ABSTRACT
The problem of delimiting the bounds of the canon, of determining which texts are scriptural and which not, has loomed large in most great religious traditions, including the Confucian. The absence of formal creeds and a recognized ecclesiastical authority does, indeed, render such touchstone issues or assertions harder to identify in Neo-Confucianism than in the major religious traditions of the West. The most well-known and widely heralded such issue in Confucian thought through the ages, not just Neo-Confucian, is that of the nature of human nature. Neo-Confucian philosophers and scholars, as well as modem historians, have attested to the central importance of the question of human nature in Confucian discourse. While the issue of human nature was a perennial topic of discussion in Confucianism from the time of Mencius forward, other Neo-Confucian touchstones of orthodoxy rarely appear as such before the rise of Tao Learning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
