 Many western scholars distinguish Confucianism from Neo-Confucianism. As an interpretive category, Neo-Confucianism has a variety of nuances but most scholars who use the term do so in reference to forms of Confucian philosophizing that emerged in the wake of Buddhism. Many philosophical positions that Buddhism endorsed had not been well addressed by earlier Confucian philosophers. For example, Buddhists often affirmed that metaphysically all things are empty of self-substantial being. Along similar lines, Buddhists offered a psychology of introspection claiming that the reality constructed by ordinary experience is permeated with delusions arising from egocentrism and ignorance. As such, the reality of common sense is the realm of suffering. Early Confucians had not typically discussed metaphysics, apparently thinking that common sense assumptions about the reality of this world were not in question. As Buddhist estimations of reality gained a greater hearing, Confucians formulated a metaphysics affirming the reality of the world of ordinary experience, explaining the substantial nature of the world by way of the notion of ki, a term indicating the generative force that is the transformative stuff of all that exists in an unending process of becoming. In positing this metaphysics of ki along with various other ideas related to ethics, politics, spirituality, and humanity, Confucian scholars expanded upon the basics of early Confucian thinking so much so that many modern interpreters have referred to them as “Neo-Confucians.”