introduction
Everyone lives in this world, there will always be countless shackles on the body, these shackles may sometimes become a boost to life, but more often become a bottleneck that is difficult for a person to break through. Chao Yi wrote in the "Quasi-White Lotte Poems II": "Do not be noble by others, his heart is my demon." "Maybe Liu Bei's failure is here.
01
The story of the Three Kingdoms can be said to be the most popular historical story in the Chinese, and the novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" has completely detonated the people's enthusiasm for the story of the Three Kingdoms. Many people grit their teeth for Cao Cao's treachery in the novel, cry out for Zhuge Liang's clever hand god calculation, cry bitterly for Guan Yu's defeat of Maicheng, and sigh for Liu Beibai's white emperor Chengtuo... Many people are lamenting why the ending of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" is so tragic, and why the righteous Liu Bei will lose to the "evil" Cao Cao. But understand that although the novel can change a lot of plots, it can't change the final ending.
▲Liu Bei stills
However, as Mingyue said in the "Dialogue" program that year, he wrote "Those Things of the Ming Dynasty", the more he wrote, the more miserable it became, he was also very uncomfortable, he wanted to write that Chongzhen did not kill Yuan Chonghuan, Huang Taiji suddenly died of a heart attack, Dolgun was immediately killed by Xiaozhuang, Manchu Qing returned to the White Mountains and Black Water Life, Li Zicheng fell ill and died after entering the mountains and forests, and the Ming Dynasty died of illness for thousands of generations... But the truth of history is always cruel, there is no victory of good over evil, no kingship eternal. Even a historical novel like "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" cannot change history beyond recognition for its own preferences.
▲The Three Kingdoms tent of the Eastern Han Dynasty
Therefore, although Liu Bei pulled up the banner of the Han Dynasty, the talents under the account did not unify the world after all. In fact, Liu Bei's failure was not accidental, but inevitable. In the novel, Pang Tong's last words before his death have already given the answer, revealing the reason for Liu Bei's failure: my death, everything is arranged by heaven. Liu Bei did not understand this sentence, thinking that he was resenting the injustice of heaven, but Zhuge Liang understood it, but he was powerless to change it, and it was even difficult to explain to Liu Bei. So what does this seemingly simple sentence really mean? What kind of fate does it reveal? To explain this problem, we must first start with Liu Bei himself.
02
Liu Bei himself was the Queen of Zhongshan, but because he was separated by several generations, he had become a mat weaver. Some people believe that Liu Bei's origin determines his fate, and it is impossible for a commoner to gain the world. In fact, this view is not valid at all, since Chen Sheng shouted out the sentence "The prince will have a kind of Xiangning", there are not many people who have won high positions from the commoners, and Liu Bang of Han Gaozu and Zhu Yuanzhang, the ancestor of Ming Taizu, were all born of commoners, and finally won the world. In the early days of the Three Kingdoms, Liu Bei had already established a lot of popularity, and there were many people around him, so he fully met the basic conditions.
Some people think that Liu Bei is too cowardly, Cao Cao can scare him into throwing away his chopsticks with a slight deception, but whenever he encounters something wrong, he will cry bitterly and lose his voice, and when he is chased and killed by Cao Cao, he is not willing to leave the people to flee for his life, how can such a domineering person defeat other tyrants? In fact, this view is also biased. Although the novel focuses on Liu Bei's benevolence and cowardice, Luo Guanzhong is not without room, and in some places that are easy to be ignored, he still leaves Liu Bei's "belly black" dark pen.
▲Liu Bei Huiling recent photo
In the novel, there is a saying that "dead Zhuge walks alive Zhongda", but people ignore that it is Liu Bei who is even more powerful than Zhuge Liang, which can be described as "dead Liu Bei Yu Live Zhuge Ge". You see that he BaiDi Chengtuogu (both in the novel and the main history) said that "if he is not talented, the king can take his own", which is simply accurate to Zhuge Liang's mind, even if Zhuge Liang still has two hearts, how dare he turn up any waves? Before dying, he did not forget to calculate Zhuge Liang, which can be said to have applied psychology to the extreme. It can be seen from this that benevolence is not a weakness that restricts Liu Bei, but a tool that Liu Bei uses to win the hearts and minds of the people.
▲Zhuge Liang stills
What really restrained Liu Bei was the shackles he put on himself, or it could be said that Zhuge Liang helped him put on them. At the end of the dialogue between the two in "Longzhong Pair", Zhuge Liang concluded: "Hegemony can be achieved, and Han Room can be prosperous." This sentence directly laid the tone of the Shu Han foundation, that is, "reviving the Han Room". It should be known that the world has just experienced four hundred years of unification, so in order to claim hegemony, it is necessary to grasp the great righteousness, such as Cao Cao's "blackmail of the son of heaven to order the princes", which is completely different from the concept of "the strong soldier is the king" in the later five generations period. Therefore, Zhuge Liang cleverly pulled up the banner of the Han Room, but this banner eventually became the burden of Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang and even shu Han's life.
▲Stills of Liu Bei and Pang Tong
It was also because of this that Liu Bei would only be tied up when he was preparing to achieve the strategic goal of marching into Yizhou, after all, he had always been a "benevolent and righteous" person, after all, he was a person who wanted to support the Han Dynasty, how could he betray his faith and attack Liu Zhang, who was also a clan relative? Therefore, when Pang Tong offered Liu Bei three strategies, Liu Bei would think that the upper strategy was too urgent and the lower strategy was too slow, and he chose the middle strategy, and it was in the hard-hitting war that Pang Tong unfortunately died. Therefore, Pang Tong, who saw all this, would issue such an exclamation on the occasion of his death.
epilogue
In the novel, Pang Tong will issue such an exclamation, which is not deliberately done by Luo Guanzhong. Luo Guanzhong created a multi-wise and near-demon Crouching Dragon image, in the novel it seems that Zhuge Liang has the ability to reverse the Mandate of Heaven, but in the end he was ended by the "coincidence" guided by the strong inertia of fate because of the delusional act of changing the Mandate of Heaven (Wei Yan knocked over the Seven Star Lantern). Therefore, in the novel, it seems that the death of Feng Yan is also caused by the Mandate of Heaven, if it were not for the heavenly arrangement for Pang Tong's untimely death, plus Zhuge Liang, the two might really be able to reverse the situation. Of course, these are only the plot of the novel, after all, the general trend of the world is not something that one or two strategists can change.
Resources:
"Quasi-White Lotte Poems · Part II"
"Longzhong Pair"