In the fifteenth year of Qianlong, Yao Nai, who was only nineteen years old, won the Zhongjiangnan Township Examination, which was really a young man's ambition and became famous in one fell swoop. In the twenty-eighth year of Qianlong, Yao Nai passed the entrance examination and officially embarked on his career path. In a few years, he transferred three departments, but for a person who aspired to learning, such a pure office as the six ministries was not suitable for him.
Finally, the opportunity came, in the thirty-eighth year of Qianlong, the imperial court opened the "Four Libraries of the Whole Book" museum, selected learned people to enter the museum, and Yao Nai was selected as a repair official. At this moment, he could have shown his ambition and made a big punch. But who knows that the "Four Libraries" museum is not a pure land, the people who enter the museum are all full of learning and Confucianism, everyone has their own set of ideas, and the academic factions and portal views are even worse than the officialdom.
Although Yao Nai was already forty years old at the time, he could still learn in the museum, and he should have followed the elders and only promised, but he preferred to put forward his own opinions and propositions, especially his opinions and propositions were also at odds with the general editor, that is, the curator Ji Xiaolan.
In academic terms, Ji Shi admired the Han dynasty and suppressed the Song Dynasty, while Yao Nai believed that "after the Confucian birth, Zhu, Cheng, Zhu and Mingkong, Meng Zhizhi, Cheng and Zhu Youwu father Shiye." The implication is that if the latecomers erase Song Ru's academic contributions, it is undoubtedly a number of classics that have forgotten their ancestors.
As a result, his life in the "Four Libraries" museum was not very good, and the articles he selected were often criticized and deleted by the director of the Ji Library. The Tao is different and does not conspire, Mr. Wuliu does not bend his waist for wudou rice, qinglian resident "An can destroy the eyebrows and bend the waist of the magnate", and the literary popularity festival is fully reflected in Yao Nai. In the thirty-ninth month of Qianlong, Yao Nai resolutely resigned from his official post and returned to the south. Since then, he has followed in the footsteps of his teacher Liu Daxun and embarked on the road of teaching and educating people.
On the way back to the south, he stopped by to visit Zhu Ziying, a close friend of the then prefect of Tai'an. On the twenty-eighth day of the 28th month, the two of them stepped on the snow to climb the mountain, at the top of mount Tai of the Five Peaks, Yao Nai looked down at the peaks as small as chess pieces, the world was just a chessboard, and life was just a few steps of chess. His mood was suddenly bright, and he gladly wrote down the famous "Dengtai Mountain".
In this essay, his three elements of prose creation, "righteousness, lexicon, and evidence", are well reflected. These three elements are the relatively complete creation theory he put forward by summarizing the creative practice and theoretical basis of a large number of Tongcheng literati such as Dai Mingshi, Fang Bao, and Liu Daxun. It is also the proposal of this theory that makes the Tongcheng literary style unique, that is, the Tongcheng school of literature that has ruled the literary world for more than two hundred years in the final Qing Dynasty.
After returning to the south, Yao Nai lived idly in Tongcheng for two years, in addition to reading and writing, he went to visit his mentor Liu Daxun. At this time, Liu Daxun was already an old man in his eighties, and his body was still healthy. In his lifetime, he did not win an official position, but he taught a large number of high-ranking disciples and wrote countless poems that can be called classics.
His disciples became officials throughout the country, and they brought his literary style to all parts of the country.