 No pre-Buddhist Chinese philosophers claimed that the qualitatively differentiated world we experience is an illusion, but their monistic metaphysics privileged connectedness and unity. While patterns of differentiation may be objective, individuation (i.e., what counts as a thing) is provisional and contextual. It is always possible to view all things as forming one whole or one body, and this unity tends toward equalizing things. From our contextual point of view, one thing can be said to be better, bigger, or more beautiful than another, but from a broader perspective all things have the same status as parts of a single body. This could lead toward skepticism of absolute values (as in the Zhuangzi) or toward an imperative to care for all things. Hui Shi (c. 380–305 BCE) is reported to have said: “Care overflowingly for all the myriad things; heaven and earth form one body [yiti 一體]” (Guo 1978, 33: 1102; Ziporyn 2009: 124). This can be seen as a radicalization of the Mohist claim that heaven generates all human beings and thus cares for them all equally, a point rooted in the early Zhou view of heaven as protecting the people. A progression toward more and more radical impartiality is mapped out in a passage from the Lüshi chunqiu 呂氏春秋, a text compiled around 239 BCE. The passage begins with a statement of nature’s impartiality: