ABSTRACT
I N intellectual controversies within the Confucian tradi-tion, each school tried to score a point by claiming for itself a sort of apostolic succession from the sages. Opponents would almost invariably be accused of deviation from a right path laid down in antiquity. The old was prized over the new, and seventeenth-and eighteenth-century critics of Sung and Ming thought charged primarily not that it failed to meet needs of the present, but that it strayed from truths of the past.
