Wang Chong 27 – c. 100

Wang Chong was a Chinese philosopher of the Eastern Han dynasty and one of the most original critical and naturalist thinkers of the classical Chinese tradition. His Lunheng, the Balanced Discourses, mounted a comprehensive skeptical critique of the popular religion, divination, and the more credulous strands of Han-era cosmology, defending an austere naturalism in which heaven is not a moral agent but the regular operation of the natural world. He held no major office, lived most of his life in poverty, and was rediscovered in twentieth-century Chinese intellectual life as a forerunner of materialist and rationalist thought.

Wang Chong was born at Shangyu in the Kuaiji commandery of southeastern China in AD 27. From a poor family of no learned tradition, he made his way to the Imperial Academy at Luoyang, where he studied the Confucian classics under Ban Biao but was too poor to buy books and is reported to have read his way through the stalls of the booksellers. He held a series of minor provincial appointments and spent most of his life in poverty, teaching, and writing in his native region.

His one surviving work, the Lunheng (Discourses Weighed in the Balance), composed around AD 80, contains eighty-four of an original eighty-five chapters and is the longest critical-philosophical treatise of the Han dynasty. He is presumed to have died around AD 100.

Wang Chong measured the inherited body of Confucian, Daoist, and folk belief against the standards of observation and consistency, dismissing the claims of omens, prodigies, prognostication, the immortality cults, the divinity of the early sages, and the anthropocentric reading of nature, while remaining loyal to the moral core of Confucian teaching. His thesis that 'Heaven does nothing on purpose' and his repeated insistence on the weighing of evidence make the Lunheng the foundational work of Chinese empirical and naturalistic critique.