 Nevertheless and without question, there are prominent and fundamental views in Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism that bear the marks of Buddhist and Daoist influence. One is the Neo-Confucian account of the goodness of human nature. Many of the major Neo-Confucians of this period endorsed the view that the ethical predispositions in human nature are well-formed from birth, so that a great deal of the work of cultivating virtue was primarily a matter of recovering and eliminating the obstructions that prevent us from accessing that nature, especially selfish or self-centered desires and the various bad habits and biases that they present (Ivanhoe 2000). These philosophers took themselves to be expounding a doctrine of human nature found in the Mencius, but in fact Mencius seems to have thought that “human nature is good” (xingshan 性善) is true by virtue of the fact that human beings have a natural capacity or potential to become good, not that they are innately good or have well-formed ethical predispositions right from the start (Mencius 6A6, 6A8). A more likely source for the idea that we have well-formed predispositions innately is Chinese Buddhism, which had long held that humans (and all sentient beings) have at all times a kind of buddha-nature (foxing 佛性) or buddha-womb (in Sanskrit, tathāgatagarbha; in Chinese, rulai zang 如來藏) with fully-formed propensities to respond perfectly to its circumstances. Here too the well-formed nature is to be recovered or discovered by removing obstacles, which for Buddhists were seen as false and adventitious conceptualizations of things. Neo-Confucians even used or adapted many of the metaphors that Buddhists had long used to describe the circumstances in which our perfect nature becomes blocked, likening it to a pearl suspended in muddy water or a mirror covered with dust (Jorgensen 2018: 73–86; Z. Liu 2003).