1. Lisa Raphals (“Fate, Fortune, Chance, and Luck,” 537–574) has analyzed the semantic field of ming in the early Chinese tradition. She distinguishes fatalism from belief in fate, and she offers a comparative historical overview of the semantic fields of “fate” in Classical Greece and pre-Buddhist China by identifying eight overlapping topoi that cover much of the theoretical range of the semantic fields of fate. She recognizes the idea of human choice and free will, including ethical choices (561). Her essay analyzes the key elements in the Chinese semantic field from the Warring States and the Han dynasty, as well as for ancient and Hellenistic Greek. Michael Nylan distinguishes twelve conceptually distinct meanings of ming (Raphals “Fate, Fortune, Chance, and Luck,” 547).

2. On the meanings of ming, especially as “reified fate” in ancient China (fate is made an object that is opposed to the subject), see Valmisa, “The Reification of Fate in Early China.” From a different approach concerning both Heaven and Destiny, based on the polarity “moral economy”-“contingency,”see Youngsun Back, Handling Fate; and “Confucian Heaven: Moral Economy and Contingency.” For the former she intends “a general, broadly conceived, connection between moral worth and non-moral outcomes; ‘contingency’ is the failure of moral economy, when “connection between moral worth and non-moral outcomes is somehow broken so that the world is felt to be beyond human comprehension and beyond human control” (Youngsun Back, “Confucian Heaven: Moral Economy and Contingency,” 65–68). Raphals (“Fate, Fortune, Chance, and Luck,” 542–543) notes the role of the autonomous will in choosing and dealing with ming in Confucianism and Daoism (see expressions such as anming 安命, resting in ming, cheng ming 成命, completing destiny/mandate, daming 達命, grasping hold of ming, liming 立命, establishing ming). On the Daoist side, for the concept of xing-ming dyad in the self-cultivation process, see Robinet, Introduction à l’alchimie intérieure taoïste, 179–184, and Pregadio “Destiny, Vital Force, or Existence?,” 157–218. For a collection of essays on the concept of ming, see Lupke, Magnitude of Ming.

3. “At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven” 五十而知天命 (Wei Zheng 為政, 4); “[w]ithout recognizing the ordinances of Heaven, it is impossible to be a superior man” (「不知命，無以為君子也」) (Yao Yue 堯曰, 3);