Li covers ritual, etiquette, and manners in one word, and the Confucian claim is that these are not surface: the forms of respect are how respect gets learned and transmitted, and a society that lets them decay loses the thing itself. Critics from Mozi onward called it wasteful theatre, and Taoists mocked it as fussy performance. The Confucian answer is that human beings are shaped by what they practice, and that the alternative to cultivated forms is not authenticity but crudeness.