There can be no denying that Confucianism, despite its image in much modern scholarship as a thoroughly secular system of thought, paid homage to a transcendent order—unchanging, normative, and moral in nature—expressed by the Chinese word “t’ien”” or “Heaven.” Confucius and his disciples and later followers held that there are indeed “permanent things,” to borrow the telling phrase employed to such great effect by Russell Kirk. And the Confucian Norms represent moral imperatives for individual human beings. . . .”