Spring rain classic
Excerpt
Thirty years have passed, and now Mr. Cheng and Mr. Guo Weisen are no longer alive, Mr. Zhou Xunchu and Mr. Wu Xinlei, who are still alive, have reached their old age, and I myself have two sideburns.
The original title of this article was "Bai Tou Yu Remember qinggang Shi", published in the 12th edition of Wen Wei Po on June 4, 2013, included in the tenth volume of "Mo Lifeng's Collected Works", quoted from the "Cheng Men Qingxue" public account, if there is infringement, please contact to delete.
In the spring of 1978, I walked into the campus of Anhui University and studied English in the Department of Foreign Languages. After ten years as a farmer and hard to go to college, I cherished this opportunity very much, not only in basic English and other professional courses to listen carefully to lectures, but also in the extracurricular reading of "Britain and the United States Overview", "British History" and other books. But in the first semester of my sophomore year, my calm mind was disrupted by the matter of graduate school. I heard that several students in my brother's class wanted to go to graduate school in advance, and my classmates also urged me to try it. I had no idea, but it was rumored that graduate students had a monthly bursary of 36 yuan, which was exactly double the 18 yuan I received at that time, which really made me feel ashamed. I plucked up the courage to go to the Provincial Department of Education to check the graduate enrollment catalogs of universities in the Gangnam area. Unexpectedly, the examination subjects of The English and American Literature majors in each school have a "second foreign language", but the second foreign language of the Department of Foreign Languages of Ontario University does not open until the third year. I had to look for objects in other majors, and finally decided on the "Tang and Song Poetry" major of the Department of Chinese of Nanjing University.
On June 2, 1979, I walked into the examination hall at Hefei No. 2 Middle School. Nanda's test paper was quite to my liking: one of the most important questions in ancient Chinese was the translation of several vernacular passages into chinese, and the answers were from books such as Zuo Zhuan and Mencius, and they happened to be passages that I had memorized. So my ancient Chinese scored 98 points, which is higher than the 96 points in English. One of the questions in the professional class examination paper is to write a grammar poem, it just so happens that I taught myself to be a ping ping when I was extremely bored in the countryside, so I wrote a seven-absolute poem on the spot (I wanted to write the seven laws, but the middle two couplets were not good, so I had to leave only the beginning and end to become the seven absolutes), although it was a bad poem, after all, I did not hand in the white paper. In this way, I was admitted to the graduate school of NTU. In September of that year, I met mr. Cheng Qianfan, a white-haired mentor.
I was able to meet Mr. Cheng, it was really a three-life relationship! When Mr. Cheng was admitted to the Chemistry Department of Jinling University, he found that the tuition fee of the Chemistry Department was very expensive, while the tuition fee of the Chinese Department was quite low, so he temporarily changed to the Chinese Department when his family was in a cold family. When I was in high school, I also wanted to be an engineer, and I encountered the "Cultural Revolution" before I abandoned the text. What is more interesting is that Mr. Cheng has been herding cattle and chickens in the countryside for eighteen years, and I have also spent ten years of youth in Longmu. So when Mr. Cheng said that a piece of grass by Xuanwu Lake was enough for five cows to eat for a day, I felt from the bottom of my heart that it was jargon. More importantly, I deeply admire Mr. Cheng's upright character. I and the same window Xu Youfu, Zhang Sanxi went to Mr. Cheng's house for the first time to meet him, Mr. said that this year there are more than forty people to apply for his graduate school, many candidates wrote letters in advance to contact, but also sent articles or reading notes to ask for advice, and even some people brought gifts to the door to ask for advice, but the three of us did not even write a letter to him, I thought that this was going to be blamed, did not expect Mr. smiled and said: "This is very good!" "I don't welcome candidates to contact me in advance, I learned it from Mr. Cheng."
Being able to follow Mr. Cheng to graduate school is of course a blessing in life. But to be honest, it's also quite hard. Especially for me, as soon as I started school, I felt deep and short, left and right. Brother Xu Youfu was a graduate of the Chinese Department of Nanda University before the "Cultural Revolution", and Master Zhang Sanxi had completed his undergraduate studies in the department of Chinese of Hubei Normal University, and their foundation was better than mine. Only I've never read a book for a day in the Chinese department. Fortunately, I was approved by the school to skip English, and I was able to plunge into the classical world of Li Bai and Du Fu and immerse myself in hard reading. Mr. Cheng personally opened two courses for us, one is school chicken studies and the other is Du Shi studies. His elderly family personally took the stage to give lectures, and the classroom could accommodate 40 or 50 people, including graduate students from NTU and Nanshi, as well as young and middle-aged teachers from the two universities. But these two courses were actually taught by Mr. Cheng for the three of us, so we always sat in the first row to listen to the lectures. Of course, in addition to listening to the lectures, we also record the lectures so that we can organize the speeches after class. Huanghuang's four-volume "School Chicken Broad Sense" is based on the record manuscript of that year. The tape recorders of that year were huge, and they had to be powered from the wall with a power strip, and the middle part of the first row of desks belonged to us, even if we entered the classroom later, there was absolutely no one to occupy it. On days when there is no class, we all get used to reading in the dormitory. I shared a room with Zhang Sanxi, two beds spread out against the opposite side of the window, two small desks in the middle, and there was no room left for a stool, so we sat on the bed and read on the table. There are no bookcases in the room, and each person's bed is stacked with a row of books along the wall, which has the ancient style of "one bed for every year". Some of the other students in the dormitory fell in love with the library, and some of them did not often come to the school in Nanjing, and it was the two of us who often stayed in the dormitory to read. Our schedules coincided perfectly: dawn and lights out at 11 p.m. Except for three meals a day to the canteen, we sat face to face and read, basically without saying a word, until the lights went out and went to bed. At that time, there was not even a fan in the dormitory, let alone an air conditioner. Sweating like rain in the summer and shrinking your head and sleeves in the winter are the norm. Our only sport is a walk after dinner, walking twenty or thirty minutes on and off campus. Because the walking time was too short, he was ridiculed by the seniors of the same grade as "walking to cut a short path". As for entertainment, just watch a movie once in a while. At that time, there were not many new films, movie tickets were not easy to buy, and watching movies was often a group activity of the whole class.
Fast forward, and at the end of 1981, we graduated. By this time the degree system had been established and we had both obtained master's degrees. Immediately after that, NTU began to recruit doctoral students. At that time, there were more than 20 doctoral supervisors at NTU, all of whom were veteran professors directly qualified by the Academic Degrees Committee of the State Council. The school considered that this was the first time to train doctoral students, not hastily, so it selected 10 tutors, each of whom tried to recruit one from the newly graduated master's students, and Mr. Cheng was in this list of tutors. In early 1982, I became the only PhD student in the department. It wasn't until I graduated in 1984 that the department began to admit the second batch of doctoral students. So in those three years, I was in a state of "studying alone and not having friends". After starting my PhD, Mr. Cheng designed a training plan for me. He didn't think he had to teach me alone, so all the courses were booked. Mr. Cheng's list of required readings is as follows: "Analects", "Mencius", "Laozi", "Zhuangzi", "Zuo Zhuan", "Shijing", "Chu Ci", "Shiji", "Wenxin Carved Dragon", and "Anthology". Mr. Cheng explained to me the reasons for determining this list of books: although my research direction is Tang and Song literature, if I want to have the foundation of studying Tang and Song literature, I must make some efforts in the first Tang classics. Moreover, doctoral students must lay a solid foundation in their studies during their studies, and writing a dissertation is only an integral part of the learning content. So I buried my head in this list of books. Mr. Cheng felt that it was not enough for him to guide me alone, so he hired three teachers, Zhou Xunchu, Guo Weisen, and Wu Xinlei, as his assistants, and the four of them came together to "exert friendly pressure" on me (this is Mr. Cheng's original words). To be honest, during those two years or so, I was crushed to death, and in the summer of 1984, after writing the first draft of my dissertation, I had a high fever for a few days. However, I still deeply miss those years and still sincerely thank the four teachers for the pressure they put on me. It was this pressure that trained me, a student with a weak foundation, to become a qualified Doctor of Literature.
I was not lazy in studying the texts, because I understood that I had to take this opportunity to make up for it. I chose as many important editions as possible to read, such as the Book of Poetry, and I read both Kong Yingda's Mao Shi Zhengyi and Zhu Xi's Collected Poems. Another example is "Chu Ci", I read through the three annotations of Wang Yi, Hong Xingzu and Zhu Xi. The "Records of History" is mainly based on Takikawa Ziyan's "Notes on the History of the History", supplemented by Liang Yusheng's "Records of History". Mr. Cheng asked me to turn in my reading notes for the teacher to read every time I finished a book, and I still have several reading notes, such as a notebook about the "History of History", I wrote a hundred reading notes. The teacher in charge of the review was Mr. Guo Weisen, who wrote the comments after almost every note, which was written in pencil. Later, Mr. Cheng added several comments with a red ballpoint pen. The tone of Mr. Guo's criticism is very gentle, which is in direct contrast to the sharpness of Mr. Cheng's criticism. I have always treasured this notebook, and today it has become a "relic of revolutionary history" that I use to teach newly enrolled PhD students. The reading notes of several classics take on the nature of a single treatise, such as "Xiao Tong's Literary Thought from the Comparison of the Anthology of Literature" and "Wenxin Carved Dragon"," "The Similarities and Differences Between the Art of Character Description in the "Historical Record" and the "Zuo Zhuan")," "The Brief Theory of Zhu Xichu's Cixue", "The Preliminary Comparison of Zhu Xi's Collected Poems and Mao's Poems", etc., which were later published in academic journals.
From my own experience, I truly realized that the study of classics plays an extremely important role in the training of doctoral students. It not only improved my academic qualifications, but also helped me to choose the topic of my thesis. When I read Zhu Xi's "Biography of Collected Poems" and "Notes on the Collected Works of Chu Ci", I deeply admired Zhu Zi's literary accomplishment. While the iron was hot, I read Zhu Zi's "Korean Kaoyi", "Zhu Wen Gongwen Collection" and "Zhu Zi Language Class". After reading it, I thought of this topic: although Zhu Zi is a master of science, he is so passionate about literature and so proficient. He was not only good at poetry writing, but also often talked about literature with his disciples, and sometimes had insights. The painstaking efforts he spent on the annotation and proofreading of the three literary classics were no less than the Confucian classics such as the "Four Books". However, in the history of literature or literary criticism so far, Zhu Zi has either not been seen, or it has been said that he despises literature and rejects literature, which seems to be inconsistent with the facts. So I proposed to Mr. Cheng the title of my dissertation, "Studies on Zhu Xi's Literary Thought". Mr. Cheng was very much in favor of it, but instructed me to find out whether relevant works had been published in the academic circles. At that time, there was no means of electronic retrieval, so I ran into the library and desperately went through various bibliographies and new and old publications. Finally, because I learned from the newspaper that Mr. Qian Mu had just published a huge work in Taiwan with more than 2,000 pages, "The Case of Zhu Zixin's Study," and at that time the two sides of the Taiwan Strait were isolated from each other, it was impossible for me to read Taiwan's publications in time. In fact, in the academic context of early 1983, what a valuable thesis topic!
After a thousand days of hard study, I finally completed the study task at the doctoral level. The department sent my dissertation "Studies on Jiangxi Poetry School" to Mr. Zhu Dongrun, Mr. Lin Geng, Mr. Xiao Difei, Mr. Wang Qi, Mr. Sun Wang, Mr. Jin Qihua and Mr. Gu Yisheng for review. They all encouraged me in their comments. On October 22, 1984, the department held a grand thesis defense for me. The defense committee's lineup was luxurious, with three of the nine members being NTU teachers: Mr. Cheng, Mr. Guan Xiong and Mr. Zhou Xunchu. The remaining six were from outside the school: Mr. Qian Zhonglian, Mr. Tang Guizhang, Mr. Xu Zhongyu, Mr. Huo Songlin, Mr. Fu Xuanqun and Mr. Shu Wu. Elder Qian, who is highly respected and respected, serves as chairman. There were 200 to 300 teachers, students and guests of the department of Chinese who attended the audience. Both Jiangsu Television and Nanjing Television Station sent people to the scene to record the video. After a 3-hour defense, Elder Qian publicly announced that my thesis defense was unanimously approved. The next night, CCTV's "News Network" broadcast the news of Jiangsu Tv's defense meeting. That's how my graduate school career came to an end.
Thirty years have passed, and now Mr. Cheng and Mr. Guo Weisen are no longer alive, Mr. Zhou Xunchu and Mr. Wu Xinlei, who are still alive, have reached their old age, and I myself have two sideburns. Looking back on my graduate school career, I am still clear and cordial. The scene of the hard reading in the South Park dormitory is vividly remembered, just like yesterday. Graduate school is truly one of the most memorable episodes of my life!
