Many people have heard the saying "rich is not more than three generations, poor is not more than five", but few people know its origin, and even misinterpret the meaning of this sentence.
This sentence first came from the "Mozi" in "Officials are impermanent and noble, and the people have no ultimate inferiority". This means that the eunuch family can always be rich, and the poor will one day get out of poverty.
Later, people saw the decline of the rich family and the decadence of the official eunuch family, so they summed up this sentence "Rich is not more than three generations, poor is not more than five."
Just like when we watch TV series or novels, we will find a particularly interesting phenomenon, that is, many large families that were originally rich and powerful, said that they lost. For example, the Jia family in "Dream of the Red Chamber", as well as the Lin Shu family in "Langya List", the Qing Dynasty officials and the Kun family, etc., although these are literary works, many of them are also based on historical archetypes.
In the history of Zhengshi, aren't such good generals as Wei Qing and Huo Guang of the Han Dynasty like this?
As it is said in the "Left Biography", "Its rise is also bold, and its death is also sudden." "Many families really prosper and die quickly.
It is precisely because our ancestors saw more of this rise and fall that we summed up this sentence : "Rich is not more than three generations, poor is not more than five." This saying has been passed down, bringing us stories and warnings.
Warning 1, about the three generations of the rich:
In the novel "Alive" by writer Yu Hua, the Fugui family was originally a landlord who was particularly rich, but in his generation, because Fugui became addicted to gambling, he lost all his family property and was eventually made a poor man.
In fact, in real life, we have seen many such families. Their fathers worked hard, whether they were in business or as officials, they worked hard, they were meticulous, frugal, and eventually saved up a huge family business.
If their next generation is sympathetic to the hardships of their parents and understands that the family's financial status is not easy to come by, they may be very disciplined and generally will not act recklessly. On the other hand, they are more "guarding" and dare not make any expandative moves, afraid that one wrong step will destroy the good life in front of them and let the inheritance created by their ancestors be in vain.
By the third generation, they are in exhaustion, and what they see from birth is just a cluster of flowers, full of the colors of successful people, but they do not know where the success or wealth in front of them comes from. Of course, they don't know what a poor life is, so there is a joke of "why not eat meat".
In the fourth generation, it is a failure, and there is a third generation of "upper beam is not correct", and their "lower beam" will only be more crooked. Therefore, it is inevitable that this fourth generation will lose all their family business or character, and bury the hard work laid by their ancestors.
However, this matter is not a fixed number, you see that there are many families in the world that have been rich for hundreds of years, or even thousands of years, in addition to the strong family foundation, the more important thing may be that they are well disciplined, or properly educated, so that future generations can learn to collect wealth and keep money early.
The ultimate meaning of the three generations of rich people, in addition to telling the law, is also a warning to people who have a stable and comfortable life now, do not always stay in their comfort zone, remember to continue to work hard, and work hard for a better tomorrow.
Warning 2, about poor but not five servings
"Five clothes" originally referred to the type of mourning clothes, when people used five different mourning clothes to distinguish between the close and distant relationships in the family, according to legend, the earliest was initiated by the Zhou Gong, and later through the Confucian advocacy, and eventually became the ancient funeral and kinship system.
Wufu refers to the five generations of people, since ancient times, there are "five services within the closest relatives" and "five services within the marriage" said. Refers to: oneself, fathers, grandparents, great-grandparents, high ancestors; or you can also push down from yourself: sons, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, grandchildren, and grandchildren. It means the five generations of the same heavenly ancestor, or the five generations pointed down from oneself, of course, including brothers and sisters, uncles and uncles, and other relatives of these cousins.
These people are considered to be close relatives, and when the family has a red and white affair, they are all present.
If the relatives have crossed these five generations, it is a "five-dress" and a distant relative, and the red and white things do not have to be present.
Like the ancient punishment of the "Nine Tribes", in fact, it is to kill the first four generations and the last four generations in this family, plus the current generation, which is equivalent to "cutting the grass and removing the roots", which is a foreign language.
Poor but five clothes means that no matter how poor a family is, it will not be poor for five generations, and there will always be people who will work hard to revitalize their own family. Usually speaking, if you can come up with a "capable person", you can realize the "ascension of the chicken dog" to drive the entire family.
On the other hand, if the family has been poor for generations, has no food and clothing, basically cannot marry a daughter-in-law, and has no offspring, so poverty will end here.
The phrase "poor but five serves" means that within five generations there will be a rise, and if it does not rise, it will disappear. But it is also a warning to us that if the family is poor for a while, we should not lose hope, the so-called "will be the same as the seed, my generation should be self-reliant." "Even if there is no ancestral shadow, relying on their own wisdom and efforts, they can still have no worries about food and clothing, and it is not difficult to say that the big rich are not difficult, but the small rich are not difficult."
Warning 3, the saying is not a fixed situation.
Regarding the saying that the rich are not more than three generations and the poor are not more than five, in fact, some people have always questioned it. For example, the Rockefeller family of American oil tycoons has now gone through five generations and is still very rich, and many celebrities on the Forbes wealth list, some families have a thousand-year rich history, and have been rich for nine generations and ten generations.
Therefore, this sentence is somewhat outdated from the face of it, and most of the rich and poor in ancient times are related to the system, such as the emperor loves to kill heroes, the traitors love to harm clean officials, etc., which is no longer the case in today's society. Therefore, our country also has several generations of rich people, and this generation is not surprising.
Therefore, the colloquial language cannot be fully believed, and what the colloquial saying brings to us should be more of a warning and encouragement, rather than a rope that binds us.
There is an old saying that "for the rich do not learn from the rich, for the poor do not read the poor more than "no matter in which dynasty, more reading, more learning, will always expand our horizons, enhance our cognition.
Three poor and three rich people live to old age, ten years of rise and fall who knows? Read more books, conform to the world, maybe the next richest man will be our descendants? Can't be a rich generation, can't be a "too high emperor"?
Come on! Encourage with the King!