 Following the decline of Buddhism, the movement known in the West as “Neo-Confucianism” became increasingly influential.  Neo-Confucianism  presents itself as a revival of the original teachings of Confucianism against the mistaken doctrines of Daoism and Buddhism. However, after centuries of Buddhist dominance in philosophy, it was almost inevitable that Neo-Confucian thinkers would unconsciously reinterpret their tradition in the light of Buddhist concepts. For example, we saw how the Chinese term li (principle/pattern) is central to Huayan metaphysics. It is also central to   Neo-Confucian metaphysics,  even though the term is of peripheral importance in the Confucian classics. For example, of the Four Books of the Confucian canon, “li” occurs precisely zero times in all of the Analects of Confucius and the Great Learning, only twice in the Mean, and a mere seven times in the Mengzi. In none of the passages where it does occur is there any suggestion that the term has any deep metaphysical importance. (A typical use is in a dialogue in which someone asks Mengzi for help with his lack of eloquence, describing himself as “not patterned (li) in regard to my mouth.”) Nonetheless, Neo-Confucian philosophers like   Zhu Xi   (1130–1200) repeatedly use the term to explain what they take to be the underlying meaning of the classics, and give it a metaphysical meaning very reminiscent of Indra’s net. Similarly, the Neo-Confucian emphasis on the dangers of “selfish desires” (Ch. siyu) and “selfish thoughts” (Ch. siyi) is not characteristic of ancient Confucianism, but rather reflects the centrality of selfishness in Buddhist accounts of human wrongdoing. 