Religions of Ancient China by Herbert A. Giles

Yang Hsiung. -- Yang Hsiung was a philosopher who flourished / B. C. 53 - A. D. 18. He taught that the nature of man at birth is neither / good nor evil, but a mixture of both, and that development in either / direction depends wholly upon environment. To one who asked about God, / he replied, "What have I to do with God? Watch how without doing / anything He does all things. " To another who said, "Surely it is God who / fashions and adorns all earthly forms," he replied, "Not so; if God in / an earthly sense were to fashion and adorn all things, His strength / would not be adequate to the task."

Wang Ch'ung. -- Wang Ch'ung, A. D. 27-97, denies that men after death live / again as spiritual beings on earth. "Animals," he argues, "do not become / spirits after death; why should man alone undergo this change? . / That which informs man at birth is vitality, and at death this vitality / is extinguished. Vitality is produced by the pulsations of the blood; / when these cease, vitality is extinguished, the body decays, and becomes / dust. How can it become a spirit? . When a man dies, his soul / ascends to heaven, and his bones return (_kuei_) to earth; therefore he / is spoken of as a disembodied spirit (_kuei_), the latter word really / meaning that which has returned. Vitality becomes humanity, just / as water becomes ice. The ice melts and is water again; man dies / and reverts to spirituality. The spirits which people see are / invariably in the form of human beings, and that very fact is enough of / itself to prove that these apparitions cannot be the souls of dead men. / If a sack is filled with grain, it will stand up, and is obviously a / sack of grain; but if the sack is burst and the grain falls out, then it / collapses and disappears from view. Now, man's soul is enfolded in his / body as grain in a sack. When he dies his body decays and his vitality / is dissipated; and if when the grain is taken away the sack loses its / form, why, when the vitality is gone, should the body obtain a new shape / in which to appear again in the world? . The number of persons who / have died since the world began, old, middle-aged, and young, must run / into thousands of millions, far exceeding the number of persons alive at / the present day.