Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi would set the philosophical course for the Confucian tradition for more than the next one thousand years. But in the eleventh century there emerged a coterie of Confucian thinkers who began to rethink the teachings of their classical predecessors. Their “school” of Confucianism, known as daoxue (道學) or “Learning of the Way,” and often referred to as Neo-Confucianism, would quickly come to dominate Chinese intellectual and political life.
