 The Chinese character translated here as “Pattern” is li, a term that appeared relatively rarely in classical Confucian texts but became ubiquitous in philosophical discourse well before the Song, by which time it was often used to refer to what might be called the underlying reality or ultimate nature of things. For many Buddhists, a thing’s Pattern was its inherent “emptiness”, which is to say, roughly, its lack of any intrinsic phenomenal qualities or essences. For Buddhists this helped to justify the view that phenomenal qualities or essences are illusory, merely conventional, or conferred by the larger whole. Most Song-Ming Neo-Confucians rejected this view. They agreed that all things have an underlying Pattern, but this Pattern is what they called ceaseless life-production or ceaseless life-generativity, not emptiness. And furthermore, this is a Pattern that all things share, so that they belong to a unified system of ceaseless life-generativity. So it is in the ultimate nature of things to participate in and contribute to these systems, which are characterized by birth, growth, and reproduction. Paradigmatic models of Pattern can be found in the cycles of birth, growth, and reproduction evident in the change of seasons, or the way that birth, growth, and reproduction serve as the central aims or the organizing principles of families.