against observation and argument: Heaven acts spontaneously and without purpose, and even Confucius, Mencius and Han Fei are criticised.

Position

Wang Chong is on the map as a critic of the correlative cosmology of the Han period, which held that Heaven responds to the conduct of rulers with portents and disasters. He held that Heaven and Earth produce things spontaneously (ziran), as husband and wife produce a child without intending it: Heaven has no purpose, does not speak and can neither reward nor punish. Portents, auspicious signs and calamities are therefore natural coincidences; fortune, lifespan and rank depend on destiny (ming), fixed by the qi received at birth, not on merit. In the chapters on death he argued that the dead do not become ghosts, since consciousness depends on the body and its vital energy. He judged claims by evidence: what a teaching asserts must agree with what can be observed and with itself, and he applied this test even to the classics – chapters 28 to 30 question Confucius, Han Fei and Mencius. Human nature, he held, differs among people and can be changed by teaching. By his own account he followed the Daoist teaching of spontaneity associated with Huang-Lao on this point, while regarding himself as a scholar in the Ru tradition. Long little read and criticised for its attacks on the sages, the “Lunheng” was revalued in the Qing period and above all in the twentieth century, when Chinese scholars read it as an early example of a critical, evidence-based attitude.

Life & context

Wang Chong was born in 27 CE in Shangyu in the commandery of Kuaiji, in present-day Zhejiang, into a family that, by his own account in the autobiographical last chapter of the “Lunheng”, had come down in the world. According to the “Book of the Later Han” he studied at the Imperial Academy in Luoyang, where Ban Biao was his teacher, and, too poor to buy books, read them at the booksellers’ stalls in the market. Back home he held minor posts in the commandery and provincial administration, which he gave up after conflicts with superiors, and spent most of his life teaching and writing. The “Lunheng”, his only surviving work, grew over many years in the second half of the first century; his books on government, on common morals and on nourishing life are lost. A summons to the court of Emperor Zhang came to nothing because of illness. He died around 100; other estimates give c. 90 or 97.

Further main works

• Lunheng (Balanced Inquiries, 85 chapters, one lost; 1st c.)
• Jisu jieyi (Censures on Common Morals, lost)
• Zhengwu (On Government, lost)
• Yangxing shu (Nourishing Life, lost)