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We are surrounded by change.
Recently, I have been using the fragments on the pillow on the toilet to watch Mr. Mei Yi's historical masterpiece "The Two Jin Dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties: The Age of Gorgeous Blood". I was shocked by the generosity of the loyal and righteous soldiers in the book, and I was also horrified by the slaughter of the people of that era. And the emotion I felt as a reader began with the bizarre "Rebellion of the Eight Kings" at the beginning.
The "Rebellion of the Eight Kings" was like opening a Pandora's box, which not only disintegrated the Western Jin Dynasty that had just realized the unification of the country, but also unveiled the broken historical chaos of the mountains and rivers of the "Five Hu Chaos China" for more than two hundred years, and profoundly rewrote the direction of Chinese history. Thinking about it carefully, the root cause of the "Rebellion of the Eight Kings" is not in Yang Jun, Wei Wan, and Jia Hou, who are powerful foreign relatives, nor in the eight Sima princes who appeared on the scene, but in the Jinwu Emperor Sima Yan himself, stemming from the emperor's stubborn selfishness and conservative short-sightedness.
In 280 AD, Sima Yan, the Emperor of the Jin Dynasty, destroyed the Eastern Wu regime with the LouChuanShui Division, officially ending the division of the Three Kingdoms and realizing the great unification of the Chinese territory. Even though Sima Yan himself was not outstanding in ability, and was a rich second generation who successfully rose to the top by relying on the power of his grandfather Sima Yi, his uncle Sima Shi and his father Sima Zhao, the superficial prosperity covered up his many deficiencies in the field of governing the country, so that it laid multiple hidden dangers for the entire country.
The first hidden danger lies in the Prince of the Great Feng Sect. Emperor Wu of Jin was deeply touched by the Cao Wei Empire that he had personally ended, believing that the reason why Cao Wei was replaced by the Sima family was that Cao Shuang, who was in power at that time, was exterminated by Sima Yi, so that the royal bloodline was difficult to sing. Therefore, Emperor Wu of Jin took precautions, widely sealed twenty-seven princes with the same surname, and asked his brothers and nephews to lead troops to garrison various places. It is of course good to have a loyal Prince Sima to guard the gates of the country for himself, but once there are sinister tyrants hidden in them, they will become irreparable, and history has confirmed this.
The second hidden danger lies in the partiality of trust in honor of noble courtiers. After unifying the world, Emperor Wu of Jin became arrogant and lascivious and content with pleasure, and naturally had no intention of listening to the will of the people, and only trusted those powerful people around him who were promoted by their fathers. Therefore, he would reuse his father-in-law Yang Jun, and he would also be stubborn and let Jia Nanfeng, the daughter of his close confidant Jia Chong, become his own concubine. In the last years of Emperor Wu's reign of Emperor Wu of Jin, the Yang family, the Jia family, and Wei Wan's power had spread all over the government and the opposition, and even to the terrible situation that the emperor's government decreed that he could not go out of the Great Interior and that the Manchu Dynasty only knew about Yang Taiwei.
The third hidden danger lies in the insistence on passing on the position of the foolish prince. The crown prince Sima Zheng was also the later successor to the throne of Jin Huidi, because of the brain damage at birth that year, the IQ level has been worrying, and also left a strange sentence in the history books "Why not eat meat". However, Emperor Wu of Jin was worried and worried, and in the end he passed the throne to him. First, it is said that Emperor Wu of Jin was very fond of Sima Zheng's son, that is, his eldest grandson Sima Suo, and hoped that the throne would naturally be excessive in the future; second, Sima Song was originally the illegitimate son of Emperor Wu and the palace daughter, so this arrangement could hide people's eyes. In any case, the biggest reason for Emperor Wu of Jin was that he had arranged the system reasonably and well, and even if the emperor was a fool, he could sit firmly in the country.
The fourth hidden danger lies in the increasing southward migration of foreign nationalities on the border. At that time, the Eastern Han government allowed the Xiongnu Xianbei and other ethnic minorities to move into the interior, relying on Hehe Wuwei not to be afraid of these remnants of the defeat and making trouble, while the Weiwu Emperor Cao Cao maintained the status quo, relying on these foreign soldiers to be strong and strong to serve themselves. However, after the reunification, the Western Jin Dynasty maintained the status quo with some bureaucracy, and it was completely the JinWu Emperor who had no time to ask questions, and the local officials turned a blind eye, all of which turned a blind eye to the dissident chiefs.
When Emperor Wu of Jin died, these four hidden dangers were all gathered, and the desires of the princes and foreign chiefs of the foreign clans spread and breeded, becoming a nightmare for the people of Li all over the world.
In the first step, the crown prince Sima Zheng became the Empress Hui of Jin, and indeed a stupid emperor who did not understand the world, and all the dynastic affairs were controlled by the maternal grandfather Yang Jun and Empress Yang, which aroused the dissatisfaction of Empress Jia and her gang who coveted power. Therefore, Empress Jia gathered Sima Liang, the king of Runan, who was in charge of the forbidden army in the capital, and Sima Wei, the king of Chu, who held military power, to launch a coup d'état, destroy Yang Jun and the Wei family, and regain power. Soon after the achievement, Empress Jia and her gang stirred up infighting between the King of Chu and the King of Runan, and successively eliminated these two princes and enjoyed eight years of wealth.
In the second step, Empress Jia always thought that the crown prince Sima Song was a hidden danger, so she used a strategy to kill the prince, but unexpectedly Sima Lun, the king of Zhao, suddenly attacked and removed Jia Hou and Zhang Hua and other ministers on the charge of killing the prince. The powerful King of Zhao simply deposed Emperor Hui of Jin and took the throne himself.
In the third step, Sima Lun's reign was indispensable, and it is said that the idiom "dog tail continues to sable" originated from the story of his great seal relatives with the fish and meat people. His tyranny caused the "Rebellion of the Three Kings", and Sima Ying, the king of Hejian And Sima Ying the king of Chengdu, and Sima Ran, the king of Qi, launched an alliance to fight against Sima Lun, the king of Zhao, and finally destroyed the forces of the King of Zhao.
In the fourth step, after Sima Yan the King of Qi came to power, he caused the dissatisfaction of Sima Yuan, the king of Hejian, so the king of Qi fought against the combined forces of the king of Hejian and Sima Qi, the king of Changsha. Sima Yan was destroyed, and Sima Yue quarreled with Sima Qi and Sima Ying, and later Sima Yue, the king of the East China Sea, joined the warband for many years. The final result of the melee was that the kings fell, the capital Luoyang was burned to a white ground, the foolish Emperor Hui of Jin was poisoned, and Sima Yue, the only surviving king of the East China Sea, became the final victor in the "Rebellion of the Eight Kings".
However, Sima Yue, the king of the Eastern Sea, was not happy for long, because the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Xianbei, Xianbei, and Qiang chieftains who had moved to the interior saw that the Western Jin dynasty was so internally consummated, and they had already supported their own troops to conquer the four sides. The King of the East Sea was actually exhausted on the way to fight against the Xiongnu army, and the troops were completely annihilated by the Xiongnu and the Xiongnu. Only three years later, the Western Jin Dynasty was replaced by a divided regime established by the Huns, and the imperial bloodline was slaughtered. Only Sima Rui, the king of Langya, who was spared by chance, was trapped in the southeast, and Shu Weiwei established the Eastern Jin Dynasty in the south of the Jiangsu Province with the support of the Southern Migration Clan.
Eighty years ago, New York Times reporter Matthews lamented in his report on the Spanish Civil War that "half of Spain is dead, the other half is killing her." The "Rebellion of the Eight Kings" of the Western Jin Dynasty may have been more tragic than the Spanish Civil War, which was tantamount to the Western Jin Dynasty's own schizophrenia and crazy self-harm.
Following the vein of history, we can clearly see that the four hidden dangers caused by sima Yan, the emperor of the Jin Dynasty, were triggered like dominoes shortly after his death, and there was no possibility of recovery. Moreover, with the end of each power game round, it is bound to be a bloody and ruthless door-to-door slash and an official purge, repeatedly hollowing out the roots of the Western Jin Dynasty. What is even more frightening is that when the Western Jin Dynasty collapsed and a large number of people of the scholar clan moved south, the tyrannical rule in northern China was successively the Mongol Huns, the Persians, the White-skinned and Blue-Eyed Xianbei, and the Tubo Qiang, and in the nearly two hundred years of infinite danger, the Han people experienced many racial segregations and genocides, and almost annihilated the country.
We can take Sima Yan's stubbornness, selfishness, and conservative short-sightedness as the reason for his failure to break through the catastrophe of history, but I think this is only his shortcomings as an emperor, not the deepest underlying logic. Once we, the modern people, attribute only the emperor's mistakes to the emperor and the civil servants to the civilian generals, it will expose our perfunctory sloppiness toward history. Because these analyses that float on the surface, cannot go deep into the underlying logic, and cannot see their own shadows are of practical use.
Whether it is Sima Yan in 280 AD or us in 2022 AD, many of the consciousnesses in human hearts have actually changed very little. Sima Yan's underlying logical fallacy may also be left to us, which is my real intention in writing this reading note.
The fallacy of Sima Yan's underlying logic lies in his belief that everything is controllable and unchanging except for time.
Of course, Sima Yan could not control the time, so he had to arrange for the aftermath to select an heir. But there are too many things he thinks won't change. For example, the power structure will not change, he hopes that his empress and father-in-law Yang clan will help Sima Zheng govern the world according to the predetermined plan, and then hand over power to Sima Suo; for example, the loyalty of the ministers will not change, he hopes that Jia Chong Wei wan and these people can be loyal and harmonious as usual; for example, the central position will not change, he hopes that the princes with soldiers and generals can divide their work to defend the territory and not repeat the mistakes of Cao Wei; for example, the han regime's military superiority remains unchanged, and it can continue to deter foreign tribes that are eager to move...
It was these things that he thought would not change that made him determined to gamble and continue the state with a seemingly comprehensive power arrangement.
However, we today should be fully aware that the only constant is change itself, and what we need to deal with is a system that is always full of variables and always dynamically changing, such as the heavens and the earth, the sun, the moon, and the season, and the human heart of the world.
When Sima Yan closed his eyes and took away his restraint on all political forces, the power vacuum brought by the low-energy new monarch as a super variable instantly broke all static and wishful thinking restrictions, making everyone's mentality unbalanced and desperate. This terrible change is not only the "Rebellion of the Eight Kings", but also the history of the past and the present.
In the same way, we are surrounded by change. This change is not only the decline of a certain industry, the emergence of a certain group, but also means that our own status, treatment, realm, and mentality are also changing with change. In the endless changes and ups and downs, some people are happy and some are worried, some people are gaining power and some people are declining.
So, can we, as ordinary people, crack this world full of change? I think that the way is to continuously enhance your own ability, so that your ability to change with the changes in the world, is the way to self-response, self-improvement and continuous motivation.
END
Editor of the people
Xiao Pi Liuliu (another network name: Lieutenant Pippi): Now the chief editor of a mainstream media, a contracted writer of "Tianya Literature", and the original master of the "360 Personal Library"; in his own position, he tastes the enrichment of the backbone of the business, listens to the teachings of the sages in reading and writing, and experiences the purest happiness in the process of accompanying his wife and daughter.
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