WANG CHONG (27–100? CE), critic and skeptic who proposed naturalist explanations for the relation between Heaven and man. Born into a poor family in Guiji (in modern Zhejiang), Wang studied in the Imperial Academy but then held office for a brief period only. Most of his life he lived in seclusion, devoting himself to writing. He wrote three works, Zhengwu (The conduct of government), Lunheng (Critical Essays), and Yangsheng (On the cultivation of life). Of these only Lunheng has been preserved.

According to Wang himself, the spirit of his Lunheng may be summed up in one sentence: he detests what is fictitious and false. The fiction that Wang detested most was the theory of "mutual response between Heaven and man," which had dominated the mind of Han China since Dong Zhongshu had first propounded it 150 years earlier. According to this theory, aberrant natural phenomena (such as floods...