 Yet, the point must be made that embedded in this rupture was continuity in some important ways. The entire Song-Ming tradition of thought was no doubt subjected to wholesale reexamination, but to begin with, the basis of their criticism and construction stemmed from a well-established preexisting strand of learning. One famous Song definition of the quintessence of the Confucian tradition by Liu Yi (1017–1086) identified the three principal components of ti (substance, essence, spirit, principle, core, and soul), yong (function, utility, practicality, application, action, and effort) and wen (literature, writings, philology, belles-lettres, textual learning, classical studies). Together, they constituted the goals and contents of Confucian learning. Qing intellectualism focused on the primacy of wen as a central manifestation of yong. Moreover, the scholars, despite their general discontent with what they perceived to be empty and recondite Song-Ming learning and their desire to reform it, continued to delineate their scholarly and philosophical allegiance in terms of association with the two schools of Neo-Confucianism: the so-called Cheng-Zhu school and Lu-Wang school. In fact, many of them engaged in intellectualist enterprises precisely for the purpose of wielding philology as a weapon to defend their philosophical views while at the same time seeking to weaken and demolish those of their opponents. 