 From Mencius forward, fidelity to gi was often defined in terms of one’s willingness to sacrifice one’s life if realization of gi and one’s continued existence could not be realized in tandem. One of the most famous debates of the Tokugawa period centered around an incident occurring in 1703 concerning a group of forty-seven samurai who had been left masterless (rōnin) due to the shogun’s forcing the suicide of their lord. The question was whether the rōnin were acting according to gi in taking revenge upon the man who had, in the first place, prompted their deceased lord to commit the offense that led to his being condemned to self-destruction. Clearly, the issue was not the legal one of whether the rōnin obeyed or disobeyed the law, but instead the moral one of whether they acted on the basis of a sense of rightness and justice. Opinions varied, of course, but that the debate was widespread and meaningful reveals the extent to which Neo-Confucian ethical notions such as gi had become integral, substantive factors in public discourse in early-modern Japan.