In this paper, I begin with rehearsing some current debates in philosophy on the topic of traditions and true successors.Rejecting the understanding of tradition in these debates as aloof from the world and as of little use for the investigation of concrete cases, I turn to the Confucian tradition and to Tu Weiming as a current representative of it.My interest lies in the ways Tu represents and constructs the tradition and I intend to offer both quantitative and qualitative analyses based on some selected writings.There is a series of questions that this paper addresses more specifically: Are there idiosyncratic practices that define the tradition as a distinct tradition and are there practices that define it simply because it is a tradition? Which textual references does Tu foreground as crucial to his understanding of the canonical transmission of the tradition? What is the role of the vocabulary he uses to articulate the contents of the tradition, which clearly is a vocabulary drawn partly from within the tradition and partly from a variety of modern academic disciplines that are clearly not part of the tradition? The paper ends with some thoughts on the question of true succession in Confucianism in an attempt to enrich beyond Confucianism the mentioned debates in current philosophy.