Gongguoge, ledgers of merit and demerit, are printed moral accounting books that became a mass practice in the late Ming and Qing, particularly among the gentry, and the best known is associated with Yuan Huang in the sixteenth century. They assign numerical values: saving a human life might be a hundred merits, saving an animal a smaller number, arranging a marriage or funding a burial for the poor so many, while cursing a parent, cheating in trade or aborting a pregnancy carry specified demerits. The user totals the day's score each night in a ruled book and carries a running balance, on the understanding that the celestial bureaucracy keeps the same accounts and that the balance determines lifespan, offspring and fortune. The obvious objection — that acting for points is not virtue — was raised inside the tradition, and the standard answer was pedagogical: begin by calculating, and the habit of doing good will eventually detach from the calculation. Their circulation crossed traditions, with Buddhist and Confucian versions in wide use.