 In accordance with his notion of the Way as the observable “constancies” that can be profitably applied to human conduct, Xunzi argued strongly against the notion that weird occurrences on earth can be rationalized as monitory signs from Heaven. Superficially terrifying occurrences such as shooting stars or squalling trees are merely “shifts in Heaven and Earth, transformations of yin and yang, material anomalies” (Xunzi 17.7). We should be concerned instead with “human portents” (renyao 人祅), a term that would have seemed as counterintuitive in Xunzi’s language as it does in ours. “Human portents” are the many shortsighted and immoral acts through which human beings bring on their own destruction: “poor plowing that harms the harvest, hoeing and weeding out of season, governmental malice that causes the loss of the people” (Xunzi 17.7). Heaven has no part in such wrongdoing. Now and then strange things may happen in the skies, but they have happened at all moments in history, and they have never been sufficient to destroy a prudent and moral society—whereas an imprudent and immoral society will fail even if it is spared an eclipse.