Zeng Guofan has been high in recent years, walking into the bookstore, all kinds of books about Zeng Guofan are dazzling, as if it is synonymous with success learning, so why do people show such great enthusiasm for Zeng Guofan today? From the popularity of the "Zeng Guofan Family Book" in previous years to the current "Zeng Guofan" novel fever, the "enthusiasm" has not faded, have people forgotten that he was the culprit in suppressing the peasant uprising in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?
What kind of person is Zeng Guofan? He is the last scholar and "sage" in Chinese history, and the last person who can embody this ideal model of life. Perhaps, Zeng Guofan never thought that he would arouse great enthusiasm after his death more than a hundred years ago. Because he did not leave a huge spiritual wealth to future generations like Ercheng and Zhu Xi, nor was he a typical example of the sages who people admired for protecting the country and loving the people, like Zhuge Liang, but he left people with deep thinking: At the end of China's feudal society, why did such a figure appear, and what kind of person was this?
Problems are often short-sighted from a political perspective and far-reaching from a cultural perspective. To understand people's enthusiasm for Zeng Guofan, we must start from the traditional Chinese ideal of life.
Generally speaking, there are two ideals of traditional Chinese: one is to become an official, and the other is to become famous. Being an official is affordable, fame can be immortal, if you can put the two together, it is wonderful!
Being an official is an ideal that Chinese dream of, and the four words "glory and wealth" can be described as describing the benefits of being an official, and for a very real Chinese, if they can enjoy the high-ranking official Houlu, it can be said that this life is not worth it. Therefore, Chinese has always had a reverence and admiration for officials.
It is not elegant enough to be an official, but it is even more perfect if one can become a sage or even a saint.
Chinese has always had a mysterious sense of reverence for the sages and sages, believing that they are not only the spokesmen of the Heavenly Dao, but also the symbols of the gods, and the general people respect the sages, especially the readers, and their greatest desire is probably not to become emperors, but to become "imperial masters".
In fact, fame and profit are often glued together, so while trying to gain official positions and reputations, there are often real benefits, and the situation of being poor and depressed like a dog that has lost his family like Kong Shengren is after all an isolated case, and the situation of winning the title, becoming a high official, and making a fortune is common, so Chinese often regard fame and profit as the same thing.
But there is still a difference between the two after all.
Merchants still despise traditional concepts for making money, and landowners have money and are also despised by the people in the city, so like Zeng Guofan, he is not only the largest powerful faction in the ruling clique of the late Qing Dynasty, a "holy minister" who is famous at home and abroad, or a leader of the academic community, and the combination of officials, power, fame, and profit is perfect, which has become the ideal image of the traditional Chinese.
Indeed, in Zeng Guofan's body, both false fame and real profit have been concentrated, and he has never been in vain in this life, eating, drinking, and having fun, occupying the storm, exercising power and using power, building meritorious deeds, dancing and ink, and ending life, in short, the four words of fame and fortune have been occupied, which can be said to have occupied all the benefits that seem to be enviable in the pursuit of Chinese.
Therefore, after more than a hundred years of silence, Zeng Guofan was able to rekindle people's enthusiasm, but it was rare for ordinary people to learn its side, let alone have the opportunity to fully imitate it.
What kind of person was Zeng Guofan in history? He is a very controversial and extremely complex figure, in which he can be said to concentrate all the characteristics of the traditional Chinese bureaucracy, as well as the character of some literati.
A predecessor once said, "Reputation is a holy face, and a slander is a culprit", which means that if you praise him, you can regard him as a "holy face", and if you judge him, you can regard him as a "culprit". In fact, Zeng Guofan is far more complicated than this conclusion, and it is not enough to say that he is the "culprit", but it is not enough to say that he is a "holy phase".
Zeng Guofan was born in the sixteenth year of Qing Jiaqing (1811) and died in the eleventh year of Qing Tongzhi (1872). Hunan Xiangxiang people. Zeng Guofan has been proud of "cultivating and reading heirlooms" many times, which shows that Zeng Guofan's family is neither a landowner nor a scholarly family, but an ideal family model in chinese tradition: there are many acres of land, abundant food and clothing, and can read and write, and write poems.
Let's not say what kind of spirit this family ideal embodies in Chinese culture, but it combines the reality of farming with the virtuality of reading books very well, and it is true that this kind of family structure that combines virtual and real has probably had a major impact on zeng Guofan's character of combining virtual and real.
Zeng Guofan entered the school at the age of six; at the age of eight, he learned the "Five Classics" and read eight shares; at the age of fourteen, he went to Changsha to take the boy exam and scored first-class; at the age of twenty-two, he studied at the famous Chinese academy Yuelu Academy two years later, and in the same year he failed to pass the Beijing Huihui examination, and then studied the history of the scriptures assiduously; and at the age of twenty-eight, he re-entered the Beijing Huihui examination, and became a scholar in the middle class, and from then on he was an official and prosperous.
Zeng Guofan worked diligently and won the appreciation of the Qing court, and was promoted to the rank of second grade official at the age of thirty-seven. He once said very conceitedly: "There is not a single person in this dynasty who has been born in Hunan Thirty-seven to Two Pins." It can be seen that Zeng Guofan still regards being an official as the first priority of life. During this period, he successively served as a waiter in the work, punishment, and official departments, which can be described as a spring breeze.
In 1851, the last large-scale peasant uprising in Chinese history broke out. Under the leadership of Hong Xiuquan, the Taiping Rebellion broke through the siege from the Guiping Mountains of Guangxi, like a rolling torrent, and pushed northward with an unstoppable momentum, and in only two years, it conquered the southern important town of Jiangning (present-day Nanjing), and renamed Tianjing and made it the capital of the country.
In 1853, the Xianfeng Emperor ordered the officials and gentry in the north and south of the Yangtze River to form a regimental exercise, and Zeng Guofan actively responded to Xianfeng because his family was in Xiangxiang, Hunan, and returned to his hometown in this year to cooperate with Zhang Liangji, the governor of Hunan, to handle the regimental exercise. Since then, Zeng Guofan began his career as a "culprit". The story of Zeng Guofan's destruction of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was too widespread to be expressed.
Zeng Guofan was also one of the important figures in the foreign affairs movement, and he favored the purchase of foreign ships and cannons, and also sent Li Hongzhang and others to "teach the strengths of the people", learn the techniques of foreigners, recruit scientific and technological talents, establish a firearms industry, and advocate mining. He also paid attention to the selection of talents to study abroad, and also advocated the establishment of academies in China to cultivate talents.
He also particularly admired the theory of the "inner saint and outer king" in the pre-Qin period, that is, it is necessary to improve the cultivation of ideology and morality, move closer to the saints, and have the style of a king in practical ability, so as to be able to save the world in time. Zeng Guofan did personally practice this theory, which can be regarded as consistent with words and deeds.
He was also very successful in hermeneutics and so on. The combination of academic attainment and his authority had a great influence at that time, and coupled with the fact that he personally trained many students and promoted many scholars, he had a considerable influence in the academic community, and many people at that time touted him as a so-called "holy face".
His life is very regular: getting up early, meditating, nourishing, self-preservation, reading, writing, etc., insisting on keeping a diary every day. This practice was highly respected by even his teachers, and the emperor of the dynasty also had many praises.
In his later years, zeng guofan did not forget to cultivate himself even in the military, emphasizing determination, seeking knowledge, respecting forgiveness, faithfulness, introspection, prudence, prudence, perseverance, thriftiness, and modesty. Its purpose, like his theory of "inner saint and outer king", is still "to begin with self-cultivation and finally to save the world".
He cannot be worshipped as a sage, nor can he be offered as a god or a Buddha, but he is a man, a man of worldliness, a man of worldly fame and benefit, a true person of worldly fame and benefit of one!
Thank you for reading, liking, and following! After the ups and downs of modern history and the vigor of contemporary history, people may be tired, have not found the ideal of personality that they originally designed for themselves, and have already felt the exhaustion of reason and emotional anxiety, so they go back and want to find a spiritual pillar in what they have abandoned. So #Zeng Guofan appeared!
References: "Biography of Zeng Guofan", "The Front and Side of Zeng Guofan"