 Many Daoxue Confucians thought that Pattern can do certain explanatory work that qi cannot. Pattern explains why boats can only travel by water and carts only by land. Pattern explains why children are naturally inclined to love and serve their parents, and why things made of qi alternate between yin (passive) and yang (active) phases or states. And Pattern also has normative implications, accounting not just for children’s tendency to love and serve their parents, but also for the fact that it’s proper and virtuous for them to do so. Most recognized that these sorts of facts had much to do with the constituent qi in things as well, and a minority among the Song-Ming Confucians (e.g., Zhang Zai, Wang Tingxiang, and Wang Fuzhi) aimed to show that the features and tendencies of qi could fully explain some or all such facts (Kasoff 1984; Y. Liu 2000; Angle &amp; Tiwald 2017: 36–38). But most thought that Pattern has some independent role in accounting for them, some explanatory power not strictly reducible to that of qi. Zhu Xi’s theories about the relationship of Pattern to qi changed over the course of his life, but on his mature and most influential view, Pattern is independent of qi in at least two senses. First, Zhu says that there is a sense in which Pattern is “prior” to qi. He makes clear that this is not a sort of temporal priority—it is not that Pattern exists first and then qi arises subsequently—but when we try to infer back to the origin or basis of things we should treat Pattern as prior or more fundamental (ZZYL 1:3). The specific implications of this are a matter of some speculation (Angle &amp; Tiwald 2017: 38–40; Chen 1987: 3–29). A second sort of independence of Pattern is that it functions as a kind of director or “master” (zhu 主 or zai 宰) of qi. Zhu is careful to say that it does not intervene in affairs or directly act on qi, but it establishes rules which qi then follows of its own power (Angle &amp; Tiwald 2017: 40–42).