Li covers a range considerably wider than English ritual suggests, extending across the Analects and the Book of Rites, Li Chi, from formal court and ancestral ceremony down to everyday courtesy, table manners and the specific deference owed between parent and child, elder and younger, ruler and minister, the graded relationships Confucian social theory treats as the basic units of a well ordered world.
Confucius is recorded answering a disciple who asks about ren with a definition explicitly framed through li, restraining oneself and returning to ritual propriety constitutes ren, one of the tradition's clearest statements that the two are not separate virtues operating independently but two faces of a single accomplishment, li supplying the external form through which inward benevolence becomes visible, teachable and transmissible across a community rather than remaining a private, unobservable disposition. The Book of Rites itself, compiled and transmitted across the Han dynasty from earlier material, systematises this material into an enormous compendium of prescribed conduct across nearly every social situation a person of the educated class might encounter, treated for centuries as foundational to Confucian education alongside the Analects and Mencius.