 While the critical and naturalistic thought of Huan Tan is only today known through fragments, we have far more material from Wang Chong (27–100 CE), a somewhat similar thinker of the Eastern Han whose work was likely influenced by Huan. While Wang Chong was a somewhat marginal figure in his time (a situation about which he complains in his work), his thought became influential indirectly in later years, particularly in the leadup to the Xuanxue movement in the Wei-Jin period. Wang’s writing was not only voluminous, but contained a wealth of historical references, quotes, and citations of earlier thinkers. Wang apparently studied a wide range of texts, and wrote about many of them. Thus, his work survived mainly due to being collected and used as a kind of encyclopedia by figures in the late Han and Wei-Jin periods. A number of these figures became prominent in the “Qingtan” (pure talk) discussion movement that preceded Xuanxue, and Wang’s ideas influenced the movement via this direction (see McLeod 2020).