 In certain respects it is unsurprising that Song-Ming Confucianism has loomed so large in East Asian philosophy in the present day. The thinkers of the Song-Ming period did so much to add philosophical depth and systematicity to the more laconic and fragmentary Confucian canon, it thus understandable that the scholars who are themselves philosophers or looking for philosophy in the historical Confucian tradition would be drawn to its greatest systematizers.