section_path: Scholarly achievements/Beliefs and philosophy
section_name: Beliefs and philosophy
paragraph_text: Beliefs and philosophy
  
  Shen Kuo was much in favor of philosophical Daoist notions which challenged the authority of empirical science in his day. Although much could be discerned through empirical observation and recorded study, Daoism asserted that the secrets of the universe were boundless, something that scientific investigation could merely express in fragments and partial understandings. Shen Kuo referred to the ancient Daoist I Ching in explaining the spiritual processes and attainment of foreknowledge that cannot be attained through "crude traces", which he likens to mathematical astronomy. Nathan Sivin proposes that Shen was the first in history to "make a clear distinction between our unconnected experiences and the unitary causal world we postulate to explain them," which Biderman and Scharfstein state is arguably inherent in the works of Heraclitus, Plato, and Democritus as well. Shen was a firm believer in destiny and prognostication, and made rational explanations for the relations between them. Shen held a special interest in fate, mystical divination, bizarre phenomena, yet warned against the tendency to believe that all matters in life were preordained. When describing an event where lightning had struck a house and all the wooden walls did not burn (but simply turned black) and lacquerwares inside were fine, yet metal objects had melted into liquid, Shen Kuo wrote:
  
  Most people can only judge of things by the experiences of ordinary life, but phenomena outside the scope of this are really quite numerous. How insecure it is to investigate natural principles using only the light of common knowledge, and subjective ideas.
  
  In his commentary on the ancient Confucian philosopher Mencius (372–289 BC), Shen wrote of the importance of choosing to follow what one knew to be a true path, yet the heart and mind could not attain full knowledge of truth through mere sensory experience. In his own unique way but using terms influenced by the ideas of Mencius, Shen wrote of an autonomous inner authority that formed the basis for one's inclination towards moral choices, a concept linked to Shen's life experiences of surviving and obtaining success through self-reliance. Along with his commentary on the Chinese classic texts, Shen Kuo also wrote extensively on the topics of supernatural divination and Buddhist meditation.
  
  In the "Strange Happenings" passage of the Dream Pool Essays, Shen offered accounts of an unidentified flying object that occurred during the reign of Emperor Renzong (1022 – 1063). An object as bright as a pearl was said to occasionally hover over the city of Yangzhou at night, and was previously described by local inhabitants of eastern Anhui and then in Jiangsu. A man near Xingkai Lake observed the same object, alleging that it emitted powerful lights from its interior like sunbeams illuminating the woods over a ten-mile radius before departing at tremendous speeds. Shen recorded that Yibo, a poet of Gaoyou, wrote a poem about this "pearl" after witnessing it and that locals around Fanliang in Yangzhou erected a "Pearl Pavilion" where spectators on boats hoped to spot the mysterious flying object again.