 Daoxue Confucians also adopted a technical term that had, by their time, long been used in Buddhist metaphysics to account for the ultimate nature and unity of things. This term was li 理 (Pattern, Principle), which the Buddhists sometimes characterized as emptiness and Neo-Confucians described as (or as a source or ground of) ceaseless life-generativity (sheng sheng bu xi 生生不息), understood as a system in which birth, growth, and procreation work in harmony to maintain the continuity of living things. Here again the Neo-Confucians took themselves to be elucidating an idea that they found in classical Confucian texts, but in fact there was very little mention of li in the classical canon, and even less that could plausibly be read as having the same metaphysical sense as the Neo-Confucians proposed (Dai 2009: 265–286; Ivanhoe 2002: 46–58; Makeham 2003b: 193–195). Other notable influences from both Buddhism and Daoism were a greater interest in meditation (Chan 1989: 255–270; Cai 2009: 195–197; Yang 2015) and a tendency to see self-abnegation or the elimination of desires as a major aim of self-cultivation. Some Neo-Confucians saw themselves as embracing a wider array of desires than their Daoist and Buddhist counterparts, but due in large part to the influence of Zhu Xi, many cut a relatively sharp distinction between what they saw as permissible desires consistent with the Pattern of ceaseless life-generativity and the impermissible desires as selfish ones (Chan 1989: 197–211). In so doing they ruled out a wider swath of desires than the classical Confucians probably intended (Tiwald 2012: 30–33). Add to these influences a wide array of shared conceptual frameworks, technical terms, and philosophical problematics and Song-Ming articulations of Confucianism become very difficult to disentangle from longstanding Buddhist and Daoist ways of thinking (Angle 2018; Araki 2008; Ivanhoe, 2002; Makeham 2018a; Ziporyn 2018). 