 Qi was self-sufficient and all-pervasive, identified with things, objects, events, and affairs, without which “the dao has nowhere to reside” (RZL: 1:20). Similarly, Huang Zongxi (1610–1695), a polymath who was Gu Yanwu’s and Wang Fuzhi’s contemporary, saw the inextricable conflation of li and qi as a foremost ontological fact: “Li is the li of qi. If there is no qi, then there is no li” (Huang MRXA: 140). Their difference rests merely on semantics: 