Listening to the Wind in the Pines, Ma Lin

People say that Wen Wang could drink a thousand jugs of wine and Confucius, a hundred gallons. From this we're supposed to conclude these sages had outstanding virtue, since they could handle so much liquor. If they could sit down and toss back a thousand jugs or a hundred gallons, they must've been winos, not sages!

There's a proper way to drink, and the torsos and stomachs of the sages must have been the same size as anyone else's. Eating food with their wine, they would've eaten a hundred sides of beef while guzzling one thousand jugs, and they'd need ten sheep for a hundred gallons. If they could toss back a thousand jugs and a hundred sides of beef, or a hundred gallons and ten sheep, Wen Wang must have been a giant like the Prince of Fangfeng, and Confucius must have been a fifty-foot-tall barbarian!

Here's a proverb: the virtuous do not become intoxicated.

^{-- translation by me, after Alfred Forke}

Wang Chong (also known as Wang Ch'ung, as in "everybody... tonight!") was an orphan who grew up to be streetwise, penniless teacher gifted with a near-photographic memory. He learned the Chinese classics by flipping through them at bookstalls, since he a.) couldn't afford to buy them and b.) really only needed to read them once to learn them.

In his day - around 100 AD, that is - Laozi and Confucius had begun to be revered as gods, with shrines set up in their honor and ordinary people giving them offerings in return for supernatural aid. Wang didn't think that was right - he was a believer in evidence, and built an ethical and philosophical system based on his simple, unflinching observations of everyday reality. He also asked a lot of questions.

So, in a time when metaphysics was giving way to superstition, Wang reasserted the value of skepticism; and in a time when schools of thought were given supernatural and even eternal importance, he emphasized the importance of individualism and the power of reason to dispel illusions.

His only surviving work is the Lung Heng, sometimes called Balanced Inquiries or just Critical Essays.

Note - As far as I can tell, the Prince of Fangfeng is a figure important to the Wang family, who helped establish a kingdom about 2,000 years before this particular Wang did his thing, and was famously big-boned and rather tragically late to a mythic meeting with Yu.

'Nother note - Other things that were going on at the same time Wang Chong was laying down his science: China started using paper and invented the wheelbarrow, the last lions in Europe died out (or were hunted to extinction), and the Greeks decided arithmetic should be a separate discipline from geometry. Before that, it was all just shapes.