China's excellent traditional culture should be passed on from generation to generation, and the premise is that it can be passed on, can be passed on, can be kept, and can be kept.
What is passable and observable? The key is whether it can be implemented as a "daily use of humanity".
China's excellent traditional culture is the root and soul of the Chinese nation, the unique spiritual identity and spiritual lifeline of the Chinese nation, and the spiritual homeland of the Chinese people. As the only Chinese civilization among the four major civilizations in the world that continues to this day and still has strong vitality, it needs to pass on the torch and keep it from generation to generation, and it also needs to innovate and keep pace with the times.
How can Chinese culture continue to be passed on, and who keeps it? How can we ensure that the "new" launched by Chinese culture is the "new" of Chinese culture, not the "new" of mutation? That is something we should think deeply about.
Everyone can do the "fire"
During the Northern Song Dynasty, there was a philosopher named Zhang Zai, who had four very popular sayings: "Establish a heart for heaven and earth, establish a destiny for the people, continue to learn from the saints, and open up peace for all the worlds." For thousands of years, many scholars have taken these four sentences as their historical mission and the purpose of learning. Of course, the study of the sacred is the sacred learning, the sacred learning is the sacred way, and the sacred path is the way of "Zushu Yao Shun, Charter Wen Wu, Grandmaster Zhongni", which is the way of Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen, Wu, Zhou Gong, and Confucius. According to this tradition, the Tang Dynasty philosopher Han Yu called it "Taoism". Han Yu believed that the Taoism was transmitted from Confucius to Mencius, and when Mencius died, this Daoist system was extinguished, and he was needed to pick up the Daoist system and pass it on. Zhang Zai, like Han Yu, believed that the sacred learning could not be passed on, and he had to take the initiative to take on the heavy responsibility of "continuing to learn for the sake of the saints". Whether it is Han Yu or Zhang Zai, his mind is the mind of a philosopher, and his mentality is the mentality of the cultural elite.
Although this sense of responsibility of the cultural elites of the past generations of people to "give up who they are" is certainly respectable, we have to ask: Why have the intellectual elites of all generations who regarded the assumption of the Sacred Tao as their historical mission not come out of the historical cycle of succession and succession? How can we get out of this cycle of history? We believe that there is only one solution, and that is to transform the responsibility for cultural transmission from the responsibility of a small number of intellectual elites into the common obligations of every member of the whole nation.
Chinese culture is passed down from generation to generation. What is the fire? Everyone can do the "fire". Who's going to keep it? To protect Chinese culture, everyone has the responsibility of the sons and daughters of China. In the Spring and Autumn Period, when Confucius's student Zigong was very confident, he said: "The way of literature and martial arts has not fallen to the ground, but in people." The sages know the great, and the unwise know the small, and there is no way of writing and martial arts. "To paraphrase Zigong," for more than two thousand years, the way of literature and martial arts, the transmission of Confucius and Mengmeng, has not fallen to the ground, the sages know their greatness, the unwise know their smallness, there is no Chinese way, there is no Confucian and Mengmeng's learning, why should there be no learning? The Zhongyong quotes Confucius as saying, "The Tao is not far from man." Man is far away for the Word, not for the Word. "The Tao is self-expansive, omnipresent, all the time, in you, in me, in Him, everyone has the Tao, and the Tao is in our daily lives. All the moral practice activities in the human world are all walking, walking, and serving the way. How could this word have been lost, and why should it have been extinguished?
Culture should not be a self-congratulatory existence of a small number of intellectual elites, but a way of life and way of life of the general public. Educating people with culture, educating people with literature, and educating people with literature is the meaning of culture itself. Cultural people, is it self-made, or is it otherized? Educating people with culture, is it self-breeding, or is it self-breeding, or other education? In other words, who breeds whom? Who breeds whom? Our answer is: All men must be transformed; all men must be nurtured; all men must be made. Confucius talked about "benevolence by oneself", more emphasis on human self-transformation, self-cultivation, and self-realization, Mencius demanded that "prophetic awareness after knowing, pre-awareness after enlightenment", by the prophet and pre-enlightened to de-incarnate, de-nurturing, to become the after-aware, more emphasis on otherization, he-nurturing, he-cheng. Emphasizing self-improvement, self-transformation, self-cultivation, and self-cultivation, as well as emphasizing otherization, other education, and otherization, are the characteristics of Chinese culture in the issue of ideal personality growth.
Seek popularity rather than vulgarity
Connecting the ancient and modern, we will realize the transformation from traditional culture to modern culture. Chinese culture has a long history, after thousands of years of development, there are differences between ancient and modern, and there are differences between literature and whiteness. There is no classic of traditional culture that is not written in chinese, and the language we use today is vernacular, for the majority of readers, reading traditional culture reading materials, immediately face the "word barrier". If you don't know its text, how can you understand its meaning? If you don't understand it, why do you practice it? To penetrate the ancient and modern, we must first connect the literary and vernacular texts in writing, help readers overcome the written barriers, so that the literary language is no longer an obstacle to understanding the ancients' thoughts, but a basis for understanding the ancients' thoughts. When we write, we should concisely explain all the words that quote the ancients' thoughts, famous sentences, viewpoints, etc., and then extend and play to achieve bypass.
The transformation of tradition into modernity is not only literal, but also ideological. Any traditional thought is not only the existence of tense, but also has the meaning of time and space, the study of traditional culture is not to require contemporary people to travel back to ancient times through time and space, but to let the ancients and their ideas travel through time and space to today, in a word: to achieve the use of the past for the present. Today we no longer have to ask what "learning and learning" was learned and learned in the time of Confucius, archery, driving an ox cart or a carriage, these contemporary societies do not have to be learned by everyone, but "learning and learning from time to time" tells people that no matter what they learn, whether it is music, painting, calligraphy, mathematics, language, or physics, chemistry, biology, geography, etc., we must "learn and learn from time to time", and its abstract meaning has not become obsolete. It is necessary to transform the ideas, propositions, and concepts of the ancient sages and sages from time to time, give creative play to them, and point out the points where contemporary society is feasible and operable.
Pave the gap and realize the transformation from academic discourse to the language of the people. In contemporary China, there are many colleges and universities, and tens of thousands of academic works are published every year. However, the phenomenon that scholarship is far removed from the lives of ordinary people also exists. Many scholars have long been accustomed to drilling into the ivory tower, self-congratulatory, lamenting the high and widowed, and the spiritual world that the people are hungry for has to find some "chicken soup for the soul" to fill the spiritual life, when the academic discourse no longer pays attention to the lives of the people, the people naturally no longer care about the academics. Chinese culture has always been characterized by "extremely clever and moderate", and the highest level of wisdom is the ordinary truth, and in turn, the extremely ordinary truth is not the most intelligent truth. Opening the Analects and opening Mencius, there is no reason to make a mistake, nor will it pretend to be profound, and it will not reject people for thousands of miles. This requires us to abandon the eight strands of scholarship, transform academic discourse into daily discourse for the common people, and use the rigor of scholars as popular texts, but popular and not vulgar.
The Tao does not depart from the daily use of humanity
Integrate affairs and realize the transformation of Xuanyuan's thoughts into the daily lives of the people. Westerners have a saying: theory is gray, and the tree of life is evergreen. How to achieve seamless docking between the gray theory and the evergreen tree of life seems to be a common problem encountered by Chinese and Western theories. The solution to this problem is not theory in terms of theory, but the continuous discovery of theories, explanatory theories, verification theories and sublimation theories in life, so that gray theories are no longer gray. Needless to say, traditional Chinese culture, especially traditional philosophy, does have a profound, distant and abstract side, such as "Zhongyong", "Zhou Yi", "Lao Tzu", "Zhuangzi", etc. These classics are full of difficult and obscure ideas, and there are also cumbersome, different and confusing aspects in the interpretation of classics, which is a challenge that each of us who study traditional culture will encounter.
In the face of ordinary people lecturing, how to make the gray theory so that the people are willing to listen and love to listen? We believe that reasoning with facts, unifying things with reason, and integrating things with reason are effective ways. Any profound theory always has typical examples in history and reality to correspond to it, and any typical case has a type and exemplary significance, reason is the reason of things, things are reason, reason is the theory of Xuanyuan, and things are living real life. We strive to use the language of the people to speak the principle of Xuanyuan, and realize the organic integration and seamless docking of the xuanyuan principle and the daily life of the people.
Chinese culture is not separated from the daily use of humanity, and the Tao is in the daily use of humanity. Human daily use is life, and life is human daily use. There is no life without human daily use, and there is no human daily use without life. In the face of the tide of globalization, Chinese culture should be passed on from generation to generation, but the premise is that it can be passed on, can be passed on, can be kept, and can be kept. What is passable and observable? The key is whether it can be implemented as "human daily use", whether it is still useful in the life of contemporary people, the "use" here is value, useful is valuable, useless is no value. Self-cultivation is used, Qi family is used, governance is used, peace is still used, repair, Qi, rule, and peace are not life, all are useless. The first thing to use is to implement it for the use of the people and the use of the masses. In line with this principle, it is necessary to start from the aspects of China's excellent traditional culture and national spirit, Confucian culture, Taoism and Taoism, self-cultivation as the foundation, godsons and children, Qi family and Taoism, living etiquette, neighborhood harmony, and township rules and regulations, so that everyone can understand the basic knowledge of Chinese culture, feel the breadth and depth of Chinese culture, and have a long history, but also learn the principles of being a human being and the wisdom of life from the ancient sages.
The inheritance and development of Chinese culture is not only the famous mountain undertaking of a small number of intellectual elites, but also the responsibility of every member of the Chinese nation. Only when culture enters the homes of ordinary people, only by turning into the way of life and spiritual pursuit of the masses, can we nourish the rich and fertile soil for the sustainable growth of culture, and can Chinese culture be passed on from generation to generation, keeping with each other from generation to generation, innovating and advancing with the times, and can there be objective guarantees.
(Author: Yan Binggang, Vice Dean and Professor of the Institute for Advanced Study of Confucianism, Shandong University, Special Researcher of the Research Center of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era in Shandong Province)
(Dazhong Daily client reporter Cui Kaiming finished the report)