 Since Hui Shi’s monism might recall that of the Eleatics (cf. Hu 1922, Graham 1989), it is worth clarifying the similarities and differences between the two. The similarities are superficial: both develop a form of absolute monism grounded in reflection about language or thought and its relation to reality. But the arguments for and consequences of the two views are fundamentally different. The starting point for Parmenides’s monism is reflection on the concept of ‘being’ or ‘the real’, specifically the claim that what is real must necessarily be. From this he draws the conclusion that what is real must be ungenerable, imperishable, indivisible, and unchanging. Thus, in contrast to the eternal, unchanging world intelligible through reason, the inconstant, changing world of everyday perceptual experience is in some sense not “real.” By contrast, the Hui Shi view starts from a kind of radical perspectivalism about distinctions. It argues that since no standard for drawing distinctions has a privileged, absolute status, the only way to draw distinctions given by reality itself is not to draw any at all. Reality is not regarded as indivisible and unchanging, nor is the changing world of sense experience in any sense “unreal.” Rather, reality is divisible in indefinitely many ways. All of the resulting distinctions are “real” in the sense that the features of things on which they are based indeed exist. The distinctions are not delusory. The problem is that neither are they privileged or fixed: they can be replaced by alternative schemes of distinctions. The only privileged scheme is monism, drawing no distinctions at  all.[15]