When Chairman Mao was studying in Changsha, Hunan Province, he wrote the famous "Qinyuan Chun Changsha", and the last sentence was: "Have you ever remembered that when you hit the water in the middle of the stream, the waves suppressed the flying boats?" ”
In the 1950s, "Nineteen Poems of Chairman Mao" was published, and Chairman Mao personally annotated the word "hitting the water" under this word, and mentioned that when he was a teenager, he once wrote a poem, and later remembered only two "residual sentences".
This is the "Seven Ancients, Confident Life": Confident life for two hundred years, will hit the water for three thousand miles. These two poems continue the consistent characteristics of all of Chairman Mao's poems, and they are written with arrogance and dryness.
The poem also contains allusions to Kunpeng in "Zhuangzi Getaway", which mentions: "The disciples of Peng are in the south of the city, the water strikes three thousand miles, and the one who supports the soaring is ninety thousand miles."
This "Peng" is the illusion of "Kun", and Li Bai once wrote in his "Seven Ancient Li Yong": "Dapeng rises with the same wind one day and rises up to ninety thousand miles." The "Dapeng" here is also the "Kunpeng" in "The Getaway".
The poet borrowed the "Kunpeng" to hit the water for three thousand and then soared, to express the author's confidence that he will achieve "extraordinary achievements" in the future. But why do you say "two hundred years of confident life"?
Confident that in two hundred years of life, it will hit the water for three thousand miles
Modern science tells us that the extreme life expectancy of normal people is about 150 years. However, due to illness and other reasons, a person's life expectancy is usually not more than 100 years.
However, in the era when Chairman Mao was a teenager, there was once a philosopher named Jiang Weiqiao and a master of qigong health, who believed in his book "Abolition of The Theory of Dynastic Food" that people can live for two hundred years.
Self-confidence is a prerequisite for a person's success, but if a person wants to succeed in a certain field, he cannot but produce a kind of self-confidence in what he wants to do and what he may achieve in the future.
When Liu Bang was not yet in the background, when he saw Qin Shi Huang on a tour, he said, "The eldest husband should be like this." When Xiang Yu saw the First Emperor's honor guard, he said bluntly, "He can take his place." ”
Without self-confidence, there will be no ambition, and there will be no later pursuit of the world. Liu Bang later defeated Xiang Yu and established the Han Dynasty. With the strength of the Han Dynasty, who dares to say that his merits are small?
However, Ruan Yuan, one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Forest, said: "There is no hero at the time, so the shafts become famous." Ruan's meaning is that Liu Bang became famous only because there were no tigers in the mountains and monkeys were overlords.
In the 1960s, chairman Mao mentioned this issue when he wrote to people. Chairman Mao said that Mr. Lu Xun had said the same thing in those years. The giants of thought will always have their own views on historical figures, and they will never follow the crowd.
Because of self-confidence, I dare to make my voice heard. Therefore, Chairman Mao when he was a teenager would write sentences like "confident life for two hundred years."
At the same time, however, Chairman Mao also said that he was not always so confident. Sometimes, Chairman Mao was also unconfident, and he doubted himself.
Therefore, he often chanted Hou Han LiGu's "Under the fame, in fact, it is difficult to be a vice", reminding himself that he must be self-aware. Chairman Mao called himself a man with some tiger spirit and at the same time some monkey spirit. However, tiger qi is the mainstay, supplemented by monkey qi.
The tiger is the king of the mountains, because of the tiger qi, a person will have the determination and will to win in the chaotic world. Monkeys are spirits in the mountains, and Chairman Mao said that he had monkey qi, which is modest to say that his success also has a certain element of luck.
But if it were not for the spirit monkey, there would be no luck in the air, and it would definitely have no luck with the throne of the king. In the prime of life, before making up one's mind, one might as well be bold and wild. Be more energetic and believe in your own strength.
Don't be complacent when you're one day successful or have achieved something. It is even more important to reflect on ourselves and review at any time. That's why Chairman Mao said that he often wrote to friends, mentioning that "people are valuable and self-aware."
Everything in the world is constantly moving forward in contradictions. All things are the opposite. We say that it is good for a person to have self-confidence, and it is bad not to be confident. But sometimes overconfidence can turn into bad.
Therefore, Chairman Mao has put forward another point worthy of everyone's attention here: A person's self-confidence must be based on "self-knowledge." Knowing their strengths and strengths, knowing their own weight, will not become "blind confidence".
For example, a person who says that he has the confidence to become another richest man in the next twenty or thirty years, but he does not pay attention to the relevant information or open a company. Is it possible to become the richest man with your eyes closed and think about it?
In 1916, when the young Chairman Mao made a grand wish when he was studying in Changsha, Hunan Province, and wrote down "two hundred years of confident life", he had already put forward the view of "civilizing its spirit and barbarizing its physique" for the future transformation of China.
Or perhaps Chairman Mao at that time had already calculated that the time that history had left for himself to make meritorious contributions in the past two hundred years was completely sufficient. As long as you do your best and exhaust the time of this life, you will one day be able to realize the Kunpeng ambition of "hitting the water for three thousand".
These two fragmentary poems of Chairman Mao, as the "Seven Ancients", were first officially published in the "Complete Book of Chairman Mao's Thought" in 1992. In fact, there are also many classic famous sentences in ancient poems, which are preserved in the form of "residual sentences".
Among them, the more famous ones are Su Lin's "Near the water tower platform first get the moon, xiangyang flowers and trees are easy to spring"; five generations later Shu Mengchang's "ice muscle jade bone, cool without sweat". It's just that Su Lin's "residual sentence" was originally only written in two sentences, and there was no complete poem.
Meng Chang's "residual sentence" was originally complete, but only two sentences were left behind, which were heard by Shushan Laoni and passed on to the young Su Shi. After Su Shi grew up, he took these two fragments to fill in the words, and it became the "Dong Xian Song Ice Muscle Jade Bone" that we see now.
Chairman Mao's "Seven Ancient And Confident Lives" was originally a complete poem. But later, because of the passage of time, other sentences were forgotten, leaving only these two good sentences.
However, Chairman Mao did not later complete it into a complete poem like Su Shi, which was probably determined by the characteristics of poetry creation.
Writing poetry relies on emotions, and once the time has passed and it feels wrong, then it is not interesting to continue to write reluctantly. In the Tang Dynasty, Jia Dao had a poem "After the Inscription Poem", which talked about the difficulty of poetry creation, and the poem said: "Two sentences in three years, one chant and two tears." ”
It can be seen that poetry is easy to write, and good sentences are rare. How difficult it is to write one or two sentences that hit people's hearts and hit the hearts of the people. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand that Chairman Mao's "Seven Ancient And Confident Lives", although it is a "residual sentence", has always been widely loved by the world.
epilogue
Chairman Mao's poems, always carrying a high spirit, are very inspiring. We can see that in his "Seven Ancient And Confident Lives", it seems to describe a historical tide, fighting for the stream, and moving forward.
In the world of poetry, Chairman Mao is eternally young. These famous sentences he wrote down will always inspire generations of Chinese youth to work hard.