 Most Confucians took the Confucian canon to be authoritative and true. Texts like the Analects, the Mencius, and the Rites were required reading for any aspiring scholar and Confucians often appealed to these texts to substantiate their claims. But modern readers are sometimes surprised to learn that there was some debate about whether and to what extent reading the Confucian classics was required for proper self-development (Ivanhoe 2000). On the one hand, it seemed obvious to many Confucians that many people had the wrong views and the authoritative Confucian texts seemed the most obvious way to correct those views. On the other hand, some Confucians of this era worried that knowledge acquired from books couldn’t be obtained and internalized in ways required for wholehearted virtue (see  section 3.3).  Moreover, most agreed that we have well-formed ethical capacities by nature  (section 3.2).  Accordingly, philosophers like Lu Xiangshan and Wang Yangming thought we could rely more on our own intuitions or deeply-felt moral insights that come from daily life, and that these were often preferable to the more fragmentary and abstract types of study connected to book learning (CXL 49; Ivanhoe 2002: 77–80; Ivanhoe 2009: 34–39; Tiwald &amp; Van Norden 2014: 243–245). In contrast, Zhu Xi worried that intuitions were too unreliable, that we are too predisposed to rationalize or find clever ways of countenancing self-serving inclinations and judgments, and thought reading authoritative Confucian texts with an open mind and reverential attention a good way to check our self-serving biases (Angle &amp; Tiwald 2017: 151–155; Chu 1990: 128–162; ZZYL 10–11).