The most critically rational and scientifically spirited independent thinker of the Eastern Han dynasty, a rare philosophical warrior in ancient China who wielded experience and logic as his weapons. He spent thirty years composing the eighty-five chapters of the Balanced Inquiries, raising the banner of "attacking falsehood and absurdity" to systematically demolish the apocryphal theology, Heaven-Humanity resonance theory, and ghost-spirit superstitions that pervaded the Western and Eastern Han. He advocated a naturalistic monism of primordial qi, holding that all things in Heaven and Earth arise naturally from the objective material "primordial qi" and that the course of Heaven operates without will or purpose. His epistemology—that "knowledge of things comes through learning, and through learning one knows"—emphasized that all knowledge must derive from sensory experience and rational verification, opposing the a priori dogmatism of innate knowledge, and shining with the light of materialism and skepticism in an age dominated by theology.
Courtesy name Zhongren, a native of Shangyu in Kuaiji (modern Shaoxing, Zhejiang), approximately 27–97 CE. Born into a "humble and solitary" family of modest means, whose ancestors engaged in farming and trade, he faced discrimination in the status-conscious society of the Eastern Han. He lost his father in childhood but was relentlessly studious; as a youth he traveled to Luoyang for study and, unable to afford books, frequented the capital's bookshops, "memorizing at a single reading" and accumulating astonishing erudition. He studied at the Imperial Academy under Ban Biao, mastering the Five Classics without being confined to chapter-and-verse exegesis. His official career was extremely frustrating; he held only minor positions such as district merit officer and provincial assistant, repeatedly marginalized for his upright and unaccommodating character, eventually resigning to live in seclusion. In retirement, he shut his door to visitors and devoted his entire life to writing the Lunheng (Balanced Discourses) in eighty-five chapters, using solitary reason to combat the theological fog of his entire era. He died in poverty and illness, "without a single acre of land to shelter his body, without a single peck of salary." The Lunheng was considered heterodox and long neglected in the Eastern Han, until Cai Yong and Wang Lang discovered it in Wu and brought it to wider circulation, becoming a monument to the spirit of critical rationality in ancient China.
Ontologically, Wang Chong takes "original qi" (yuan qi) as the fundamental substance of all cosmic things: "Heaven and earth unite their qi and the ten thousand things are spontaneously born." Original qi naturally differentiates to produce heaven, earth, and all things, requiring no intervention from any supernatural will. "The way of Heaven is natural and non-active"—heaven has no purpose, no emotion, and does not issue calamitous warnings to humanity. This constitutes a thorough negation of Dong Zhongshu's heaven-human resonance theory. Epistemologically, "knowledge of things comes through learning; learning and then knowing"—all knowledge originates in sensory experience, then processed by the mind to form judgments. "To know without learning, to understand without asking—in all of history, past and present, this has never occurred." Methodologically, "matters must have evidential verification; use effectiveness to test what is so"—claims must be tested against empirical facts, and logic must be used to distinguish truth from falsehood. He systematically refutes popular superstitions: that sages are heaven-born, that ghosts are real, that thunder is heaven's anger, that dragons can ascend to heaven—all demonstrating a scientific rational spirit ahead of its time. On the question of fate, he acknowledges the power of contingency: "Fate cannot be forced; timing cannot be struggled against." Life's circumstances are determined by the thickness of one's endowment of qi and the contingency of timing, not by ghosts or divine will.
"The way of Heaven is natural and non-active. It bestows qi and things are born of themselves, not seeking to give life to things. — Lunheng, "On Nature""
How does Wang Chong's fierce assault on sycophantic theology and supernatural apocrypha two thousand years ago inspire us to defend rational skepticism today, amid pseudoscience and algorithmic "mysticism"?
Wang Chong uses the natural qi theory to reject theological teleology; Lucretius uses atomism to dispel religious fear. Both rebel against prevailing superstition with a pure naturalistic worldview, their spirits resonating across ten thousand miles.
Can pure naturalism satisfy the human need for meaning? Do the naturalistic worldviews of Wang Chong and Lucretius offer true liberation, or do they merely replace one form of nihilism with another?
Wang Chong's empirical epistemology of "knowledge through learning" and Hume's empiricist principle that "all ideas originate in impressions" both take sensory experience as the boundary of knowledge, using skepticism to reject transcendent dogma, inaugurating the critical-empirical tradition in their respective civilizations.
Is radical skepticism the path to truth or the road to nihilism? Do the skeptical methods of Wang Chong and Hume ultimately strengthen or undermine the possibility of genuine knowledge?
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