Tian is the one thing in the tradition that occupies the position a god occupies elsewhere, and it is conspicuously unlike one. It has no image, no myth, no genealogy, no consort and no biography; it does not appear to anyone, issues no commandments and receives no personal petitions from ordinary people — the sacrifice to Heaven was the emperor's alone, and performing it without authority was a capital offence. Its altar at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing is a bare circular platform of stone open to the sky. Confucius invokes it at moments of stress — when Yan Hui dies, when he is threatened at Kuang, when he is accused of impropriety — and he refuses to elaborate: asked how he could say Heaven does not speak, he answered that the four seasons turn and the hundred things are born, and what does Heaven say. Scholars have argued for two millennia about whether the tradition is theistic, and the honest answer is that it declined the question early and built everything else on that refusal.