Li is usually rendered ritual or propriety and covers everything from state sacrifice to how you hold a jade tablet, greet a superior, sit, or mourn. The tradition's distinctive claim about it is causal rather than expressive: the forms do not communicate an inner state, they produce one. Practising deference makes you deferential; standing correctly at a funeral is part of how grief becomes properly ordered rather than merely felt. Xunzi makes the argument explicitly, describing ritual as the channel cut for feelings that would otherwise flood or dry up. This is why the tradition attends so intently to things that look from outside like etiquette, and it is also its most-attacked feature — the May Fourth critics called it a machine for eating people, and Zhuangzi had made a version of the same joke two thousand years earlier. The modern defence, made by philosophers like Herbert Fingarette, is that this is a serious theory of how social reality is constituted by convention, and not a fussiness about manners.