Heaven as Nature, and a Philosopher Out of Favour

Xunzi advanced one of the most naturalistic conceptions of Heaven (tian) in early Chinese thought. For him Heaven is not a purposive moral agent watching over human affairs but the regular, impersonal order of nature: the seasons turn and the stars move by constant processes, indifferent to human wishes, and it is folly to pray for what one should work for. The wise response is to understand nature's constancy and to concentrate on the human task of building a good social order, a strikingly this-worldly stance.

Xunzi's influence was immediate but double-edged: two of his most famous students, Han Fei and Li Si, became leading figures of the harsh Legalist statecraft of the Qin, and his association with them, together with his rejection of Mencius's innate goodness, told against him in later ages. When Song Neo-Confucianism enshrined Mencius as orthodox, Xunzi was pushed to the margins, and he was long read as a near-heretic; modern scholarship has restored him as one of the most rigorous and systematic thinkers of the classical age.