Lunheng
論衡 (Lunheng, 'Balanced Discourses')
Most of what Han society takes for supernatural, omens, ghosts, and portents interpreted as Heaven's response to human conduct, is explicable by natural cause, and a scholar's job is to weigh every claim, including claims made by the Confucian classics themselves, against evidence rather than authority.
- skepticism toward Heaven-sent omens and portents
- naturalistic explanation of ghosts and prodigies
- willingness to criticize errors in the Confucian classics
- argument against Dong Zhongshu's correlative cosmology
An 85-chapter work of skeptical natural philosophy by Wang Chong, a minor Eastern Han official writing largely in retirement, that systematically attacks the correlative cosmology dominant in his day, above all the doctrine, associated with Dong Zhongshu's school, that Heaven sends portents and disasters as moral responses to a ruler's conduct. Wang Chong argues instead for a naturalistic universe in which qi operates by impersonal regularity, ghosts are hallucinations or misperceptions rather than spirits, and even revered classical texts and the sayings attributed to Confucius contain errors that should be identified and corrected rather than venerated uncritically, an intellectual independence unusual in Han scholarship.
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