The paper summarizes current knowledge on the paleographical evidence for rén 仁 and its earliest variants. It is argued that no reliable attestations of the character exist prior to the mid-Warring States period. The variants recently discovered in the Guōdiàn and Shàngbó corpuses and elsewhere are shown to be predominantly based on phonetic principles which can be explained in a systematic fashion using current models of reconstruction. Proceedingfrom Baxter's arguments for rén as a cognate of Written Tibetan snying and extending (...) it to Tibeto-Burman congeners, a final section speculates about a chain shift, which propelled rén from its Sino-Tibetan meanings to an ethical notion harnessed by earlyConfucianism. This shift left a lexical gap which was quickly filled by xīn 心 and ài 愛. (shrink)