 What prompted Xunzi to dissent from Mencius’s characterization of xing as good if he ultimately agreed with Mencius’s larger view: that people can perfect themselves and that such an achievement requires great exertion and self-motivation? Perhaps Xunzi wished to highlight his conviction that the proper models for moral behavior lie outside the self, which is fundamentally opposed to a Mencian notion of Four Beginnings (siduan 四端) lodged within the human heart (e.g., Mencius 2A.6). Whereas Mencians have always emphasized looking inwards for moral direction—sometimes complicated by the acknowledgment that the heart can be corrupted—self-cultivation in the Xunzian style is inconceivable without looking outwards.