The ancestral tablet — a wooden board bearing the dead person's name and rank in gold characters — is the central ritual object of Confucian practice, and it is emphatically not an image. Tablets stand in a household shrine or a lineage hall, conventionally to four generations, after which they are buried or moved to a collective position, so the individually remembered dead form a rolling window while the lineage as a whole persists. Almost all Confucian ritual action is addressed to these. The question of what is actually being addressed was put to Confucius directly and he refused it: asked whether the dead have consciousness, tradition records him saying that if he said they did, filial sons would ruin themselves on funerals, and if he said they did not, unfilial ones would leave their parents unburied — so the question could wait. Xunzi gave the flatly naturalistic answer, that the rites are for the living and the gentleman regards them as human practice while the common people regard them as serving spirits.