 Korean philosophy is also characterized as the view that relations are more important than the entities that enter into them. It is not entities that make relations possible, but the other way around. In other words, relations are more primitive and real. It is this kind of position that would see the active development of relation-oriented ontology such as the paradigm of ch’e (體 Essence)-yong (用 Function) paradigm, mu (無 Nothing) as the matrix of the universe, and the concept of harmony as a reciprocal concept linking i (理 Principle) and ki (氣 Vital Force), inter alia (see below for details). Thus, the basic conceptual tools in Korean philosophy cannot be understood from the perspective of the most typical Western substance-property ontology (H. Kim 2020). An upshot of this is that Korean philosophy is inclined to be monistic. This does not deny the apparent independent existence of the myriad entities—rather it means they are “organic” consequences of fundamental relations. So, the kind of monism one sees in Korean philosophy is not a reductive monism but an organic one in which the myriad things are modalities or manifestations of the basic relations (Jung-Yeup Kim 2015).