"Great Spring and Autumn": The silhouettes of the scholars converge into a sparkling Chinese bone

【Reading Notes】

■ Li Fang (Vice President of China Prose Literature Association)

At the end of 2015, in a gap in the midst of unusual busyness, I suddenly had an idea to write a big book about China. The regular life of eight to six, the daily busy and tedious work, let me start to think about many big issues that I have never thought deeply about in addition to reading, such as ideals and beliefs, human beings and the world, civilization and inheritance, time and space, history and literature, longitude and latitude and the future... The content of the book has not yet eyebrows, but the name of the book is so stubbornly in front of my eyes - the great spring and autumn, like a majestic mountain, attracts me to climb.

At that time, I was immersed in the historical hooks of the Spring and Autumn Warring States, especially the meeting between Lao Tzu and Confucius, which made me full of passion for that distant era. Lao Tzu and Confucius, two intellectual giants in the depths of history, with what kind of mood and posture did they overcome many difficulties and finally meet? Lao Tzu and Confucius, two people who are so different—one gentle and thick, whose writing is bright and bright, and whose harmony is as bright as spring; one who is cunning and cunning, whose writing is steep and ethereal like autumn—they come together and complete a great collision in the history of Chinese thought.

On that lonely snowy night, a trapped beast that had encountered a magic seal was awakened by a loud noise from the Spring and Autumn Period.

Spring and Autumn is a great era in Chinese history.

The era of Lao Tzu and Confucius was a long time of decline in the Western Zhou Dynasty, and the End of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty was like the end of the crossbow. There was a Monday Dynasty, laid by Wen and Wu, Cheng, Kang flourished, and history said that the punishment was not used for more than forty years, which was the golden age of the Zhou Dynasty. After Zhao and Mu, the country's power gradually declined. Later, King Li was expelled, King You was killed, and King Ping moved east, entering the Spring and Autumn Period. In the Spring and Autumn Period, the royal family declined, the princes annexed, yidi invaded, and the society was in turmoil. Lao Tzu as the history of the Zhou Shou Tibetan Room, confucius as the regent of the Lu State Grand Si Kou, both naturally have the responsibility of assisting the Tianzi administration, and the mission of saving the dead and trying to survive links them.

The peculiarity of Lao Tzu and Confucius is that they expanded philosophical questions to the grand scope of human thought and existence, and even from life to the entire universe. They have created a dialectical way of thinking, a paradigm of philosophical research, an ability to listen in the midst of a hustle and bustle, and a wisdom that is complex and free and distant. This is an ability of the individual to get along with the self, and it is also an ability of human beings to get along with society.

Spring and Autumn, Shi Ye, Shi Ye. The ancient ancestors' sacrifices of spring and autumn gave the word a distinct temperament of agricultural civilization, spring planting and autumn harvest, spring and autumn fruits, spring leeks and autumn pines, spring dew and autumn frost, spring flowers and autumn moons... The beautiful words in the classics carry the beautiful expectations of the ancestors and also harvest the beautiful blessings of the ancestors. Spring to autumn, the four seasons reincarnated, the achievement of China's 5,000 years of Haohao soup.

Xu Shen's "Commentaries on the Interpretation of Texts" says: "History, the chronicler also; from the middle of the middle, the middle, the right also." "The original meaning of history is actually the chronicler, that is, the historian who records history. In the West, the multilingual concept of history is derived from the Greek historia, that is, investigation and inquiry, from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus's book Historia. History includes all the past, as well as the recording and reflection, study and interpretation of the past. In this way, history has three characteristics, one is the consciousness of time, the second is the presence of ideas, and the third is the openness to the future. Time is fluid, today's tomorrow is tomorrow's yesterday, the future history is the future of the past, the meaning of history lies in the continuous discovery of the real past, and constantly use new discoveries to correct the fallacies and misreadings of the past, which is precisely the value of historical research, and in the places that historians cannot reach and cannot reach, so that the details of history become more abundant and rich, it is precisely the meaning of the existence of writers.

Why is the history of a writer different? Sima Qian gave us a firm and powerful answer, and the writing of literature is in the depths of history, and even more in the blank space of the years. What writers write about is the part of why man is human, in the final analysis, that is, man's belief and courage to know that he cannot do it. As a result, we see Sima Qian's Spring and Autumn Period of tenacity and indomitability.

Hegel said: "A nation has a group of people who look up at the stars, and they have hope." We can imagine that in the long dark night of 2,500 years ago, two wise men who looked up at the stars had just concluded a great dialogue in human history and were immediately and firmly rushing to their respective futures--a sneering embrace of "supreme wisdom", "absolutely holy renunciation of wisdom", "absolute benevolence and renunciation of righteousness", "absolute abandonment of profit"; a gentle man full of "supreme goodness", who could not live in fear, "tired like a dog that lost his family". In that era of turbulent storms and fates, they worked diligently and rushed to seek it, and finally used coldness to hide the generosity, expanding from small to grand, from humble to the great shore, it is precisely because of their candle-like exploration that they have the vertical and horizontal and broad and profound Chinese culture.

In the Spring and Autumn Period, ancient China, together with ancient Greece, ancient India, and ancient Israel, began the "awakening of ultimate care", and human civilization, which was still in its childhood, had completed the first major breakthrough in thinking. In the place of origin of the four civilizations, people invariably chose to face the world in a rational and moral way, thus achieving the "axial era" of world civilization. At the same time, those ancient civilizations that did not achieve a breakthrough, such as the Babylonian culture and the Egyptian culture, although they were large-scale, eventually could not get rid of the fate of extinction and became the fossils of culture.

Mankind has experienced one change after another, one migration after another, the age of great navigation, the era of great turmoil, the era of great subversion, the era of great change... It is precisely with these magnificent histories and the continuous exploration of these histories that there is an infinite richness of human thinking and the infinite possibilities of human progress. History tells us that a country and a nation can never leave their ideals and beliefs; it also tells us how a country and a nation can maintain ideals and convictions.

Time, like the humble Sisyphus, pushes a boulder up the mountain every early morning, and rolls down with the boulder every time it comes to the top of the mountain, and the cycle begins and ends.

The Spring and Autumn Festival is a personal literary adventure, a historical note, and a kind of combing and tribute to my complicated past, which still has many immature points. However, I wish that the green lantern and yellow scroll, diligently, whisk away the dust of the years, salvage the fragments of memory, find the pearls and jade left to us by our ancestors, and pass them on to future generations.

All the past is the prologue.

Holding bundle after bundle of thin and thin Jian Mu in his hand, Yang Xiong walked anxiously on the long corridor...

Dancing wildly among the bamboo forests, walking through the thunder and lightning, Ji Kang imagined himself as a lonely bird...

The sun was like blood, the cold wind was cold, Chen Ziang was worried and bone-wrenching, and he climbed the Youzhou Platform...

In the dark winter, heavy iron shackles, Han Yu staggered out of Chang'an, all the way to the east, to the south, and then to the east, to the south...

Thirty appointments, seventeen times of fall out of favor and exile, Su Shi a smoke and rain, a thousand miles of boats...

In the prison window, the gray hair was scattered, the manuscript was finally completed, Li Xian had no regrets, killed himself, and died...

Standing in front of the Xiangxi Caotang, facing the Stone Boat Mountain, Wang Fuzhi stared at it for a long time, and the robe was raised high in the cold wind...

This is a silhouette of a Chinese scholar.

In the brilliant galaxy of the historical firmament, light and shadow flicker, converging into a sparkling Chinese style bone. (Note: This article is authorized to be excerpted from the self-prologue of the book "Great Spring and Autumn", and the current title is added by the editor)

Source: China Youth Daily client