 On one common reading, a ruler’s authority is based in individual moral charisma (or virtue; de). The famous “Mandate of Heaven (tianming)” theory has its roots in the way that the Zhou people legitimized their conquest of the Shang. Passages in the Book of History tell us that Heaven (tian: the deity of the Zhou people) had transferred its “mandate” from the Shang to the Zhou leaders, as a result of the depravity and misrule of the Shang kings. The Zhou leadership claimed to know this by employing oracle bone divination: they adopted the Shang practice of divining, but put it to the new use of justifying political authority, and thus the shift of Heaven’s favor (partly by eliding the difference between the Shang chief deity and their own). One aspect of this transformation was transforming Heaven into a moral figure, a god who made judgments based on the perceived virtue of the leader (Allan 1984). As we will see below, by the time of the Warring States era and the foundational texts of Confucian philosophy, there have been further transformations: Heaven is no longer a figure at all, but closer to an abstract sense of the normative order of the universe, and its intentions are no longer accessible via divination. Still, most modern scholars hold that for the majority of classical thinkers, an ethical ideal continues to serve as the ultimate justification of political authority.