 By adding the element of qi—a term that Xunzi rarely used, and certainly did not build into his metaphysics—Lu Jia retains Xunzi’s volitionless and mechanistic Heaven but forges a novel philosophical justification for the arcane science of omenology, which Xunzi mercilessly deprecated. Where Xunzi counseled us to ignore abnormalities, Lu Jia accepts their validity as “admonitions” (jie 誡). But, once again, Heaven itself has no effect on our success or failure. If we are faced with a host of wood-boring caterpillars, to use Lu’s vivid example, the only way to account for them is to acknowledge that our government is responsible for their generation through its maleficent conduct (Zhou Guidian 1999: 51–53; Puett 2002: 249–52). Two coeval philosophers, Jia Yi 賈誼 (201–169 BCE) and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 198–ca. 107 BCE), agreed that human beings are responsible for their own fortune or misfortune, and thus have no cause to blame Heaven, although Jia Yi did not refer to qi in prosecuting his theory, whereas Dong Zhongshu did (Goldin 2007).