 While the literature of criticism had long been a part of Chinese intellectual culture, in Huan’s work we begin to see more direct and incisive criticism, rather than the carefully expressed, indirect, and suggestive criticism we see earlier in the Western Han, when fu poetry was a dominant form of presentation of critique and literary subtlety and indirectness were prized. Such indirect criticism through fu poetry was still practiced in the Eastern Han, by masters of the art such as Cai Yong, but the more direct critical literature of scholars like Huan Tan came to play a larger role in this period. Huan’s critical stance undermined many earlier traditional practices, such as divination, and he does not, unlike many previous thinkers, rely on historical precedent and appeals to the figures of the past. This aligns him to some extent with the realist pragmatism of the Legalists, although it is incorrect to see Huan in terms of this older school designation that had no cache in the Han. His thought is representative of the critical, rationalist, and more insistently naturalist mode of thinking that became more prominent in the Eastern Han. Huan and others criticized what they saw as the excesses of the metaphysics of correlative cosmology of the Western Han, and its tendency to proliferate entities in its ontology, many of which Huan thought were imaginary. Huan’s critical style is clearly echoed in later thinkers of the Eastern Han such as Wang Fu and Wang Chong. Particularly in his approach to the classical texts, we find influence on later thinkers such as Wang Chong. Huan advocated a piecemeal approach rather than acceptance or rejection of a text as a whole. We should accept what is true and reject what is false in the writings of the past.