Humans and all things are one. The ancients believed that humans and all things were produced by heaven and earth, and that despite belonging to different categories, they ultimately followed the same fundamental principle and had a commonality or consistency, just like the parts of a person’s body; humans must acknowledge this so they won’t lose their pre-eminence over all things. In this way, Confucian scholars of the Song and Ming dynasties reinterpreted the concept of “benevolence,” and also this is how the idea of eco-civilization is being explored today. This idea, like the concept that “all people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions,” transcends the limitations of human-oriented thinking and achieves a high degree of unity and harmony between our own selves and other human beings as well as between our own selves and everything else.