Ming as Fate-Object

Broadly speaking, everything that is beyond our control is called ming in early China. As the Mengzi defines it, ming is “what happens with no one causing it” (mo zhi zhi er zhi zhe 莫之致而至者).Footnote ⁵ The Zhuangzi 莊子 gives us another encompassing meaning of ming as “what cannot be avoided” (bu ke nai he 不可奈何).Footnote ⁶ The Mengzi’s definition takes the perspective of the causing agency, whereas the Zhuangzi’s evaluates ming from the point of view of its repercussion on humans. All in all, both of them point at the notion that there are events that happen without human intervention and which remain out of human control. These events constitute the phenomenon of ming, an external, objective force that indifferently and persistently affects the subject.

I do not wish to import categories such as fatalism, determinism, and free will from the Western philosophical tradition to frame my discussion of ming, for three reasons. First, those categories do not find one-to-one early Chinese counterparts, so they can confuse more than they can clarify. Second, concepts such as fatalism, determinism, and free will are charged with different layers of historically accumulated connotations, and at the same time, perhaps for that very reason, they have become too ambiguous and too empty to be useful at all (as Western philosophers recognize with contempt, like Dennett; with embarrassment, like Searle; or with hope, like Honderich).Footnote ⁷ Third, even if I could temporarily disambiguate the categories for the limited use of this study, engaging with the voluminous Western scholarship in the topics of determinism and free will would be an unnecessarily exhausting task. And here I return to my first reason: Chinese thinkers did not use those categories.

The main category that Chinese thinkers used to talk about a realm of external and amoral forces that exercise determining influence over human life was ming. The reader must be aware that the word ming acquires a variety of different meanings in early Chinese texts: naming, command, mandate, objective circumstances, determining factors, and life span are the most common.Footnote ⁸ All of these meanings, as diverse as they appear to be, are related in more than one way: philologically, semantically, philosophically, and historically. That is to say, we are dealing with a word, ming, with different yet related meanings (polysemy), and not with different words that coincidentally happen to share graphic or phonetic features but not semantic roots (homonymy). For an exhaustive review of the phenomenon of ming in China, as well as the ramifications and connections between the different meanings of the word ming, I would like to direct the reader to the most comprehensive resource in English: Christopher Lupke's The Magnitude of Ming, a collection of complementary essays by various experts discussing the etymology, semantics, and intellectual history, as well as the sociopolitical, legal, cultural, literary, ritual, and ethical implications of the concept of ming in China from antiquity to the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹

My discussion of ming in this section does not pretend to be exhaustive, as my only goal is to show how different meanings of ming in early texts appear related in one particular way. It is my contention that most of the early Chinese meanings of ming hold a sense of prevailing external objective reality (in both aspects of how we are and what happens to us), and all of them can be gathered behind, or connected to, an overarching meaning of ming as “fate.”

The English “fate” comes from the Latin fatum, which literally means “that which has been spoken” and implies a sentence or command of the gods.Footnote ¹⁰ In this way, fatum is close to the meaning of tian ming 天命, the command or mandate of god-Heaven, with the only caveat that the early Chinese Heaven does not speak. No text from early China records the words of Heaven, either in direct or indirect style, or suggests that Heaven speaks. In turn, while there is disagreement on the means that Heaven uses to express its will and mandates, testimonies of Heaven's silence and nonverbal means of communication abound. Arguably, most of the philosophical, ethical, and political problems of early China, and the texts that embody these problems, precisely originate from Heaven's silence. The locus classicus for Heaven's wordless nurturing of the world is Analects 17.19, where Confucius compares himself with quiet Heaven in an implicit critique of verbose yet insubstantial and inefficient orators and rhetoricians.Footnote ¹¹ As opposed to the eloquent Greek and Roman gods, the early Chinese Heaven shows its command through the people's actions, the sages’ words, and all sorts of natural and cosmic events.

Another related sense of fatum (and the Greek moira) is that of one's lot, what is fated to happen, and an allotted life span.Footnote ¹² As we will see below, we find a similar meaning of ming in early Chinese texts that points at both descriptive and normative conceptions of life expectancy and life span. Finally, fatum also referred in a more abstract way to an external force that shapes events and influences or determines outcomes.Footnote ¹³ It is especially in this more general and abstract sense that I translate ming as “fate.” That is the overarching meaning of ming that I want to emphasize, as it serves as a connection among all the other particular and concrete meanings. In the following examples, I discuss different meanings of ming in early China as they illustrate the reifying pattern of thinking about ming as a fate-object: an external, objective, determining reality that confronts and limits the subject, thereby introducing a problem that requires a solution.

Ming as Command

One of the widespread meanings of ming in early texts is command, appointment, and mandate, both as verbs and nouns, and even as a text type.Footnote ¹⁴ The reader might be familiar with the notion of tian ming, usually translated as the Mandate of Heaven. The ideology of the Mandate of Heaven, which may have already been in existence by the early Western Zhou period (1046–976 b.c.e.),Footnote ¹⁵ granted a personified god-Heaven the capacity to judge human behavior and consequently bestow its mandate to a deserving ruler. This religio-political ideology was used in retrospect to justify conquest and legitimate the victorious ruling house. First applied to the Shang conquest of the Xia, and used repeatedly afterwards, it argued that Heaven shifted its mandate when the virtue of a ruling house decayed, enabling the virtuous conquering power to seemingly effortlessly obtain the throne with the support of Heaven.Footnote ¹⁶

However mandated they may have been, Heaven's commands to the king, much as the parallel case of the king's commands to his subordinates, were all tasks to accept voluntarily. That is to say, ming as command or mandate holds no notion of inevitability, yet we may understand a command as being fated in the sense that it belongs to the commanded person by family history, birth, or social and moral condition.Footnote ¹⁷ As an example, among the inscriptions that were cast on ritual bronze vessels during the Western Zhou period, some texts are records of investiture ceremonies. They show official subordinates accepting the command, mandate, or appointment (ming/ ling 令)Footnote ¹⁸ that has been assigned to them by their king, as well as kings accepting Heaven's mandate to rule.Footnote ¹⁹ In both cases, the political commands involve legitimate delegation of power within a closed elite circle largely defined by family boundaries. In quite a few inscriptions, the voice of the current king claims to participate in the same power inherited from Heaven as the Former Kings 先王 (Wen 文 and Wu 武), recipients of the original mandate at the beginning of the Zhou dynasty.Footnote ²⁰ By doing so, the current king puts himself in a position to transmit the mandate to his own subordinates, establishing a lineage of power that extends from Heaven to the chosen appointee. Much as the king belongs to a royal lineage that goes back to the Former Kings, the appointed officials belong to a family tradition responsible for serving royal members (as it is apparent in both the Shi Qiang pan 史牆盤 and Lai pan 逨盤 inscriptions). In this sense, they all share a family fate.

The inscriptions present us with two caveats to the notion of ming as an unavoidable and fated command: first, the appointee must be up to the task and accept it; second, it is not a given that, even after having accepted it, the appointee will be able to perform the task. In the bronze texts, these caveats take the form of formal acceptance of the given orders, promises of intentional effective performance, expressions of anxiety in the face of potential failure, as well as pleas for support to the gods and ancestors to be able to fulfill their tasks.Footnote ²¹ The family fate, is to be understood as an inherited mission in this world rather than as an unavoidable imposition. In some situations, an individual is allotted a particular mission not because of his family relations, but because of his extraordinary virtue. These are exceptional individuals who are chosen to do something great: that is their appointment, lot, or command. The most famous case is probably that of Emperor Yao 堯 abdicating in favor of a worthy man of humble origins, Shun 舜, instead of his own son, a story narrated in the Documents (Canon of Yao and Canon of Shun) but also in found manuscripts such as the Guodian 郭店 bamboo text that editors have called The Way of Tang and Yu (Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道).

In received texts such as the Documents and Odes (Shi jing 詩經), too, it is common to see that the Former Kings’ receipt of Heaven's mandate was preceded by demonstration of extraordinary virtue. An illustration of this idea is found in the “Admonishment to Kang” 康誥, where we read that King Wen 可明德慎罰 “was able to be discerning in his virtue and careful in the use of punishments,” among other demonstrations of deserving behavior. King Wen's prudence is a precondition for Heaven to offer him the great appointment.Footnote ²² Although this idea is not so common in the bronze inscriptions as it is in received texts, there are a few exceptions, one of which is the Maogong ding 毛公鼎, which reads: 王若曰:父歆!丕显文武,皇天引厌劂德,配我有周,膺受大命 (“The King spoke to the effect: ‘Father Yin! Wen and Wu, the Greatly Illustrious! August Heaven was greatly content with their charismatic power. They were worthy of our blessed Zhou, and so they received the great appointment.’”)Footnote ²³

In all these cases, the appointees endowed with a ming can, but should not, do otherwise. The relationship of this kind of ethico-political command with fate in early China has therefore a soft sense and a strong one. On one hand, it is a soft kind of fate because it is not completely unavoidable, whether the failure to fulfill the charge is due to choice or malpractice. On the other hand, it is a strong kind of fate because the larger sociopolitical schema demands for the allotted person to follow through with the task to which he has been appointed. Although we do not find in this meaning of ming a fatalistic view of human and heavenly relationships, there are social and moral imperatives to act in a certain way: for the mandated king to govern, and for the appointed official to serve his ruler. In this way, the understanding of ming as command belongs to the more general pattern of thinking of ming as an external imposition of the object of fate.Footnote ²⁴

Ming as Life

Ming often takes the meaning of life span in early texts. Understood as life expectancy in a descriptive way, it is interchangeable with the term tian nian 天年, the natural number of years that a living being is expected to live according to its species (a tree might be expected to live longer than a person, and a person longer than a cicada). While certainly ming can be a descriptive term signaling the number of years someone lives, it also acquires in early texts a prescriptive connotation pointing at the number of years one is allotted to live. For instance, one Zhuangzi passage in “Great Ancestral Master” (Da zong shi 大宗師) explains that “dying and being born, that is [the works of] ming,” in the same way that “the constancy in the succession of days and nights is [the works of] Heaven.”Footnote ²⁵ A different Zhuangzi passage in “Metaphorical Language” (Yu yan 寓言) discusses the idea that life and death might both be ordained (ming). One of the speakers of the dialogue challenges the conventional view that life happens spontaneously (wu zi 無自) whereas death has an external cause (you zi 有自) by setting doubts on what we can actually know about these processes.Footnote ²⁶ Similarly, in the Han philosopher Wang Chong's 王充 words, ming is responsible for “when we are born and die, and whether we are to live long or die early.”Footnote ²⁷ Our ming in these usages is not describing our life span but pointing at a normative dimension of our allotted years. In the normative sense, our life span would be endowed to us at birth, as a kind of physical individual fate. This ambiguity permeates the early meaning of ming as life in early China.

However, much as in the meaning of command discussed above, neither ming as life span nor as allotted years necessarily imply inevitability. In several texts, we learn that the person should protect her life and/or allotted living years from being cut off too early. This implies that even in the case of being fated with a pre-determined life span, the amount of years one actually lives may change. For instance, metaphoric trees in the Zhuangzi save themselves from being cut down before their time by being useless to humans. Only those with fine wood will attract the axe.Footnote ²⁸ Another cause of premature death related to the dangers of attracting unnecessary attention, a recurrent theme in the Zhuangzi and other early texts, is punitive execution. A third common cause of dying “early,” in this case not involving external intervention, is failing to nurture habits that protect one's health from deteriorating too quickly. Sleeping the adequate number of hours, eating and drinking in moderation, and covering the body with clothes suitable for the season are basic measures everybody can take to live out their years, whether these are simply a matter of life expectancy or a more serious matter of a pre-ordained life span.Footnote ²⁹

We also learn from early texts that, beyond protecting her life span, the person can even choose to try and lengthen it. While some of these strategies to live longer, even to become immortal, are quite feasible and resemble the hygienic habits advised to protect one's life span from being cut off too early, other means are more sophisticated, requiring harmony with the dao 道 and the four seasons, cultivation of inner power (de 德), vital energy (qi 氣) and a complete spirit (quan shen 全神), as well as comprehension of yin yang 陰陽 shifts.Footnote ³⁰ Both scenarios, protecting one's original life span and attempting to extend it, imply that our years of life are susceptible to change.

Yet this understanding of a person's life span is part of the more general view of ming as fate-object in that it works as an externally imposed pattern of the world that determines how we are and what we are to do. As in the previous case of ming as command, ming as life span holds both a soft and a strong sense of fate. In the soft side, we find that what is given, in this case one's years of life as a human, is not unchangeable and is not beyond human intervention. Whether it is in the descriptive sense of life expectancy or in the normative sense of allotted years, the individual ming can be cut off too early if it is not properly protected and lengthened by resorting to hygienic and alchemic procedures. Yet once again we also find a strong sense of fate in the conception of ming as life. Many early sources contain a critique of those who neglect their years and allow themselves to die before their time. For instance, Zhuangzi’s “Robber Zhi” (Dao Zhi 盜跖) chapter harshly criticizes legendary figures such as Bo Yi 伯夷 and Shu Qi 叔齊 who lent themselves to starvation on the margins of the world out of political remonstrance. That they thought themselves to be doing the right thing only proves their commitment to a failed system of beliefs, one that does not have nourishment of long life (yang shou ming 養壽命) at its center.Footnote ³¹ The Wenzi 文子, in turn, includes in a description of the state of affairs during the Yellow Emperor's (Huangdi 黃帝) golden age the ideal situation that “common people would protect their life spans and not die prematurely.”Footnote ³² All this suggests that there was a strong current of thought in early China that considered protecting one's life, regardless whether the amount of years is pre-ordained or not, a necessary individual commitment and a moral responsibility.

As in the case of ming as command, our expected or pre-ordained life span is not something that we can determine. It comes to us as a given, posing a problem and requesting a reaction. Ming as life span is not an unavoidable fate, but it is regarded either as a detrimental limit (when it is short and we are encouraged to extend it) or as a responsibility (short or long, we must protect it). In both scenarios, our life span is construed in early Chinese literature as an objective and external imposition, and as a problem that needs addressing and resolution from the subject, which makes it part of the more general understanding of ming as a fate-object.

Ming as Determining Factors

In Wang Chong's worldview, the duration of our life is just one of the determining aspects of ming. Ming also determines other outcomes, such as whether we are to be rich or poor, fortunate or unfortunate, a success or a failure. It is a complex combination of individual and supra-individual factors which decides the minutiae of one's existence: inborn physical and personal features, social context in which one is located, what one encounters through own efforts, incidents that simply happen, and the general state of affairs of the country—the latter being a transpersonal fate shared by all members of a generation. These competing aspects of ming are hierarchical. The clearest example of the hierarchy found in the Lun heng 論衡 is the transpersonal ming of the state winning over the individual ming (國命勝人命):Footnote ³³ nothing can prevent a strong individual endowed with extraordinary physical features from prematurely dying in war.

With his intricate theory of ming as the combination of determining factors of human life, much as with many of the other writings in the Lun heng, Wang Chong was opposing the common belief of his time (first century c.e.) in a personified god-Heaven that would decree our destinies.Footnote ³⁴ The doings of Heaven, he argued, are not purposeful and do not accord to laws of moral retribution in terms of punishments and rewards for our behavior. Heaven acts in a wuwei 無為 manner: spontaneously and purposelessly. Hence, it is incorrect to blame Heaven for one's outcomes, such as misfortune, and a waste of time to make offerings and issue pleas for Heaven to act on our behalf.

According to Wang Chong, our life is controlled by an interrelated web of competing, determining factors rooted in physical and metaphysical bases. While we can exercise our capacity for purposeful agency in an effort to guide our destinies, the outcomes of our actions and the turn of events are almost never decided by such efforts. It is clear from ordinary experience, the Lun heng argues, that rightful actions do not always help the agent have a successful life. There are simply too many factors playing with our luck for our intentional efforts to be able to exercise enough influence. In most occasions, the different potencies at play in a situation are too strong for our contingent actions to have the power to override them.

Wang Chong's theory of ming offers a clear example of the pattern of thought of ming as fate-object in early China. The different factors that compose ming present an effective, objective, and external determination over the course of the person's life. Much as the conception of ming as command, mandate, or appointment, and ming as life span, the understanding of ming as determining factors assumes a reifying view of the different phenomena involved in life and exercising influence on the person where these are conceived in terms of external opposition, determination, and limitation.

We have seen that the different meanings of an impersonal ming were all related to the overarching notion of ming that can be understood as fate: what happens without our intervention, affects us, and cannot/should not be avoided. We explore the process of reification of fate in early China in detail in the next section.

Origins of Ming

Scholars of Mesopotamia point to the experience of livelihood in an agrarian society as a likely scenario for the development of the notion of fate. Relying on natural resources such as water, soil, weather, and seasons for sustenance may have made early inhabitants of the world aware that there were forces beyond the divine which, like gods but separate from them, had a determining and inescapable influence over their lives.Footnote ³⁵ In early China, these natural workings and patterns that configure the material, spatial, and natural contexts were subsumed under the categories of Heaven and Earth (tiandi 天地), while fate was, in general terms, rather associated with sociopolitical and individual events. Heaven and Earth were responsible for the cyclical changes of the four seasons; they defined geographical accidents, established cosmic patterns and movements, provided materials means of sustenance, warned through omens, and also threatened (sometimes punished) with floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Fate was in turn responsible for social success and failure, personal physical features and health, life and death, and conditions of living in general. The Confucius of the “Mountain Tree” (Shan mu 山木) chapter of the Zhuangzi, to which we will return, puts it nicely when he associates Heaven and Earth with scarcity of food and water, as well as extreme heat and cold, leaving ming to be responsible for social rank and emolument.Footnote ³⁶

For early Chinese thinkers, the natural order provided by Heaven and Earth could, to a certain extent, be predicted, and even tackled by adjusting to it. A variety of devices such as calendars and other mantic methods were introduced to help humans understand the workings of Heaven and Earth and conform to their natural pattern, thereby putting the natural order to human advantage and preventing it from becoming an impediment to human society's growth, harmony, and stability. As distinguished from the workings of Heaven and Earth, ming was not something that could be predicted, and definitely not something that could be tackled. It belonged, therefore, to a different category of uncontrollable reality, one that was especially problematic.

The understanding of ming as fate-object becomes a pattern of thought in early China that explains human relations to the world as inherently problematic. The fact that there are determining, opposing, reducing, limiting phenomena affecting the control that humans can exercise over their lives is seen as a problem that needs to be addressed and solved. This problem is generally understood in the literature as a tension between nature and humanity, or the problem of the relationship between Heaven and man. For twentieth-century scholars, the different approaches to the dichotomy between Heaven and the human that we find in early texts became a common way to classify positions and isms in early Chinese philosophy, as well as a way to identify developments within the intellectual history of the period.Footnote ³⁷ For instance, A. C. Graham famously spoke of a metaphysical crisis that took place in the fourth century b.c.e.: the intellectual realization of the separation between Heaven and man, and the doubt whether Heaven is after all on the moral side. He then classified Mencius, Zhuangzi, Mozi, and other pre-Qin thinkers according to their approach to the side-effect problem of morality and human nature that had evolved from the split between Heaven and humanity.Footnote ³⁸ In a similar manner, Puett classified philosophers according to the position they take with regard to the relationship between nature and culture, humanity and divinity (a relationship that could be one of continuity and harmony, or discontinuity and tension), tracing the historical development of the different claims and the debates in which these claims were inserted.Footnote ³⁹ Whether or not one agrees with the methodological assumptions behind these scholarly efforts to map early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history, they identified and analyzed important issues in early China, among them the problem of what is beyond human control and the problem of fate.Footnote ⁴⁰

It is ironic that ming would become such a problematic concept, because, according to scholars such as Chen Ning 陳寧, the notion of a blind, amoral fate was invented in early China as a solution to a previous problem: the problem of theodicy created by the ideology of the Mandate of Heaven.Footnote ⁴¹ Simply put, the ideology of the Mandate of Heaven established Heaven as a moral judge of human action. However, in their daily experience, people could see that the virtuous were not always rewarded. Often they even seemed to be penalized. The causal link between moral behavior and success seemed to be broken, which compromised assumptions about the morality and ultimate legitimacy of Heaven. The endangered position of Heaven in this religious conflict is similar to that of the omnipotent Christian god when followers faced the problem of evil. Why would a moral god allow bad things to happen, especially to good people? This problem led in Western traditions to the invention of theodicy: theoretical justifications of a compromised god.

Western theodicy has a long history. The most famous episode in the Western intellectual history of evil is probably that of the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that flooded and destroyed Lisbon and beyond in 1755. The natural disaster triggered a revision of Leibniz's positive theodicy. Leibniz had argued that, in choosing the best of the possible worlds, God had to allow a minimal necessary amount of evil for the greatest good of the community. Evil was therefore a residual illusion only felt from an individualistic and partial point of view. After the catastrophe, which greatly affected the community, Voltaire and Rousseau each issued their critiques of the generally accepted positive theodicy and let the problem of evil off the leash; it would thereafter dominate the intellectual discourse in a reinforced fashion. In early China, the invention of the notion of a blind, amoral fate, an impersonal force of its own unrelated to Heaven, may have been a response to the same problem: blind fate was a power to blame for the existence of evil and injustice, so that Heaven could keep its moral integrity intact. Of course, Heaven, like the Christian god, did not get off so easily. The human relationship with Heaven became tense and ambiguous, as certain thinkers began to suspect that Heaven was not always moral. We will return to this tension later.

Even if the notion of blind fate started as a solution to a previous problem, it soon became a problem itself. Humans were believed to exist in opposition to an overpowering force that was blind in direction and external in nature, which lashed them arbitrarily and often in detriment of their aims and expectations. For this pattern of thought to become effective, the reification of fate was necessary.

The Process of Reification

The word “reification” may bring Marxism to the reader's mind. The concept of reification gained currency in Marxist-Hegelian social philosophy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially through Lukács's reinterpretation of Marx's denunciation of the fetishism of commodities in the capitalist system.Footnote ⁴² The term originally targeted the “thingification” of social relations. I ask the reader to try and forget about Marx for a minute, and instead grasp the literal meaning of reification as turning a conceptual item into a thing, leaving aside its repercussions and all its implications with regard to Western modernity and capitalism. In the understanding of ming as fate, some early Chinese thinkers turned fate into an object, which was a process that involved different steps and had several important consequences for the intellectual history of the period. The phenomenon known as reification, here understood broadly and adapted to the early Chinese context, provides us with a technical vocabulary that proves appropriate and helpful to theorizing the pattern of thought of ming as fate-object in early China.

In brief, the process of reification of fate, as found in received and excavated early Chinese texts, consists of understanding ming-fate as an external object in opposition to the subject that imposes limits on the subject and is often negative and detrimental to his aims and goals. The following traits of the process of reification of fate in early China can be analyzed separately:

Mengzi

In an article that deals with the conception of ming in the Mengzi and the Analects, Ted Slingerland gives the following definition of ming: “forces that lie in the outer realm—that is, the realm beyond the bounds of proper human endeavor, or the area of life in which ‘seeking does not contribute to one's getting it.’”Footnote ⁶¹ The spatial description of ming as the outer area in which “seeking does not contribute to one's getting it” comes from Mengzi 7A.3:

Slingerland's discussion, which closely follows the Mengzi’s classification of phenomena into what is within human control and what is not, interests me because of its emphasis on location. According to the Mengzi, within our control there is the exercise of our inborn virtues. That is the realm of interiority where “seeking helps obtaining.” The gentleman (junzi 君子) has the power to examine his interiority (nei xing 內省) and correct his moral behavior accordingly. What makes the gentleman, as well as an ordinary person, a proper human subject is the moral potency that lies within, and over which he can achieve control. In the Mengzi, the four inner virtues constitute the person's subjective interiority: what we really are, or rather, have the potential to become and the power to realize, as distinguished from what comes from outside and remains beyond our control.

Opposed to the inner moral realm of the four virtues, which lies within our control, we find the outer, incontrollable, inexplicable realm of ming. The forces that exert influence in our lives belong to the outer realm, a realm that opposes our interiority and quality of subjects. In its identification with an independent and outer realm where human actions do not necessarily lead to the expected outcomes (where “seeking does not contribute to obtaining it”), ming becomes objectified and externalized.

In the reifying pattern of thinking, ming is not only reified as an external object that opposes the subject's interiority and sphere of autonomous behavior, but it is also often construed as a negative, opposing object. The identification of the realm of personal interiority with that of morality by means of the four sprouts of virtue (si duan 四端)Footnote ⁶⁴ allows the external realm to be identified with the amoral. In modern Chinese scholarship, this dichotomy is expressed through the notions of how things are (shiran 實然, or descriptive reality) and how things should be (yingran 應然, or normative reality).Footnote ⁶⁵ External ming is the vast descriptive realm of how things are; while the internal moral subject is the comparatively smaller but crucial normative realm of how things could and should be. The external realm is not necessarily immoral, but is often perceived as a detrimental limit, not conducive to the development of the normative pursuit of our inborn sprouts of morality.

Ming versus Xing: The Outer and the Inner

In the Mengzi, the tension between descriptive and normative reality, as well as between outer and inner realms, is expressed in terms of a dichotomy between ming (the external, incontrollable realm of fate) and xing 性 (the internal, controllable realm of human nature). The following passages are key to understand the dichotomy between ming and xing, and how ming is construed in a negative way as an external limitation to the person's moral development and fulfilling life.

Let us first pay attention to the formal features of these passages. We may understand these passages as a level of commentary inserted within the text. The commentator may be alluding to well-known debates about what must be consider inner and what must be considered outer, such as the one recorded in Mengzi 6A between Mencius and Gaozi 告子. The purpose of the passage is to explain why it is the case that “the gentleman” provides counterintuitive definitions of what belongs to the realm of “human nature” (xing) and what belongs to the realm of “fate” (ming).

The formal features also help us discern the concepts at use. It might be tempting to read the first xing 性 as qing 情 (emotions, conditions, tendencies), given that it stands for sensorial tendencies and motivations such as the eye's attraction towards colors.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, attention to the parallelism between the last three lines of each section clears the temptation out and forces us to read the word as it appears in the transmitted text: xing 性. The structure of the three last lines in each section has a negative mirroring effect. In each case, we find a distinction between what common sense would tell us that either human nature or fate is, and what the gentleman counterintuitively tells us they actually are. The author of this passage is making a rhetorical point trying to prove that the gentleman has insights that go contrary to what ordinary people think they know. However, the rhetorical point to present the gentleman as a counterintuitive thinker should not prevent us from taking seriously the redefinitions of the concepts of xing and ming that the text presents. The reason for the gentleman's redefinition of the concepts of human nature and fate is also provided in these lines:

Sensory desires—what we can translate as “inborn physical tendencies” (the first “xing” in the quoted passage)—belong by common sense or conventional understanding to human nature. They seem to be part of our inner subjectivity, part of our inner self. However, in order to satisfy these impulses, tendencies, and desires—the passage argues—the senses need to seek outside of themselves, which introduces them into the outer realm of ming, where “seeking does not help obtaining.” This is the reason provided by the text to explain why the gentleman does not consider physical tendencies to be part of human nature, or what we could better call “inborn moral tendencies” (the second use of xing).Footnote ⁶⁸

Ming is present as a potential obstacle to the fulfillment of inborn sensory desires. As we saw before, what conforms the interiority that makes us human subjects is limited to what can be achieved by active seeking: what is within our control. Shifting the meaning of xing from inborn sensory tendencies and desires, common to all humans but also to other animals, to an inner space of moral tendencies specific to humankind, the gentleman is deciding the parameters that define us as exclusively human. In other words, the gentleman is the one qualified to decide what should be considered part of our human inner selves, and what should not. Those inborn tendencies and desires do not belong to the moral interiority that defines humans, not only because their satisfaction lies beyond our control, but also because they do not contribute towards the development of a moral personality.Footnote ⁶⁹

Let us now look at the other side of the mirroring parallel. Common sense and conventional understanding inform us that activities that involve the practice of virtuous behavior are subjected to different aspects of fate: luck, timing, and appropriate encounters, among others. Even under the right circumstances, it is never certain that a person who practices the virtues will be reciprocated with an equally correct treatment. Therefore, interpersonal ethical behavior should be thought to belong to the realm of what lies outside of our control, the realm of ming. Nevertheless, the gentleman knows that the practice of virtuous conduct is rooted in the inner virtues, which are part of our inviolable interiority. As the quoted passage reads, xing is involved in the sprouting of these virtuous tendencies. That is the reason why the gentleman advises that, despite the fact that the practice of morally correct behavior does not always entail a successful outcome for the virtuous person, these activities must be considered a part of xing in the sense of what makes us specifically human. In qualifying these activities governed by fate as part of human nature, the gentleman is reclaiming them to the inner realm of what is within our control.

In reading ming as an external limitation to our inner selves, I follow scholars such as Mou Zongsan 牟宗三, Lin Qiping 林啟屏, Lao Siguang 勞思光 and Liang Tao 梁濤.Footnote ⁷⁰ They all offer slightly different interpretations to this Mengzi passage, but generally agree that fate (ming) plays the role of objective reality that limits the fulfillment of the subject (xing) from the outside. There is a clear dichotomy between ming and xing, outside and inside, in this Mengzi passage. The dichotomy works towards creating a counterintuitive understanding of the realms of ming and xing. Where ordinary people would assume that inborn sensory desires and tendencies are inherent to the person and part of our nature (xing), at the same time that interpersonal moral tendencies and ethical behavior are affected by the external operation of fate (ming), the Mengzi’s gentleman rectifies these notions. Keeping the spatial image, he gives improved definitions of the realms of personal interiority and the external effects of fate by redesigning their boundaries.

As we saw earlier in the discussion of ming as life span, and as we can see from our discussion of the Mengzi passage, even matters so intuitively close to our individuality and that we usually construct as intimate, such as our life span, our desires, tendencies, temperament, character, and disposition, once they became attributed to ming, were reified and construed as external limitations imposed on the subject from the outside. What is the subject then? The subject is reduced to the part of us that can make moral choices and has the power to control those choices: our moral inner self. We can decide how to think, act, and react in situations with a moral component, and we have the power to cultivate our virtue. This is the world of human interiority that was created against an external world of confronting, limiting, and hostile reality.Footnote ⁷¹ But what exactly constitutes this world of limiting reality, the world of ming?

Ming versus Heaven: Two Kinds of Agency

From the analysis of the dichotomy between xing and ming we have learned that the Mengzi construed ming as an amoral, detrimental object. In the following, and in order to better understand what is ming, we will direct our attention to the similarities and differences that we find between tian and ming, Heaven and fate, in the Mengzi. Let us begin by reviewing the literature.

According to Chen Ning, the forces of ming in the Mengzi include both Heaven's decisions, which are always moral, and a sort of blind, amoral fate.Footnote ⁷² When ming is Heaven's moral commands, it resonates with our own moral interiority (our human nature), and we take on them with pleasure. When, on the contrary, the ming we face is the lashes of a blind and amoral destiny, we rather withdraw to ourselves and find autonomy in our moral behavior. In both cases, the person cannot but accept ming. Tang Junyi 唐君毅 and Lin Meiling 林玫玲 have proposed similar arguments. In their view, apart from an undeniable sense of ming as external limitation to our power, there is in the Mengzi a distinct meaning of ming as moral command coming from Heaven. Being in consonance with our moral nature, this moral command does not impose a limit but works as a guide for our ethical behavior.Footnote ⁷³ The proponents of this second meaning of ming in the Mengzi want to reconcile the dichotomy between our inner moral selves (xing) and Heaven's external commands (ming) that we have previously seen.Footnote ⁷⁴ When ming involves a moral command coming from Heaven, it finds resonance in our inner morality to the extent that there is no differentiation between what we are morally predisposed to do (xing), and what Heaven requires us to do (ming).

Michael Puett, on the other hand, has argued that there is only one meaning of ming in the Mengzi: Heaven's decisions. Nevertheless, Puett points out, Heaven's decisions need not always be moral. They are often inscrutable and can even be straightforwardly against the moral plan that Heaven itself conceived for humanity in the first place.Footnote ⁷⁵ Puett uses as example Mengzi 2B/13, where a tragic Mencius speaks of the cyclical pattern of sagely rulership conceived by Heaven. Every five hundred years a true king has arisen, and during that time, a person that we could call a sage because of his capacity to bring peace and order to the world has appeared. Mencius complains that it has already been seven hundred years since the first Zhou rulers, and no true king or sage has arisen yet. According to Mencius, he should be the one appointed for this task, yet his projects as royal advisor have all been a failure. This can only be, Mencius complains, because Heaven does not yet wish to bring peace and order to All under Heaven (夫天，未欲平治天下也).Footnote ⁷⁶ Puett concludes that the ambiguity in the term ming is not due to it having different meanings, but it is rather a reflection of the ambiguity felt in face of the relationship between the person and Heaven. Heaven created the moral patterns that should govern the person and the world yet, for unknown reasons, it not always worked in favor of those patterns.Footnote ⁷⁷

I would like to propose a different way of looking at the relationship between tian and ming in the Mengzi. On one hand, I agree with Chen, Tang, and Lin that ming sometimes refers to commands of Heaven, and insofar they come from Heaven, these commands are moral. This is the case when the word ming is short for tian ming (“heaven's mandate” when applied to the sage or the king, and “heaven's commands” when applied to everyone else). It is my contention, however, that the meaning of ming when it is short for tian ming must be distinguished from the meaning of ming when it refers to the blind and external force of fate. In the same way that we distinguish the verb ming when it stands for “giving an order” (wang ming 王命/jun ming 君命, Mengzi) or “replying” (fan ming 反命 Mengzi), we need to differentiate between the moral, Heavenly command, and the amoral forces of fate.

On the other hand, I agree with Puett that in the Mengzi Heaven does not always act in the moral or ethical way that it is expected to. However, I must disagree with the idea that there is only one meaning of ming in the Mengzi, which according to Puett would be Heaven's decisions. As pointed out before, ming is a polyvalent word, and it is used in the Mengzi as well as in other early texts with a variety of meanings, which include command, order, reply, life, mandate, and fate. The ambivalence of ming certainly is due to its polysemic character, and to the way in which early authors consciously or unconsciously dealt with its multiplicity of meanings.

In the following I propose to pay attention to several formal and literary aspects of the passages that make reference to Heaven and ming in order to clarify the difference between these two important concepts, as well as to better understand the reification of ming.

In his study of the Mengzi and Confucian ethics, Shun Kwong-loi points out that Heaven, much as ming, is credited with things over which we have no power.Footnote ⁷⁸ Heaven in the Mengzi shares with ming in being a source of explanation for what we cannot explain and what lies beyond our control. Both Heaven and ming are a sort of agency that make things happen or not. They are both heteronomous forces, namely external forces that influence the person from the outside and threaten the person's autonomy and self-determination. Nevertheless, and this is the most important point, Heaven is expected to be moral in the Mengzi, while ming is not.

We find a multiplicity of expressions that attribute morality to Heaven in the Mengzi. Some of these expressions are indirect. For instance, “Gongsun Chou A” implies that Heaven is a moral entity by claiming that the king who behaves according to the five moral precepts becomes a minister of Heaven (tian li 天吏).Footnote ⁷⁹ In turn, “Gongsun Chou B” uses the notion of the minister of Heaven to claim moral authority over war and conquest: only the minister of Heaven can justly smite another kingdom, in the same way that only a chief criminal judge can justly judge people.Footnote ⁸⁰ Other expressions are more direct. Several chapters directly attribute virtues to Heaven making it be the source of human morality.Footnote ⁸¹ Finally, several passages show that Heaven has moral character, that it has agency, and that it responds to people's actions.Footnote ⁸² In Mengzi 4A, Heaven is made a retributive and moral agent that gives the throne to the virtuous ones and enables the defeat of those who lack virtue (ideology of the Mandate of Heaven).Footnote ⁸³ A correspondence between human behavior and Heaven's actions is expected. For instance, in Mengzi 1B we learn that Heaven will surely send down punitive calamities against a king who does not conquer an evil state (不取，必有天殃).Footnote ⁸⁴ This behavior can only be expected when Heaven is considered a moral agent that responds to human action according to an ethical standard.

The fact that Heaven is considered a moral agent, and that it is expected to keep to certain ethical standards, implies that, when Heaven does not act by those standards, humans can feel discontent, angry, frustrated, and lost. This is exactly what happens to Mencius in the story that, as shown above, Puett uses to explain that Heaven can be immoral:

The keywords in this dialogue are bu yu 不豫, which means to feel discontent, dissatisfied, or displeased; and yuan tian 怨天, which is to complain or murmur against Heaven. The structure of the story is very simple: in theory, one should never complain against Heaven.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, Mencius qualifies, there are circumstances that allow for the person to feel discontent and complain: when Heaven seems to act against ethical principles.

We find a similar anecdote in Mengzi 5A. It is parallel to the previous dialogue in vocabulary and structure, with the difference that the object of complaint and dissatisfaction is one's parents, instead of Heaven:

Then Mengzi proceeds to explain to Wan Zhang how it can be the case that Shun could not help but feel sorrow and express his complaints against his parents. Shun exerted himself in all spheres of life, first to cultivate the fields, then to govern the world. Yet Shun's parents did not consider him worthy of love. No matter how correctly Shun behaved and how successful he became in political matters, he could never achieve his parents’ acceptance and support. Mengzi explains that a filial son will always need his parents to be in accord with him (shun 順). Despite enjoying the pleasures of beauty, sensuality, riches, and honors (hao se fu gui 好色富貴), as a filial son who feels unappreciated and undeserving of parental love, Shun could not liberate himself from sorrow (jie you 解憂) to the end of his days.Footnote ⁹⁰

The keywords in this story are yuan mu 怨慕, dissatisfied and full of earnest desire; yuan (fumu) 怨 (父母), to complain or murmur [against parents]; you 憂, sorrow; and min tian 旻天, which we can translate as “compassionate Heaven.”Footnote ⁹¹ Note that these words express ideas similar to those we found in the previous story: they point at a dissatisfied person sorrowed by ethical injustice who complains against the source of his unhappiness. The structure also parallels the dialogue where Mencius complains against Heaven: in theory, one should not complain against one's parents, but there are circumstances that allow it. Notably, the fact that one's parents behave in what seems an unloving way towards their filial son. Both stories showcase people who are frustrated, sad, and angry against an unsympathetic, unfair superior authority that they respect and love, and of whom they would expect an ethical behavior that is missing. The parallel between the two anecdotes becomes even stronger when we realize that early texts often qualify Heaven and Earth as the parents of the ten thousand types of things.Footnote ⁹² Heaven takes the role of a father in its relationship with humans. The parallelism between Heaven and a father is clear in the two stories. In the first dialogue, Mencius admits he is discontent and frustrated by Heaven's behavior. In the second, Mencius justifies that Shun could be discontent and sorrowed by his parents’ behavior. The people need and expect Heaven's moral guidance, acceptance, and support, much as a filial son needs his parent's love and recognition. Note also that the story about Shun's sorrow begins by making reference to his crying out to a compassionate Heaven (min tian 旻天). Contrary to Laozi’s famous statement “Heaven and Earth are not humane” (tiandi bu ren 天地不仁),Footnote ⁹³ the Heaven of the Mengzi is a moral entity that is expected to display humanity and righteousness in its behavior.Footnote ⁹⁴

Ming-fate, on the contrary, is not expected to display a moral or ethical behavior. Therefore, the human attitude towards ming will be different from the attitude towards Heaven. Fate can also cause all sorts of unethical, undeserved, and unfair outcomes, yet there is no point in feeling discontent and anger, and certainly there is no point in complaining. One can be mad at Heaven because Heaven is an intentional, subjective, and moral agency. However, one cannot be mad at ming because fate is an objective and amoral power: fate is reified as an opaque object that, differently from the personified Heaven, does not admit communication, intersubjectivity, or any sort of interpersonal transactions.

The features of the reifying pattern of thought, where fate is reified as an object, are visible in the semantic field that accompanies ming in texts that share this worldview. In the Mengzi, ming is something to await (si ming 俟命), accompany in harmony (pei ming 配命), accept (shun shou 順受), stand on (li ming 立命), understand (zhi ming 知命), or simply have (you ming 有命).Footnote ⁹⁵ All these verbs that accompany ming in the Mengzi confirm that ming is seen as an external object beyond the subject's control and emphasize its inevitability. At the same time, they imply that the subject must show a particular behavior towards this inevitability. As opposed to the attitude one must have towards Heaven, which allows in certain situations for dissatisfaction and complaint, the correct attitude toward ming is one of acceptance and understanding. The emphasis on accepting and understanding also implies that the object in question is not always easy to accept and understand yet we must make the effort. This difference in attitude suggests that the authors of the Mengzi considered the power of Heaven and the power of fate to be two distinct things.

Standing on Ming: A Solution to the Problem of Fate

The fact that, as opposed to Heaven, which accepts communication (and may even be compassionate), fate is a sort of objective, external, opaque force with which humanity cannot negotiate, introduced a problem in the relationship between the person and the world. As we have seen before in the study of the dichotomy between ming and xing, the Mengzi’s gentleman redefined what belongs to the external realm beyond our control and what belongs to the inner realm of what makes us properly human. This redefinition had two practical consequences. First, reintroducing interpersonal ethical behavior within the realm of what is within our control gave the ordinary person motivation to keep acting correctly, disallowing self-defeating and lazy behavior. Even though the consequences of one's actions could not always be foreseen and remained governed by external fate, one could and should be in control of his own actions and thoughts. At the same time, eliminating inborn sensory desires from the definition of human nature eliminated distractions and helped the person focus on morality as the only thing that matters as a human.Footnote ⁹⁶

The solution that the Mengzi proposed to the problem of fate was to do what is right regardless of the outcomes. In other words, the person should not worry about the workings of ming but concentrate only on his virtuous behavior. For instance, in Mengzi 5A/8, Mencius explains that 孔子進以禮，退以義，得之不得曰有命 “Confucius advanced according to propriety and retired according to righteousness. Whether he obtained [office] or not, he said, was a matter of fate.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The teaching of this passage, as it faces the problem of a reified, opaque, inhumane, incomprehensible object of fate, is that one should always act in a virtuous way (moral behavior is within human control) and stoically accept the outcomes of one's actions whatever they are (the outcomes belong to the realm of fate, what is beyond human control).Footnote ⁹⁸

In my view, Confucius’ behavior, in the way it is explained by Mencius in the extract above, is an instance of “standing on ming” (li ming 立命), namely relying on one's fate as it comes and whatever it is. See Mencius’ statement below:

I follow commentators and modern scholars in translating er 貳 as “double-mindedness,” what we could understand as a kind of moral doubt. Not having duplicity means not to hesitate to follow the proper moral way even when facing challenging circumstances.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The person who does not deviate from morality and continues cultivating himself (xiu shen 修身) while awaiting the charges of fate regardless what they bring about is said to “stand on ming.” I do not follow commentators and most of modern scholars in my understanding of “standing on ming,” as they reduce the spectrum of ming to that of tian ming, Heaven's mandate. For instance, Zhu Xi interprets “standing on ming” as cultivating oneself as to complete our heavenly moral endowments and do not harm them through humanly imposed actions (謂全其天之所付，不以人為害之).Footnote ¹⁰¹ According to my analysis, Heaven and fate are two different kinds of agency. Heaven imposes on the person its own kind of ming, but ming is not reduced in the Mengzi (or in other early texts) to the workings of Heaven. Shun has proposed that the difference between Heaven and ming is that “the former emphasizes the source of things due not to human effort and the latter the outcome of such things.”Footnote ¹⁰² While this is certainly the case in the passages where ming is short for tian ming, in numerous other occasions ming is a force of its own, an independent agency, often responsible for allotting living beings’ life span, among other outcomes. When ming is reified as the object of fate, it is a nonsubjective, opaque, unreachable agency, as opposed to Heaven, which is a subjective agency. As we have seen above, the Mengzi introduces a difference in attitude toward Heaven and ming when the latter stands for a reified fate. “Standing on fate” is part of the correct attitude to show toward fate: it is a way of appropriation of one's fate, a way of taking control over one's life by keeping up with the moral path while accepting one's lot without question or regret.

About the Mengzi and the Analects, Slingerland remarks that “the motivation informing these texts is the desire to change people's views of what is and what is not important, to redirect people's energy and efforts from the external realm to the internal realm of self-cultivation.”Footnote ¹⁰³ A second motivation is the psychological function of providing peace to a troubled mind. Since what happens lies beyond our control, and there is nothing we can do about it, it should not trouble us. As long as the person is sure to be acting correctly in a moral way, she can live at peace with anything that happens in her life, no matter how unfair or dramatic it appears to be. This attitude requires continuous self-reflection and self-rectification: a search of the conditions for a worthy life within oneself.

To recapitulate, the Mengzi has given us a clear illustration of the reifying pattern of thinking about the relationship between the person and the world in early China. In this pattern, ming is hypostasized as something independent and external to the subject; it is reified as an object that opposes or thwarts the subject; acting from the exterior, it entails an amoral limit and a threat to human moral interiority; and it is potentially detrimental to the subject, so it requires human reaction and psychological resolution. In the next section, we see the same features of the reification of fate in a different early Chinese text, The Way of Tang and Yu.

Tang Yu zhi Dao

Once we have extracted the features of the pattern of thought of ming as fate-object, it is easier to see this pattern repeatedly appear in early texts, both received and found. There is a phrasal structure that establishes that “those who understand fate do not feel sorrow” (知命者不憂).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ We see it in the Wenzi, with a parallel in Huainanzi “Quanyan” 詮言:

As we have learned from the parallel dialogues in the previous section, one may rightfully feel sorrow in the face of Heaven, but not in the face of fate. What comes from fate is nothing to feel anxious or to complain about, since fate is not an ethical subjective entity. In this regard, the Liezi 列子 offers additional insights:

“Understanding fate,” the person is free from sorrow and distress toward what is beyond her control, therefore can concentrate efforts and energy in improving her moral behavior. This is probably what the Master in one of the Lun yü’s 論語 aphorisms meant by describing the gentleman as free from sorrow and fear:

“Understanding fate” (zhi ming) is a particularly important topos in the pattern of thought of ming as fate-object. We find this topos in many early texts such as Xunzi, Shuoyuan, Liezi, Wenzi, Huainanzi, and Lüshi Chunqiu, to name just a few. The notion of “understanding fate” is normally associated with the reification, externalization, and problematization of fate in early China. I include an example from a manuscript that was found at Guodian in 1993, and which has stirred up much attention.

The Way of Tang and Yu is a relatively short argumentative text that defends abdication and government by merit, as opposed to hereditary monarchy, as the best political option.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ What is interesting for me here is how it reflects the reifying pattern of thought of ming as fate-object. In The Way of Tang and Yu we find the same pattern that we have seen in the Mengzi: (1) Dichotomy and relationship of opposition between an inner subject and an external object; (2) Fate presented as a limiting, opposing object; (3) Fate presented as often detrimental to the subject; (4) Therefore, fate presented as a problem.

In the bamboo text, we see a clear differentiation between the inner realm of things that are under the subject's control, such as self-cultivation in the virtues, and the external realm of ming: the objective, larger world of events that inevitably happen and affect the subject's life. According to The Way of Tang and Yu, the mythical emperor Tang Yao's 唐堯 abdication to Yu Shun 虞舜 was due to numerous factors, which can be divided into two categories. The first category of factors belongs to the inner realm of Shun's virtue: he had been shown to be humane (ren 仁) and sagely (sheng 聖), filial (xiao 孝) and loyal (zhong 忠). Yao knew that these qualities would make him a good ruler for All under Heaven ([知其能]為民主也).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ According to the text, Shun achieved these qualities through self-cultivation. They belong to his inner self, the realm that remains within the subject's control under all circumstances. This is indeed the author's key argument in favor of abdication. Sagely government is based on the premise that the person is able to cultivate a correct moral behavior, and only then he will be prepared to bring order to the world. Hence the throne should only pass to the person who has already accomplished such virtuous merit. In the author's words,

The second category of factors involved in the making of a legitimate ruler belongs to the external realm, the one that is outside human control. Heaven and Earth, and the world of numinous beings, are forces alien to the subject; they are objective and necessary, not susceptible to be changed by human agency. They all have determining influence over the course of events. All the elements that jointly play the role of fate, namely Heaven and Earth, natural elements such as mountains and rivers, and ancestors and other numinous beings, are treated as spirits or gods that must receive offerings and religious rituals.Footnote ¹¹² Religious rituals have certainly the goal of modifying the gods’ interaction with humans, to make them benevolent. Yet they precisely assume that the gods’ agency is outside our control, and that it does not necessarily suit our interests.Footnote ¹¹³

Together with these numinous forces, or precisely made out of a combination of them, we find the supra-notions of fate and time. In the last paragraph of The Way of Tang and Yu, the author argues that, even though Yao was born as Son of Heaven, and he had cultivated the virtues, he would not have gained control of All under Heaven had not it been because of the matching forces of fate and time/opportunity:

Similar arguments can be seen in the Qiongda yishi 窮達以時, also a bamboo text from Guodian, which argued that historical figures such as Shun and Guan Zhong 管仲 were only able to succeed by virtue of timely and fated encounters.Footnote ¹²² Ming is that external and objective reality that one encounters (yu 遇), for good or bad. Often it only frustrates the subject's aspirations. Nevertheless, when the course of fate matches the moral qualities of a person, we can expect great outcomes.

But, even though it escapes our control and can act in detriment to our goals, according to Tang Yu zhi dao, ming should become an object of our accepting understanding. The bamboo manuscript contains the phrase zhi ming, understanding fate, in the following context:

The precedent that Shun set became a teaching for the contemporaneous generation of politicians:

The author of the Tang Yu zhi dao encourages his contemporary politicians to “understand fate” the way Shun did. Even when Shun lived in a low position in the middle of nowhere, the author observes, he had no thirst to become powerful and important. As Sarah Allan notes, “the statement that Shun did not feel resentful even though he lived in a thatched hut [what I have translated as the “countryside”] implies that before Yao raised him up, he was a man of worth waiting for recognition rather than a simple farmer.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Allan interprets Shun's behavior as virtuous. He would be “the epitome of humility.”Footnote ¹²⁸ In my understanding, Shun knew that sociopolitical rise was outside of his control, no matter how cultivated and well prepared he could be to be of service to the realm. His lack of emotional response in the face of the unresponsiveness of the world to his moral cultivation shows his realism. It shows that Shun understands ming.Footnote ¹²⁹

Of course, understanding ming is a characteristic of the virtuous person and a precondition to become a gentleman, because the fact that one understands ming has the implication that the external world of fate cannot impose any limits on one's inner moral development.Footnote ¹³⁰ Shun would not wish for anything to change; he had no aspirations or desires for his life to become different. He would not show ambition, resentment, or regret. Understanding fate has, then, two sides. On one hand, while self-cultivation is in our power and control, the subject has no say on what will happen as a consequence of his moral behavior, because this outcome belongs to the external realm of fate. From this perspective, fate can act as a detrimental limit to human agency, and becomes problematic. On the other hand, when one understands the workings of fate and accepts them, fate cannot do anything against the subject's mind, against his interiority. The subject's moral autonomy remains intact as an untouchable and invulnerable inner realm. This is one of the proposed solutions to the problem of the reification of fate in early China.