Wang Chong

In the sixth month of the year 79, in the commandery of Kuaiji on the coast south of the Yangzi, a man named Chin Chuan was killed by lightning, and five of his sheep died with him. People said they knew what that meant: thunder was Heaven's anger, and lightning struck down the guilty. A local scholar, then in his fifties, wrote it down and asked a question: "What hidden faults had these animals, that the lightning killed them?"¹²

His name was Wang Chong, and in the same years he was writing a book he called the Lunheng, which means something like Discourses Weighed in the Balance. "For this reason the Lun-heng weighs the words, whether they be light or heavy, and holds up a balance for truth and falsehood."³⁴ In it he argued that the dead do not become ghosts, that Heaven has no mouth or eyes and does not rebuke rulers with disasters, and that thunder is the clash of natural forces. He wrote under the Han dynasty, when the orthodox Confucian scholars taught exactly the opposite. This chapter follows him from a village school to that book, and asks what kind of unbelief a man could hold in the first-century Chinese empire. (His words are quoted in the English translation of Alfred Forke, published in 1907 and 1911.)

A poor scholar

He was born in 27 CE at Shangyu in Kuaiji, near modern Shaoxing, into a family that had come from the north; he told his own readers, to the scandal of later critics, that one of his ancestors had been "very bold and violent" and had killed men in a famine, and that the family had moved after feuds.⁵⁶⁷ At six he was taught manners, and at eight he went to a school of more than a hundred boys, where he read the Analects of Confucius and the Book of Documents and learned a thousand characters a day.⁸ He lost his father as a boy and was praised in his village as a filial son.⁹ On the belief timeline, his faith stands for that schooling, in the Confucian classics and the Confucian virtues.

The history of the Later Han dynasty, written four centuries afterwards, says he went to the capital, Luoyang, and studied at the Imperial College under the scholar Ban Biao. "His family being poor, he possessed no books. Therefore he used to stroll about the market-place and the shops in Loyang and read the books exposed there for sale," and he remembered whatever he read.^10111213 He himself does not tell the bookshop story; it comes from the later history. In his own account he simply says that, reading widely, he found in the current books and common sayings much that he could not accept. That reading is where the timeline places his doubt, and no source dates it more closely than "after Luoyang."¹⁴

He went home, taught, and held a series of minor posts in the local government. Accounts differ on why he left them: the official history says he quarrelled with his superiors and colleagues, and his own autobiography says his relations with them were excellent.¹⁵¹⁶ He remained poor. "Although he was poor and had not an acre to dwell upon," he wrote of himself, "his mind was freer than that of kings and dukes."¹⁷

Heaven's reprimands

The orthodox teaching he set himself against was the doctrine of the Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu, two centuries before him: that when a ruler went wrong, Heaven warned him with strange events, then struck his people, then struck him. In Wang's own report of it, "when of old a sovereign in his administration departed from the right way, Heaven reprimanded him by visiting him with calamities."^18192021 Dong Zhongshu himself, in Forke's translation, explained that when a ruler was not enlightened, "heat and cold are out of order, and the people visited with diseases and epidemics."²²

Wang answered politely and then without mercy. "I say that this seems very doubtful to me." "If they say that Heaven reprimands a sovereign through calamities, does it also reprove an individual through his misfortunes?" "These opinions of the literati are those of illiterate people."²³²⁴²⁵ Heaven, he said, acts by spontaneity, not by intention, because "it has neither mouth nor eyes." To say that Heaven grows grain and silk in order to feed and clothe us "would be tantamount to making Heaven the farmer of man or his mulberry girl."^26272829 And if Heaven acted at all, it would no longer be spontaneous: "Heaven's principle, spontaneity, consists in inaction. If it did reprimand people, that would be action."³⁰ He took the idea of spontaneity from the Taoists, but he would not take it on their word: "The Taoist school argues on spontaneity, but it does not know how to substantiate its cause by evidence."³¹

Thunder

The essay on thunder is the clearest example of his method. People said that thunder was Heaven's anger and that lightning killed the wicked. "But if we look into the matter, taking human nature as a basis, we find that all this is nonsense."³² Thunder, he argued, is the collision of the two natural forces, yin and yang, and lightning is fire; it strikes sheep and trees as well as men.³³ Then he gave his example from Kuaiji, the man and his five sheep. "Does Heaven in such a case indulge in useless anger?"¹³⁴

The dead

His most famous argument is about death. "The dead do not become ghosts, have no consciousness, and cannot injure others." Why should only human beings become ghosts, when other creatures do not? "If we suppose that after death a man becomes a ghost, there would be a ghost on every road, and at every step." "Human death is like the extinction of fire. When a fire is extinguished, its light does not shine any more, and when man dies, his intellect does not perceive any more."^3536373839 The ghosts people saw, he thought, were "evoked by intense thinking and meditating," and the sick saw them because their strength was failing, "like Po Lo seeing horses or the cook seeing oxen."⁴⁰⁴¹⁴²

He gave his reason for writing it in plain words, and it was practical. "Now I have written the essays on Death and on the False Reports about the Dead to show that the deceased have no consciousness, and cannot become ghosts, hoping that, as soon as my readers have grasped this, they will restrain the extravagance of the burials, and become more economical."⁴³⁴⁴ In 76, during a famine in Henan, he had sent the emperor a memorial urging that waste and extravagance be forbidden so that the hungry could be fed; it was not accepted.⁴⁵⁴⁶ His argument against ghosts was, among other things, an argument against ruining families on funerals.

Confucius and the books

He did not spare the Sage himself. "The students of Confucianism of the present day like to swear in verba magistri, and to believe in antiquity," he wrote, using the Latin phrase Forke chose for "by the master's word." But he criticised Confucius as a student, not an enemy: "criticisms animate the discussion, and bring out the meaning, and opposition leads to greater clearness."⁴⁷⁴⁸⁴⁹ He wrote against "the many deceitful books and popular literature devoid of veracity and truthfulness," and against the habit of "taking everything indited on bamboo and silk for the records of wise and sage men and for absolutely true."¹⁴⁵⁰⁵¹ His translator thought he regarded himself as a Confucian all the same.⁵²

What he kept

He was not a modern sceptic, and his translator was careful to say so. He kept a belief in fate, in astrology and physiognomy, and in omens as natural signs that arise of themselves; what he denied was that Heaven sent them on purpose.⁵³ "Wang Ch'ung denies the immortality of the soul," Forke wrote, "but at the same time he believes in Ghosts and Spirits," though his ghosts are "very poor figures" with no consciousness.⁵⁴ He praised the Han dynasty warmly, and argued that the empire was at peace even without omens.⁵⁵⁵⁶

The last years

In 86 he went to a post in the provinces, doing mostly official correspondence, and gave it up in 88, poor and ageing, his friends gone.⁵⁷ A man of his district recommended him to the emperor, who summoned him; he was too ill to go.⁵⁸ In his last years he wrote a book on prolonging life, now lost, and took wine and medicines, and he ended his autobiography by accepting what he could not change: "But the duration of human life is limited. Men like animals live for a while and die."⁵⁹⁶⁰⁶¹ He died at home around 97.⁶² On the timeline, that is his revision, and it was no retraction, only an old man's attempt to stay alive a little longer and a plain acceptance that it could not last.

The critics

His book was slow to be read. The great scholar Cai Yong, it was said, found it and kept it secret "as a help to conversation."⁶³ Later Chinese critics were hard on him. In the twelfth century one called the Lunheng "a medley of heterogeneous masses, written in a bad style, in which morality does not take the place it ought." Others condemned "the author's impious utterances regarding his ancestors and his attacks upon the Sage Confucius," for "to dare to find fault with Confucius is an unpardonable crime." The imperial catalogue of the eighteenth century called his attacks on Confucius and Mencius "wicked and perverse," yet admitted that "in exposing falsehoods and denouncing what is base and low he generally hits the truth."^64656667 His own translator found some of his objections "far-fetched and groundless."⁶⁸

Did his unbelief change shape?

It hardly could, since all of it went into one book written in middle age, and he left no record of a crisis. What the book shows is a method more than a creed. He took the received doctrines of his time, about Heaven's anger, the conscious dead and the infallibility of old books, and weighed each against what could be observed: sheep killed by lightning, roads not crowded with ghosts, Heaven with no mouth to speak a rebuke. His motive, in his own words, was partly practical, to stop families wasting their substance on the dead, and partly a scholar's disgust at "deceitful books." He kept a great deal that a modern unbeliever would reject, and he would not have recognised the word. But he insisted that a claim about Heaven be weighed like any other claim, and it was that insistence, not any single conclusion, that his critics found impious.

Epicurus and Lucretius, whom Forke compared him with at length, and who also argued that death is nothing to fear, have their own chapters in this book.