 Wang also proposed that people have an innate faculty of moral understanding that he called liangzhi 良知, most literally translated as “pure knowledge” or “good knowledge” but sometimes more loosely translated as “innate knowledge” or “conscience”. If people fail to be virtuous, he proposed, this is because they are unable to access or recognize the deliverances of good knowledge due to interference by selfish desires, which arise from self-centered attachments and ways of thinking. This teaching, combined with his worries about forms of study that are too far removed from personal experience, conferred a somewhat ambiguous status on the longstanding Confucian practice of reading and reflecting on the Confucian classics, for it is not entirely clear why grasping ideas and accounts of events well removed from one’s own life should help to access or complement good knowledge (Ivanhoe 2002: 123–134). This and other ambiguities in Wang’s teachings left considerable room for debate among the subsequent generations of his disciples and followers (Peng 2003).