 But Zhang did not see the past simply as successive parades of relative spatial forms and temporal segments. Instead of particularizing the ancient past and the classics once and for all, Zhang often sought in them the universally normative. The dao-in-history pertained to the pattern of change of the political, social and institutional polity, things such as “government, pedagogy, marking out boundaries, delimiting prefectures, well-field system, feudalism and education” (WSTY: 34). These were changing forms of life relative to their own place and time, embodying their own Way. But overarching these particular Ways was the transhistorical dao of the ancient sages, enshrined in the classics, which Zhang called the “the essential Way” (daoti): 