This article investigates the following questions: Does a conflict exist between the pursuit of personal morality and familial obligations in Confucian discourse during the Ming-Qing transition? How important are the family and the fulfillment of familial obligations in Confucian moral cultivation? In terms of learning to become a sage, what relationship obtains between the cultivation of one’s mind-heart and familial ethics? If the fulfillment of familial ethics is required for Confucian sagely learning, how is it represented in the images of Confucian sages? By investigating the above questions, this article finds that early Qing Confucians tended to reject the internal practice of the mind-heart and instead emphasized the importance of fulfilling familial obligations. They claimed that Confucian sagely learning had to be realized within the household, arguing that a person could never abandon his familial obligations in order to engage in sagely learning. In other words, filial piety was viewed as a requirement for sagehood. In accordance with this idea, early Qing Confucians highlighted filial piety in their writings about past Confucian sages. Even in the absence of strong evidence, scholars of the time argued that Confucius and Yan Hui had achieved great filial piety. In a departure from the focus on cultivating the mind-heart and Three Teaching syncretism popular in the late Ming, early Qing Confucianism thus reemphasized the importance of familial ethics. Despite this, however, the concepts of a moral heaven and an inherently good human nature were not abandoned, and they continued to play an important role in the Confucian discourse of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]