 To charge Buddhists with selfishness and egoism might appear to overlook some well-known features of Buddhist thought. The Buddhist Eightfold Path includes duties to help others and prohibitions against harming others. The path of the bodhisattva in Mahāyāna Buddhism includes a long, perhaps indefinite period in which the bodhisattva embodies and practices great compassion (daci 大慈) and commits to ending the suffering of all sentient life before entering nirvana herself or himself. Neo-Confucians were well aware of these aspects of Chinese Buddhism, so a charitable and historically informed reading of their criticisms should be more nuanced. One better way of understanding the charge of selfishness is that it describes what motivates most ordinary Buddhist practitioners in fact, not what motivates idealized practitioners in principle (HNCSYS 1:3; JSL 13.6). This would be a natural consequence of the fact that the Buddhist route to other-directed concern is considerably more demanding than the Confucian one, as care for others is more easily attained through ordinary interactions with family and members of one’s community than through radical nonattachment (Lu 1980: 16–21; Tiwald &amp; Van Norden 2014: 257–260). Another variant of the Neo-Confucian criticism is to suggest that subordinating ethics to soteriology has problematic implications. If all norms, including ethical ones, are justified to a significant degree by their contribution to one’s own quest to end personal suffering, this will give a different shape to very notion of goodness. Practices like donating to Buddhist shrines and maintaining a Buddhist diet can potentially be conceived as “good” (shan 善) without essential reference to improving other people’s lives or participating ably in human relationships (ZZYL 126:3033, Tiwald 2018a: 134–37).