 Zhu Xi on occasion modeled his ethical conception of observing situations and fashioning the most appropriate response naturalistically on the butcher character, Cook Ding, portrayed in the Zhuangzi as a skilled artisan: just as the sure blade of Cook Ding’s cleaver goes straight to the cartilage between the bones, the cultivated sense of appropriateness (yi) of Zhu Xi’s moral adept strikes right at the heart of interpersonal situations (see Thompson 1988: 39–40). A.C. Graham once contrasted Zhu’s perception/response model (gan-ying) of ethical action with that of Zhuangzi by suggesting that Zhu’s notion of appropriate response was informed by rigorous adherence to rules and principles, whereas Zhuangzi’s was relatively intuitive and spontaneous (Graham 1986a: 143–145). This apparent contrast can be resolved by separating the stages of cultivation and mastery: Zhuangzi’s skilled artisans, such as Butcher Ding, all had to undergo prolonged periods of rigorously controlled apprenticeship before they could “forget” the “knowing that” in an integrated, spontaneous process of “knowing how”. For his part, Zhu Xi knew that the years of learning and practice—one’s moral apprenticeship—culminates in a responsive moral agent who can operate as intuitively and spontaneously in his or her personal and social ethical sphere as do Zhuangzi’s skilled artisans in  theirs.[11]  Zhu’s moral adept is in effect an artisan of interpersonal intercourse. Zhu could rightfully claim Confucius as a prime model for this view. After decades of cultivation, Confucius could say, “At sixty, my ear was attuned. At seventy, I could give my heart free rein and without overstepping the mark” (Analects 2.4).