This article examines the story of Shun's 舜 ascension to the throne. This story has drawn considerable attention throughout Chinese history because of its significance with regard to political succession. However, in this article, I shed light on a different dimension of the story: its relevance to the issue of contingency. I investigate four texts, two excavated and two transmitted: Qiongda yi shi 窮達以時 (Failure and Success Depend on Times), Tang Yu zhi dao 唐虞之道 (The Way of Yao and Shun), the Mengzi 孟子, and the Xunzi 荀子. At one extreme, Qiongda yi shi highlights that Shun became a king by pure chance, while at the other extreme, Xunzi interprets the event as a necessary one, emphasizing that Shun cannot but succeed Yao. The other two texts fall somewhere in between the two extremes. I use these four texts to showcase different ways of thinking about areas over which humans are believed to lack control. My claim is that these four texts offer different accounts of the same event—Shun's ascension—because they see the event from different perspectives: from a perspective of the chosen, from a perspective of the chooser, from a mise-en-scène, and from a perspective of not of this world, respectively. I argue that the diverse perspectives of these texts entail the different understandings of several related issues such as the degree of human control over the event, the important features of the event, and the content of the moral and political lessons that we draw from the event.

In his Research Note, “Shun 舜 and the Interpretation of Early Orthographical Variation,” in this issue of Early China, Jonathan Smith made several claims about the early evolution of the graph 舜, in particular suggesting that it should be identified with the graph lin 粦 that occurs in certain Western Zhou bronze inscriptions. While showing that these claims are ill-supported, I nevertheless concur in the identification with the bronze-inscriptional graph, but show that the word being written is 濬 ~ 浚 “deep, profound” and in no way connected with lin 粦.

Ji Xusheng's 季旭昇 account of the character 〈舜〉 as a derivative of 〈夋〉 and ultimately of 〈允〉 by reference to Warring States excavated manuscript evidence, recently elaborated by Adam Smith in these pages, appears to clear up the mystery of Shun's 舜 doppelgänger—Jun 俊—in the Shanhai jing 山海經. However, while Ji's observations are of value, there is danger in treating early orthographical variation of this kind with one eye on an interpretive problem from the received texts. In this case, attested variation shows clearly that the form 〈舜〉 was no such derivative, its peculiar origins arguably “large and useless” from a textual critical point view.

The graph used to write the name of the mythical emperor Shun 舜 in received texts is a puzzling one. It is not obvious that any component in the graph, as it appears today, is semantically motivated, nor is there any element well suited to representing the name Shun phonetically. Texts like the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 preserve an alternate writing of the name under the rubric “guwen 古文,” but this too is hard to analyze in terms of the semantic and phonological motivation of the graph components. Without a clear understanding of why the name Shun is written the way it is, a reliable reconstruction of its Old Chinese pronunciation is difficult, and many of the graphic and phonological associations with “Shun” and related words made by early Chinese script, texts, and commentaries would be opaque.

A graph that is clearly writing the name Shun, seen for the first time in two of the Warring States-period manuscripts from Guodian 郭店, partially resolved these difficulties, and in particular the question of the phonological spelling of the name. This in turn allows a series of interesting textual problems to be resolved. This article presents a selection of these, and discusses their implications for the history of the Chinese script and for textual transmission.