Author: Jin Manlou
Not long ago, I went to Suzhou and deliberately went around to the Quyuan Garden, the former residence of Yu Fan in Ma Yike Lane. Quyuan was originally part of the old residence of Pan Shien, the "Elder of the Four Dynasties" of the late Qing Dynasty, and in 1874 Yu Fan bought it and built it into a garden, and now zeng Guofan's inscription "Spring in the Hall" plaque is still there (or a fake), but the original garden is occupied by foreign units or private houses, not to mention, the corner is actually placed with Sai Jinhua's piano (rather like the real thing), the former elegant atmosphere, quite a bit of regret.
Of course, it was an accident to meet Sai Jinhua's piano, and the main reason for visiting Quyuan was because of a public case that occurred here that year. In the spring of 1901, Zhang Taiyan went to Suzhou Soochow University to teach, and went to visit his mentor Yu Yu, and said to Mr. Yu Chun in the church. Yu Yu was furious at his visit, and reprimanded Zhang Taiyan in a loud voice for "betraying the tomb of his parents, slandering the scourge of suing for revenge, disloyalty and filial piety, and non-human beings!" Qu Yuan is no disciple, the boy beats the drum and attacks it, but also! ”
Yu Fan was a famous master of Pu Xue in the late Qing Dynasty, and with his knowledge, character, cultivation, and even his eighty-year-old body, and such a ruthless rebuke of the disciples who had placed high hopes in the past, not only was zhang Taiyan surprised and inexplicable, but in the eyes of others, he was really a bit surprised.
Yu Fan (Chinese: 俞樾; pinyin: 俞樾; pinyin: Jīng Yīng Đồng Đồng Đ During the imperial examination, Yu Fan broke the question with "The flowers are still falling in the spring, and the weather is full of sunshine", and won the reward of the examiner Zeng Guofan, and he was the first to be promoted and entered the Hanlin Academy as a Shu Jishi, thus being favored by Zengmen. After the hanlin academy was dissolved, Yu Fan stayed in the library as an editor, and then was released to Henan to study politics, and was soon deposed and immersed in scholarship, successively presided over Suzhou Ziyang Academy and Hangzhou Zhenjing Jingshe for more than thirty years, with thousands of disciples under his disciples, the relationship between teachers and students has always been harmonious, and the "Yu Lou" (number "Xiaoqu Garden") built by disciples at the foot of the lonely mountain in the West Lake is proof.
According to the Analects, the prince Ji Shi was richer than the Duke of Zhou Dynasty, and the disciple Ran Qiu wanted to help him accumulate wealth, and Confucius was greatly annoyed, saying: "Non-wu disciple also." The boy beats the drum and attacks it, but also. The public statement is "non-disciple", that is, the eviction of students from the door, the so-called "breaking the door". After being reprimanded, Zhang Taiyan was also indignant, and wrote the article "Xie Benshi" that night, declaring that the master-apprentice relationship was severed. Similar cases were by no means trivial at the time, because the traditional teacher-student relationship was no less than that of father and son, and students and teachers still had the meaning of respect for each other in addition to studying, even in the era of the alternation of the old and the new, which was also intolerable to social ethics.
Then the reader may have to ask, what really happened between Yu Fan and Zhang Taiyan? What makes Yu Fan so bright and fiery? I am afraid that this must start from Zhang Taiyan's personality and experience. Zhang Taiyan, a native of Yuhang, Zhejiang, whose father Zhang Jun was a county school instructor and had received a systematic Confucian education since childhood, was expected to have sudden epilepsy when he first took the county exam and gave up the exam (no longer refer to it later). In 1890, the 21-year-old Zhang Taiyan was ordered by his father to enter the Hangzhou Zhenjing Jingsha and studied under Yu Fan's door for seven years.
However, Zhang Taiyan's peaceful reading life was soon broken by the fiasco of the Sino-Japanese War. In 1896, Zhang Taiyan ignored Yu Fan's persuasion and went to Shanghai to serve as the chief writer of the "Current Affairs Newspaper". "Shi Ji Bao" was a restoration newspaper founded by Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao and others, and Kang and Liang were even more hot at that time, so what reason did Yu Fan have to oppose Zhang Taiyan to go to help? It turned out that in that year, Kang Youwei, who had just entered the army, passed through Hangzhou to meet Yu Fan, who invited several proud disciples to accompany him, including Zhang Taiyan.
Yu Fan's view that Kang Youwei and Zhang Taiyan were bound to be at odds came from academic differences. Kang Youwei's famous work "Examination of the New Study of Apocryphal Scriptures" refers to "Liu Xin's ancient texts are all unpretentious", which temporarily alarmed Shi Lin, and Emperor Shi Weng tonggong read it and thought that Kang "confused the Six Classics" and "really said that the scribes were a wild fox". In Yu Fan's view, Zhang Taiyan most admired Liu Xin, while Kang Youwei most rejected Liu Xin, and the ancient texts of this day and age, the two are intolerable and tit-for-tat, and if they work together, there will be incidents. Sure enough, Zhang Taiyan clashed with Kangmen's disciples the following year, and Zhang was beaten and humiliated and withdrew from the "Times".
After 1898, Zhang Taiyan was invited by Zhang Zhidong to Wuhan to organize the "Zhengyi Journal", but he left before January. In July of that year, Zhang Taiyan returned to Shanghai to serve as the chief writer of Changyan Bao, during which his words and deeds were obedient, and he was jokingly called "Zhang Crazy", which made Yu Fan very embarrassed, and contradictions began to appear between teachers and students. It is said that another disciple, Song Shu, defended Zhang Taiyan every time he wrote a letter to Yu Fan, saying that he was "sensible and ignorant of the situation" and that he was "highly jealous and slandered in the middle of the district", and Song often gave Zhang Taiyan "instructions" to Zhang Taiyan, but the latter still went his own way.
After the coup d'état, Zhang Taiyan, who had emerged from the Restoration Movement, was also on the wanted list, and finally panicked and avoided the disaster in Taiwan, and soon transferred to Japan. After Gengzi, Zhang Taiyan was completely desperate for the Qing court and embarked on a radical road. In July 1900, Zhang Taiyan returned to Shanghai and participated in the "Chinese Parliament" organized by Tang Caichang, but when formulating the charter, Zhang was dissatisfied with Tang Cai's contradictory practice of denying the legal status of the Qing court while asking the Guangxu Emperor to restore the throne, so he was indignant and cut his braids and stripped his clothes in public, declaring his resignation.
Zhang Taiyan's various absurd things reached Yu Fan's ears through various channels, and eventually led to the aforementioned Quyuan "breaking the door" public case. In Yu Fan's view, since Zhang Taiyan had no intention of doing so, it was not necessary to devote himself to academia, and with his extreme personality, he was not suitable for politics. In fact, Yu Fan is not a stubborn person, as his last words say: "Since the country advocates Western studies, then in addition to my children and grandchildren's study, it is advisable for themselves to learn the language and writing of westerners, and there are scholars who can master sound, light, and electricity, and also good children." However, Yu Fan's opposition to nationalism and the bottom line of loyalty and patriotism cannot be broken. As Gu Hongming said, the wisest place of Zeng Guofan is that "it is not anti-full", but on the contrary, the crowd rises together, and the world is poisonous. With the talents of Liang Qichao and the learning of Zhang Taiyan, it is indispensable to add firewood and fire to the revolution; however, after the revolution, chicken feathers are everywhere, and its responsibility cannot be escaped.
In the author's speculation, Yu Fan's great light and fire may be related to his own encounters. In 1855, Yu Fan was released to Henan Xuezheng after passing the examination. It is said that this is a difference, and the usual three-year income can be used for a lifetime, but this difference was finally messed up by Yu Fan himself. In less than two years, Yushi Caoze impeached Yu Fan for splitting the scriptures during the scientific examination of the proposition, which had the meaning of drama and anti-monarchy. Originally, the scope of the ancient scientific examination questions was limited to four books ("Analects", "University", "Zhongyong", and "Mencius"), in order to avoid repetition, some examiners cut one of the sentences or half of the sentences into the upper part, and then matched the meaning of the unrelated lower half of the sentence, and combined with the examination questions, that is, the so-called "interception questions". Cao Ze gave out three topics: "Lady Jun's Yang Cargo Desire" question, which is too playful; "Wang Quickly Orders Rebellion" (the original text is "Mencius. In the Liang Huiwang ,"The king quickly gives the order, the opposite of his Jingni"), which has the meaning of instigating rebellion; "the second and third sons are troubled by no king" (the original sentence is "Mencius", "The second and third sons are suffering from no king, I will go to it"), can be understood as "there is no king and there is me", which is very disrespectful. Because it was a sensitive period for the Taiping Army to rebel, Yu Fan, as a scholar of politics, could not avoid committing a big taboo, and eventually he was dismissed from his post as a civilian and never used.
Previously, Yu Fan had been smooth sailing in scientific expeditions and careers, and this blow was extremely heavy and thorough. Ancient readers took it as their duty to cultivate themselves and rule the country and the world, and the punishment of "dismissal and never use" made this ideal of life a dream that could never be realized, and the impact was so great that the livelihood embarrassment caused by it could be imagined. After thinking bitterly, Yu Fan may understand a truth, that is, he has only learned from others and is conceited and frivolous, and he is afraid that he will eventually suffer a catastrophe. His rage was probably also worried that Zhang Taiyan would encounter his own misfortune, or even worse.
However, after the incident passed, Yu and Zhang did not really break off the teacher-student relationship. For Zhang Taiyan, Yu Fan still regarded it as a protégé, and in August 1901, he also used the four songs of "Autumn Huai" to make peace, and Zhang Taiyan was also "as fate and harmony", and said that he would "forget about the previous unhappiness in the jianghu". Curiously, in 1906, when Zhang Taiyan was in charge of Minbao in Japan, he published an article entitled "Xie Benshi" in his ninth issue, which criticized Yu Fan's loyalty to the Qing court (it is not known whether his motivation for publishing the minbao was a lack of manuscripts or an old grudge or a revolutionary attitude). However, he did not hear that his fellow disciples had reprimanded Zhang Taiyan for this article, perhaps because it was not widely disseminated. After the article was published, Zhang Taiyan himself probably felt inappropriate, and his collection of essays was deliberately not included in this article).
In 1907, Yu Died. In addition to zhang Taiyan's mourning, he published a "biography of Mr. Yu" in the "Journal of National Essence", which gave a high evaluation to the teacher's scholarship and personality. Zhang Taiyan himself had some remorse for the absurdity of publishing the article "Xie Benshi", and he said in a letter to Sun Yirang: "Seeing the Summer News today, Mr. Yu is not lu. To Yi Yi foolishness, a few slashes of the door book, the tibetan road separation, no mountain construction field, hanging Si heart mourning, the temple in the heavenly spirit knows my ears. ”
Zhang Taiyan's life is contradictory, he wants to revolutionize and preserve the essence of the country; he wants to be both republican and oppose representative government; he is both a Confucian and a yearning for Buddhism... According to his disciple Chen Cunren, Zhang Taiyan was jealous and hateful, and if mortals were not good, they would rebuke him in the face and leave no room for it. In his old age, as long as he did not like to see people, he would never receive him; even if he saw him, he would not talk much, and he would take care of him and not do the scolding of the bushman. Zhang Taiyan in his twilight years, his interests are very different from those of his early years, he is becoming more and more plain, and his cultivation skills are becoming more and more profound, he once wrote banners for people, laughing at himself: "The youth is full of vigor, standing up and saying that he is a good stranger, from the present point of view, more wearing chisels and losing his original intentions, about ten can get five ears." If I'm a few years old, it may be no big deal."
From breaking through tradition to finally returning to tradition, Zhang Taiyan finally gained spiritual liberation from the struggle. But unfortunately, in the era in which he lived, the trend of thought became more and more extreme and more intense, and he finally could not keep up with the trend of the times and was abandoned by the "revolution", and the "madness" he showed in his writings in his later years was not a kind of "lonely anger" that returned to the basics. Fortunately, after closing the door and concentrating on academics, Zhang Taiyan did not live up to his talent and early academic training, and eventually became a generation of masters of traditional Chinese studies; and some talented and beautiful people of his contemporaries have long been obliterated after a hundred years of "revolutionary tide"!