The big slogan on the upper floor of Tiananmen Square is very meaningful, and in the past, everyone thought that it was more like the Spring League on the door of ordinary people's homes, but it was just a decoration, but in the past two years since the epidemic, everyone has begun to feel the profound connotation of these two sentences, triggering netizens to re-learn and re-understand. Yesterday, when fireworks were used at the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics to play "One World, One Family Under Heaven", I thought of the second half of the slogan of Tiananmen Square: "Long live the great unity of the people of the world".
The tiananmen slogan is complete: "Long live the People's Republic of China, long live the great unity of the people of the world", the core of which is "the people", there are people in the first and second half of the sentence, the first half of the sentence is the Chinese people, and the second half of the sentence is the people of the world.
These two sentences look very white, but their connotations are very ancient, and the difficulty lies in the word "people". The word "people" is actually the core of Chinese culture, and like Chinese culture, it is timeless and new, but modern people only know its new side, but do not know its timeless side.
The word "people" is said to be new, because it is the cornerstone of new China and of course the core of Mao Zedong Thought, so Chairman Mao named New China "The People's Republic of China", which can be referred to as "the people's country".
Why is China's current anti-epidemic model fundamentally different from that of the West? The West is naturally immune and coexists with the virus, and the essence is to let the virus run free and let it rage, while China is based on people's health and life, and resolutely stops the epidemic at all costs, which was later summarized as "dynamic zeroing". The root cause lies in the fact that China's culture is the people's culture, China's state is the people's country, and the Chinese government is the people's government, adhering to the supremacy of the people. The most basic principle of people's supremacy is that people's lives are supreme.
The word people has been said for a long time, because it is as old as Chinese civilization, and it can also be said that Chinese civilization is "people's civilization". Later, the idea of putting the people first and being precious was designed into a system and recorded in the classics. The Book of Shang says that "the people are the foundation of the state, and the people are the foundation of the state"; "Heaven listens to the people, and heaven sees itself as the people". Mencius said, "The people are precious, the society is secondary, and the king is light." "Spring and Autumn" says that "the people are what they want, and the heavens will follow it." Dong Zhongshu said, "Not fighting with the people is the way of the ancients."
To say that Chinese civilization is the civilization of the people, its deeper root is that the people are not only the creators of history, the main body of history, but also the cornerstone of Chinese culture, and it is through the people's generations that Chinese culture is passed down from generation to generation, and it is eternal and timeless.
The people are the living carriers of Chinese culture. There is an idiom in China that "literature carries the Tao", in fact, if you study Chinese culture thoroughly, you will find that the core characteristics of Chinese culture are "people carry the road" and "the people carry the road". It is the "people", not the "Four Books and Five Classics", that is the true bearer of Chinese culture.
It is easy to shake the four books and five classics, but it is difficult to shake the people. Academics are fickle, and the people are like stones.
Reading Chinese culture, we will find that the people, righteousness, mentality (sexual goodness), and benevolent government are four in one, and the four are equivalent, saying the same thing, but the sides are different. The people are said to be the subject, righteousness is from the value standard, mentality is from the function of thinking, human nature is said, and benevolent government is from the governance of order.
Chinese civilization is the civilization of the people, but also the civilization of righteousness, the civilization of the heart, and the civilization of benevolent government, and China is the country of the people, but also the country of righteousness, the country of heart (goodness), and the country of benevolent government.
The reason why Confucianism, as a school, has become the mainstream of history is rooted in the fact that its ideological views have grasped the core of Chinese culture, taking the people as the foundation, teaching theory, saying that people's hearts are good, and advocating benevolent government.
Therefore, the people are a concept unique to China, and only Chinese people are the people, and there are people outside China, and there is no "people". Because righteousness, mentality, and benevolent government are also concepts unique to Chinese civilization, righteousness, mentality, and benevolent government are the equivalents of the people and the cornerstone of the people.
The essence of the people is in the human heart, human nature, that is, in the heart, the premise of the concept of the people, there is an independent concept of "heart" and "sex", and then the heart as the essence of man, can see people from the dimension of the heart and analyze and study problems.
The mind is a concept unique to Chinese culture and is also a highly abstract concept. To what extent it is abstracted, to the extent to which it hits the highest level of abstraction in human civilization, is the most abstract concept in human civilization, and any concept outside the mind is relatively concrete, "thing". This is one of the core cores of the distinction between mind and matter.
The mind is abstract, while the matter is concrete. What is a thing, everything outside the mind is a thing. Trees and stones are things, and opinions and ideas are also things. Opinions and ideas belong to the abstract category in the modern academic system, but in the framework of the distinction between mind and matter, they belong to the category of concrete, belonging to the category of matter.
Why say, the mind reaches the highest level of abstraction. Thus the mind is not an abstraction of concrete entities, but an abstraction of thinking activity. Our ancestors observed that thinking activity is the essential activity of man, so they summarized and abstracted the thinking activity, and virtually created an organ to emit and dominate the thinking activity, and named it: the heart.
In short, the mind is man's virtual thinking organ, or the function of man's thinking itself. The difference between the heart and the brain is that the heart is software and the brain is hardware. The ancient Chinese only focused on the software of thinking, not the hardware of thinking. The function of thinking is the original meaning and first meaning of the Chinese character "heart", and "heart" is the first meaning and extended meaning.
Therefore, the mind is the function of thinking itself, and the object is the result of thinking and cognition. As the function of thinking itself, the mind is "virtual", and as a result of thinking about people, things are solidified, fixed, and become "real" because of this solidification.
In Buddhist parlance, the mind is out of phase, but the object is out of phase. Buddhism also pursues non-conformity, but it does not really do it. Just as modern Western civilization pursues freedom and does not really do it.
Only the Chinese concept of "mind" is truly out of phase, and only independence and freedom at the mental level are truly independent and truly free. Call it "freedom of mind," or "freedom of mind, or freedom of mind" for short. Western freedom is all based on things, and it is the "freedom of things" that awaits.
One of the core characteristics of the concept of the people is "unity" and "unity," and the realization of this unity and unity is based on the mentality, the unity and unity at the mental level. Only by transcending the highly abstract mental dimension of things can such unity and unity be achieved.
Because the West lacks the concept of mental nature and does not reach the abstraction of the mental level, it takes some figurative things as the essence of man, and then distinguishes, differentiates, and divides people. For example, religion as the standard, race and color as the standard, cultural civilization as the standard, assets as the standard, occupation as the standard, and so on. Therefore, Western civilization cannot achieve Absolute Unity and Unity in the Chinese style, it must be divided and divided, and because there is no concept of "people".
Mencius said, "The same heart is called righteousness, and it is said to be reason." This "same mind" has two meanings, the first meaning is that the human mind can reach a consensus, and the second meaning is that the human mind can reach a consensus because the human mind has the same basic attributes and structures, and this basic attribute and result is "good", that is, "sexual goodness". Further, Mencius described the structure of the human mind as the "four ends of the heart", that is, the four components: "the heart of compassion, the end of benevolence; the heart of shame, the end of righteousness; the heart of resignation, the end of etiquette; the heart of right and wrong, the end of wisdom".
Because human nature is the same, a consensus will be formed, that is, a "righteous reason" will be formed. Therefore, based on the human heart and righteousness, unity can be achieved. This is what later generations have summed up as "people have the same heart, and the heart has the same reason." "Tianxia" is the people's world, the world of righteousness, the great unity of the people based on righteousness, and becoming "the family under the heavens."
China's order is based on the will of the people and righteousness, which Kong Meng called "benevolent government." In fact, only an order based on the human heart and righteousness is the true order, the true harmonious and peaceful order. With this as the standard, the real order is only available in China, and not outside of China. This is the way to understand what has been chaotic in the West throughout history and now.
With the people as the center, Chairman Mao put forward the concept of serving the people, and named New China the people's country, which obviously inherited the core of Chinese culture.
Chinese are people, and people outside of China are also people. Chinese have a human heart and a doctrine, and the people of the world must also have a human heart and a doctrine. Pushing themselves and others, the people of the world also hope and need "great unity".
China's state is "serving the people", and the core of this service is righteousness, that is, providing righteous services to the people in order to maintain righteous order, defend benevolent government, and realize the unity of the people. If we take into account the essence of the people, if we take into account the nature of the mind, this people must be "under the heavens" and the world. Therefore, China's state will not only serve the people of the Chinese, but also the people of the world.
By providing righteous services to the people of the world, we will realize the "great unity of the people of the world" and realize "one world, one world".