What are the new developments of Neo-Confucianism in Song and Ming Dynasties?

Neo-Confucianism in Song Dynasty is a new development of Confucianism, which is based on Confucianism and absorbs Buddhism and Taoism.

1. First, Confucianism is further speculative. On the one hand, the Neo-Confucianists in Song and Ming Dynasties learned from the achievements of Buddhism and Taoism in philosophical ontology, on the other hand, they looked for the factors that can be used for reference in traditional Confucianism, and creatively put forward many unique Confucian concepts such as "Taiji", "Tian Li" and "Heart", thus making the moral creed quotations of traditional Confucianism a philosophical theoretical system.

2. Secondly, pay more attention to ethics as the ideological core. Neo-Confucianism especially emphasizes righteousness, in fact, it emphasizes Confucian ethics. Various ontologies on the philosophical level, as well as the theory of human nature, self-cultivation, epistemology, the theory of sanctification and the theory of equal role from cultivation as the moral basis, all take ethics as the core.

Thirdly, it absorbs more Buddhist and Taoist factors. Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties, as a stage of the development of Confucianism, has obvious Buddhist characteristics, such as absorbing the core idea of Neo-Confucianism, asceticism, and putting forward the moral proposition of "preserving justice and eliminating human desires".