Heaven, Earth and Man​ is a part of the ​Chunqiu Fanlu​ written by Dong

ZhongShu(192-104BC) during the Han Dynasty. It is a famous political philosophy book that
illustrates the author’s understanding of natural matters, in which he classified them into ‘yin’
and ‘yang’, as well as the ‘five rows’(in English with my understanding, metals, plants, fluids,
flames and earth). It also presents the idea that heaven and human beings sense and affect
each other, such as heaven can make it auspicious for human action, and bad human
behaviors, especially the emperors’, can lead to natural disasters. Under this cosmology, a
drought that leads to famine could be viewed as the result of the punishment from heaven
towards an emperor’s bad behaviors such as being indolent or making bad judgements;
while comet sightings could be regarded as bad omens for human society. This cosmology
is idealistic rather than materialistic, and provided ruling legitimacy for the emperors in which
people would believe that emperors have supernatural powers to influence the society
significantly.

This stabilized the society as those who believe in this philosophy, from ministers to
peasants, would hardly challenge or question the ruling legitimacy of emperors. They would
regard emperors as ‘sons of heavens’ instead of questioning that if or why they could
become emperors instead. Emperors would favour and spread this philosophy(which was
why Confucianism was adopted but not some revolutionary philosophy like Marxism which
the ruling class would hate). However, this philosophy could hardly be proved by
materialistic evidence, but was brought up from different people’s minds(with many actually
serving the interests of such creators), which could often diverge from reality and lead to
failures in practices. For example, a minister’s nightmare of war loss that he said to change
the emperor’s military plan might be something he made up after bribed by enemies, but
may be approved and lead to disasters in the end. Therefore the method of launching
materialistic investigations has been preferred by later generations and has led to much
success.

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