 The other Neo-Confucian whose influence rivals that of Zhu Xi is Wang Yang Ming (1472–1529). Wang saw Zhu’s emphasis on the investigation of patterns in external things as overly scholastic and leading to abstract speculation rather than practical guidance. He rejected what he saw to be the intellectualization of personal realization, and identified the mind with li (xin ji li or mind is pattern or principle). This means that the dispositions to judge properly the appropriate action in various situations constitute the mind’s original pure state. Li is not to be sought as a pattern residing in an independently existing external world but is embodied in judgments of the mind. This seems to commit Wang to an identification of the world with the experienced world and to a denial of a mind-independent world, but an alternative interpretation is that the structure of the world is mind-dependent while the world itself is not (Liu, 2018). Wang’s version of the Mencian theme that human nature is good is even more innatist than Zhu Xi’s (see Ivanhoe, 1990, for a comparison of Mencius and Wang Yang Ming). Original goodness does not need completion through learning about the external world. Then why aren’t all people fully good? Why are some very bad? Wang’s answer is that selfish desires cloud the sun of the complete and perfect moral mind, and that the task of human beings is to eliminate selfish desires and recover that mind (Chan, 1963, sections 21, 62).