Study On The Supernatural And Weird Tales Of Wang Chong’s Writing: Lun Heng

Lun Heng, whose writer is Wang Chong who exists in Later Han Dynasty, is a immortal writing. There are more than200thousands words in the book and its purpose is criticical of the untrue,weird and consuetudinary tales. Wang Chong made a sharp criticism of the superstition, and put forward his own opinion to the supernatural. This paper tries to analyze Wang Chong’s opinion on ghost and monster from the literary view, which is divided into three parts:introduction, text and epilogue.Introduction is the first chapter, which mainly introduces the current research situation on Wang Chong and his view on ghost, as well as the design of this paper.The second chapter:the record of supernatural tales in Lun Heng mainly combs the supernatural tales which is recorded by Lun Heng. The supernatural story can be divided into several kinds:if the dead people knew; people if the dead knew, could harm people; people would be ghosts after death; the ghosts could hurt people. While Wang Chong recorded these stories, he made a collection and processing which let the language of stories more concise and with more rich content.The third chapter focuses on Wang Chong’s spirits of criticism. Wang Chong was critical to theological superstition on learning forum, the popular worship and custom of divination in folk; especially, Wang Chong was critical to the ancient records and folk tales of supernatural in the chapter:pseudo ghost, opinion on death, textual research on ghost and so on. Wang Chong criticize the traditional outlook of ghost such as people will be ghosts after death, the dead people know things, can speak, can do harm to people in kinds of angles. Wang Chong either made a explanation from the point of physiology, psychology and nature on the so-called supernatural phenomenon; or used analogical argument, reduction to absurdity and feelings on dead people what are used to argue his view which is the embodiment of Wang Chong’s outstanding art of debate. However, the comment on supernatural tales extently promoted the improvement of ghost story itself, so that later ghost stories be more exciting with more compact structure, which enhanced the readability of the stories and has played a positive role in promoting the later development of literature.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes Wang Chong’s view on the sign of weird things. Wang Chong provided his theory of strong gas from the sun and analyzed three types of weird things. Wang Chong explained the strange phenomenon with Yao what became a fatal vulnerability of Wang Chong’s atheism, which also reflected the contradiction of Wang Chong’s thought. Wang Chong simply insisted the death was not a ghost, while didn’t deny the existence of ghosts on the world. It means that Wang Chong admits that the ghosts exist but do not change from postmortem human. What’s more, Wang Chong’s support on the sign of weird things promoted the future development and boom of the ghost-branching literature.The last part, the conclusion summarizes the research, and puts forward the deficiency of this article, namely for the meanings to later development of literature of the criticism on supernatural tales. There is a big research space on it.