And yet Zhu Xi...
What he advocated was preserving heavenly principle and extinguishing human desires...
Human desires had already been mentioned earlier.
They were a force within the concept of intelligent life, one that accounted for a substantial share of the intelligence of the vast majority of living beings.
They were the most important part of sustaining humanity.
Without human desires,
Intelligent life could very well fall into a state of divinity or bestiality.
Divinity was actually the better of the two.
At least, divinity was not particularly dangerous.
It was not easily provoked.
After all, a being without desires or wants could hardly entertain thoughts born of any other desires.
At least, from the perspective of an intelligent being possessed of divinity, if whoever provoked him could not make him abandon that state entirely,
And posed essentially no threat to his physical safety,
Then that divine being would not strike.
But if it was the other extreme of divinity-bestiality-
That was a very different matter!
Bestiality meant pushing a particular desire to an extreme.
So extreme that it had become a primal instinct to kill!
That was bestiality.
Much like those gods who regarded all life with indifference and did not even care about themselves,
There were many different kinds of such beings.
For example, when greedy desires gathered together, the result was bestiality rooted in greed.
They would pursue whatever they liked with the fury of the wind and the obsession of a maniac!
They would even pay any price.
They could trample every legal boundary in the world.
They would risk being hanged outright, having their bodies hacked into ten thousand pieces, and having their souls barred from reincarnation forever-or reduced to ashes and smoke.
That was bestiality.
Overly intense, obsessive desires took root and sprouted in