Up to this point I have attempted to show how Shen Nung was portrayed in late Warring States and early Han texts. I have also reviewed what we know about Nung (or Chu) and Lieh Shan shih, Keng-fu (Plough Father), and T'ien-tsu (Field Ancestor), since it may be one or all four of these figures that comes to be known as Shen Nung.

We can argue nothing for certain on this, and certainly T'ien-tsu in the Shih, was, we assume, a god of the Chou. But that point aside, there seems to be good reason to think that Shen Nung was originally a farming god of the Shang people. He is the hero who invented the plough, and the god to whom they turned when they needed rain. Ultimately, this may have been Hsieh, the first-born of the Shang people, known to us in our texts as Shu-chün or Yi-chün. That Shen Nung would become prominent only in texts that date from the late Chou should be no surprise; we should expect him to be overshadowed in early Chou times by their hero Hou Chi.

It is important to keep in mind as we proceed that in the materials we have examined so far, we have seen repeated references to ‘fire’ and ‘rain’ and ‘drought’. Ritual ways of producing rainfall and combating the drought could involve fire (yen-huo, in Shih, 211); they might also involve ‘invocations’, charging the drought demon to ‘Go to the north!’ (Shan-hai ching).

Students of ancient China learn early on the story of Yao and Shun . The great emperor Yao (traditional reign dates, 2356–2255 B.C.) chose the virtuous Shun as his replacement over his own son Tan Chu . Shun was the model of filial piety: when his parents and brother tried to kill him a number of times, he saw the fault as his own and tried all the harder to win their love and approval.

One of the places that plays a role in a number of myths and legends that survive from ancient China is the place called K'ung-sang , Hollow Mulberry. Confucius is said to have been born in a place called K'ung-sang, and Yi Yin, the man who served as chief minister to T'ang, founder of the Shang or Yin dynasty (traditional reign dates, 1766–1753 b.c.) was born in an actual hollow mulberry tree. By force of the Confucius connexion, commentaries often identify K'ung-sang as a place in the state of Lu, if not precisely Ch'ü-fu, the home town of Confucius. But K'ung-sang is located and identified in a number of ways in early texts: it is a mountain in the North or the East; it is a place that is being attacked by a demon; it is the capital of various Ti (emperors or gods); and in one source at least, it is the name of a musical instrument, a zither (se).

The Ma-wang-tui texts of Lao-tzu have seemingly confirmed two points long held to be true by many scholars: (1) that the text from an early date, if not right from the outset, was divided into two parts; and (2) that—while it is not claimed that the Ma-wang-tui texts represent the original text—it was not originally divided into chapters. This latter conclusion is open to debate since, although there are neither chapter numbers nor names in the Ma-wang-tui texts, there are punctuation dots (·) in part II of text A, often placed at the beginning of one of our present chapters. However, absence of punctuation elsewhere, and the failure of what there is to completely coincide with present chapter divisions, would seem to indicate at least that the present eighty-one chapter divisions—thirty-seven in part I and forty-four in part II—were not yet (c. 180 B.C.) uniformly observed.