Zhang Heng On "natural Days" And "religious Days"

For the ancient Chinese philologist, the relationship of the heaven and the people was always a main topic of their discussion. The problem of the heaven's evolution, function and phoneme which nowadays is no doubt included in the science researching was in the field of philosophy in ancient Han Dynasty. In ZhangHeng's time (Eastern Han Dynasty), Confucius received the exclusive respect and meanwhile the scholar of different Confucius subsidiary part analyzed the heaven's natural property from different sorts of aspect, such as'the hypothesis of Qi'and consequently established the philosophy to explain the relationship of heave and people.With the development of Confucius in eastern Han Dynasty, ZhangHeng, who was a member of Confucius scholar, researched not only the heaven's natural property but its relationship with people as well. The recent documents of ZhangHeng, no matter which are domestic or oversea, are mainly focus on his merits of astronomy, seismology, machinery, mathematics and such, especially his technological invention, often acts as the foundation of ZhangHeng researching for the scholar nowadays. But ZhangHeng's philosophy of heaven and the heaven's relation with other philologists of that time are always neglected. So this paper aims to retell ZhangHeng's viewpoint of astronomy in philosophy language and meanwhile explain his comprehension of heaven in nature and religion. But all of this is based on his comprehension of heaven and the explanation of his great astronomy work'LingXian'.My paper is divided into 5 chapters.The first chapter is due to set the aim of this philosophic paper on the foundation of existed analysis which have achieved many progresses in researching ZhangHeng's merits. But, on the contrary, nearly no one has touched the problem which concerned ZhangHeng's astronomic and philosophic comprehension of the heaven.'LingXian', a masterpiece written by ZhangHeng, is the representation of ZhangHeng's comprehension of the heaven. By the analysis of'LingXian', the subject of chapter 2 and 3 is mainly on the ZhangHeng's whole comprehension of the heaven. Firstly, I will explain ZhangHeng's view, treating heaven as a phoneme of nature, including the beginning of the heaven, the mutation of the heaven, the hypothesis of the heaven confusion, the planet, the lunar eclipse and meteor by the help of Chinese ancient philosophy hypothesis'Qi'. Secondly, in ZhangHeng's mind, the heaven was not only a kind of natural material but also a palace where the god stayed and, furthermore, from where the god's will, rewarding or punishment is conveyed to the people. So the heaven was entitled to the name of religious heaven. In Han Dynasty, people's research of heaven equaled to the horoscope and from which ZhangHeng tried to unveiled the mode or the regulation of the nature heaven and meanwhile, according to the change of the heaven, made efforts to translate the heaven's will in time.In the fourth chapter, according to the'ChunQiuFanLu'written by DongZhongshu and'LunHeng'written by WangChong, representative of philosgists in Han Dynasty, I am going to analyze the natural heaven defined by Dong and religious heaven by Wang in these two books respectively and further prove that in the Han philologists'viewpoint, the heaven's property of nature and religion is undividable. The mixed concept of heaven with two property, nature and religion, is a kind of main ideology in Han.ZhangHeng, as an orthodox Confucius inheritor and worked as the official'TaiShiLin'twice, was deeply influenced by the'heaven-human mutual influence'ideology of DongZhongshu. In'LinXian', ZhangHeng's theory of religious heaven inherited the main idea of Dong's. After inauguration, he provided advices to the governor according to the analysis of natural heaven's rule and heaven auspice. Further, he tried to prove the legitimacy of the monarchy by heaven's will. Obviously, the profound natural heaven and the delicate religious heaven he mentioned in his book'Linxian'are two property of one concept.