The Chinese tradition of “Li” (礼) has a broad significance as a set of rules that set standards in behavior that create harmony between individuals, and between the institutions of human society. Li, both in general sense of manners and propriety, and in the narrow sense of rituals of life (birth, marriage, funerals, ancestor worship and offerings to Heaven), was the foundation for society and defined family relationships and encouraged responsibility and accountability within the family, the community, the nation and the realm. Li was seen as foundations for governance, for international relations and for all family relations.In the narrow sense, “Li” refers to the offering up of food and other valued objects as sacrifices to the ancestors of a clan, the former emperor or king, or to heaven, or other deities. It served as periodic affirmation of the indebtedness of the individual, of the family and of humanity as a whole to the ecological cycles that produced the food that we consume and gave deeper significance to foodstuff, and the act of eating in a manner that encouraged an awareness of the centrality of agriculture and the importance of the ecosystem.“Li” in the sense of “propriety” defines a set of complex rules that governed conduct between people and created a healthy order in society through the reinforcement of moral imperatives in daily life. “Li” in the sense of greeting family member in accord with their position within the family (and thus making social relations explicit, and therefore acknowledged) had profound symbolic value and real ethical power as well. “Li” in the sense of propriety grew directly out of “Li” as a ritual in that periodic rituals defined relationships and assured that everyone, even the emperor, is neatly woven into a larger hierarchy of things human and natural so that no one can imagine himself or herself to be standing alone.Ritual is not limited to Confucianism. It has strong foundations in Buddhism, in Daoism and in Shamanism in East Asia, and for that matter parallels in Christianity and Islam. Perhaps one of the greatest weaknesses in contemporary ideology is our loss of a language to describe ritual. That is to say that although we pretend that we have moved beyond the rituals of the past into a modern age of self-expression and directness, in fact ritual is deeply embedded in human culture and cannot be overcome. Rather, modern society consists of many rituals that citizens are not aware of as rituals (like the rituals of shopping and of consuming). At the same time, citizens lack awareness of the power of ritual to connect citizens together and to increase their awareness of the environment and to create a political and spiritual commons.The Confucian ritual tradition, especially after Zhu Xi’s (1130-1200) codification and standardization of ritual practice during the Southern Song Dynasty, and his linkage of ritual with a metaphysical totality, gave family, community and state rituals a new intellectual import. The importance of the relationship between the underlying metaphysical order of things, the ecosystem and the human realm the dates back to ancient times,[1] but it had never been put together in such a systematic manner. Suddenly man’s ties to nature in his every action were made explicit, and intellectually involved.Zhu Xi unambiguously mapped out the significance of rituals and wedded them directly to an imbricated metaphysical order that lay behind every act in the family rituals.The tremendous potential of the Confucian rituals is the manner in which they affirm the relationship between the individual and nature, between the consumption of food and the awareness of its origins, between daily life for the citizen and the ecosystem as a whole. Those rituals, if they can be reinterpreted for our age, offer the potential of a solution to the most serious threat to our society, the growth of mindless consumption as the primary ritual of daily life.