 Naes and Hanay (1972) have characterized Chinese philosophy as “invitational” in its method of persuasion, meaning that it portrays a way of life in a vivid fashion so as to invite the audience to consider its adoption. The Analects, for example, portrays the ideal of the junzi (often translated as “gentleman” but perhaps more accurately glossed as the noble person) as realized by persons of genuine substance who are undisturbed by the failure of others to recognize their merits (1.1: “To be undisturbed by others yet not complain, is this not the mark of the junzi?”). In the Mencius (2A2), such a person possesses a kind of equanimity or heart that is unperturbed by the prospects of fame and success. This unperturbed heart corresponds to the cultivation of one’s qi (vital energies) by uprightness. One might be able to see such passages as appealing to experiences the audience might have in its encounters with persons who do seem to possess special strength, substance, and tranquility through identification with and commitment to a cause they perceive to be far greater than themselves. One need not interpret such sayings as attempting to persuade by the pure emotive effect of certain words, as in propaganda. Rather, they may correspond to a way of doing philosophy that attempts to say something about values in life that can be supported by experience, even if not all testimony will agree (Kupperman, 1999). The Daoists recommend a way of life that they explicitly characterize as one that cannot be argued for, but their recommendation receives some support through commonly shared experience. Consider again the notion of wuwei and its illustrations in the Zhuangzi through stories of exemplary craft. Most famously, Zhuangzi’s Cook Ding cuts up an oxen so smoothly and effortlessly that his knife never dulls, and it is if he is doing a dance with his knife as it zips through the spaces between the joints. He does this not through “perception and understanding” but through the qi, the vital energies of the body. His marvelous skill is knowledge of how to adjust his own movements to the spaces within oxen so that he and the oxen form seamless wholes. Similarly, Woodcarver Qing has learned to prepare for carving his marvelous bellstands in such a way that he clears his mind of all distraction and sees the stand within the timber he has selected. Suggested here is a portrait of acting in the world that consists of complete and full attention to present circumstances so that the agent can act with the grain of things (the Cook Ding passage refers to tianli or heavenly patterns). Such a portrait does resonate with the actual experience of craftspeople, artists, athletes, musicians and dancers who have advanced beyond self-conscious technique and rule-following, who become fully absorbed in the experience of working with the material, the instruments or in the movement of their bodies, and who experience their actions as an effortless flow and in fact perform at very high levels. In such ways, Chinese thinkers draw a picture of the world that must in the end be evaluated by explanatory power in some very broad sense. We must ask whether the picture helps make sense of our experience of the world (again in a broad sense of ‘experience’ not limited to quantifiable observations in replicable experiments) and whether it preserves features of that experience that we think are prima facie genuine. Much of Western philosophy must be judged according to the same standard. 