 First, the heart-mind is the organ that we use to discover the Way. Xunzi’s discussion of Heaven presents his argument that moral self-cultivation is a matter of correctly perceiving and then applying the Way, but does not explain how we perceive the Way in the first place. Elsewhere, he states explicitly that we come “to know the Way” by means of our heart-mind (Xunzi 21.5d), which has three cardinal attributes: “emptiness” (xu 虛) “unity” (yi 壹), and “tranquility” (jing 靜). Xunzi patently borrowed these three terms from earlier discourse, particularly Zhuangzi (e.g., Yearley 1980; Goldin 1999: 22–31; Stalnaker 2003), and uses them to denote three nurturable faculties that we all possess from birth, but do not employ to the same degree. (The title of the relevant chapter, “Resolving Blindness”, refers to the self-destructive acts that people undertake because they fail to employ their heart-minds correctly.) “Emptiness” refers to the heart-mind’s ability to store a seemingly unlimited amount of information: we do not have to erase one datum in order to make room for another. “Unity” refers to the heart-mind’s ability to synthesize diverse data into meaningful paradigms. And “tranquility” refers to the heart-mind’s ability to distinguish fantasy from rational thinking. Armed with these powers, we can infer the patterns of the Way by taking in, and then pondering, the data transmitted to the heart-mind by the senses.