 After Zhu Xi, the second most influential Neo-Confucian philosopher is Wang Yangming (1472–1529). Wang spent his early years studying Buddhism and Daoism but eventually became an articulate and charismatic defender of Confucianism, one whose ideas and practices were honed over the course of an extraordinary career as a civil administrator and military general. By Wang’s time Zhu Xi’s views had become deeply embedded in the customs and institutions responsible for formal education, and Wang was trained in and well acquainted with those views. But Wang broke with orthodoxy on some fundamental issues, most notably on the role of personal experience and intuition in ethical cultivation and an alternative metaphysics that made the heartmind a constituent of the Patterns (li) that are the source of order and virtue. A guiding concern that ran through many of his objections had to do with the nature of moral knowledge or knowing, which he believed to be intrinsically related to the motivation to act, much as the desire to avoid a foul odor is intrinsically related to the understanding that the odor is foul. This had implications for the model of ethical cultivation which he promoted, which was to build on the immediate concerns and experiences of individuals rather than overly academic or scholastic study on topics well removed from their daily lives (Ivanhoe 2009: 99–184).