 Confucian philosophy in Japan, ancient, medieval, and early-modern, is often caricatured as a teaching of loyalty and trustworthiness, that is, one suited to authoritarian rulers and obedient subjects, as well as warrior-lords and their samurai followers. No doubt loyalty and trustworthiness were integral to the Confucian ethic, but equally important were more universal ethical prescriptions such as humaneness (jin). Humaneness was described variously, but most often associated with the injunction not to do to others what one would not want done to oneself. Humaneness might well be deemed the most quintessential of all Confucian and Neo-Confucian virtues. While Neo-Confucians affirmed the ancient and fundamental meaning of humaneness as the “golden rule,” they added substantially to the meaning of humaneness by suggesting that being truly humane led one to become mystically one body with everything in existence. While such a unity was grounded substantially in the single generative force constituting all reality (ichigenki), it was equally a function of recognizing other selves as oneself, and other entities, sentient or not, as part of a cosmic, familial continuum of essential oneness and wholeness. Moreover, the unity reflected one’s immersive participation in the generative activities of heaven and earth, and ultimate identification with the all-inclusive unity of the limitless creative potential of the cosmos. At a more rationalistic level, this unity was equally grounded in a cognitive grasp of the rational principles defining human nature’s goodness and the core ethical goodness of all things and their limitless becoming.