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Speaking of Tao Yuanming, people will naturally have the image of a hermit in their hearts. In the assignments I received in the past, most students would say that Tao Yuanming lived a negative life that evaded the responsibilities of life, which was enviable but not worthy of admiration.
However, in history, people did not regard Tao Yuanming as simple as this. For example, Gong Zizhen once said: "Tao Qian is exactly like Wolong Hao, Wangu Xunyang Songju is high, Mo Xin poet is plain, and liang fu is two points and one point." ”
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They are all emphasizing the understanding of Tao Yuanming, not just as a reclusive poet, but to see the core full of vitality through the surface of tranquility.
Tao Yuanming was born in the last year of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, between the two Jin Dynasties, usurpation and killing can be seen at any time. Before the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty, there was the so-called Rebellion of the Eight Kings, and in sixteen years, the ministers killed the emperor, the younger brother betrayed the brother, and almost all the important literati of the Taikang generation were killed because they were involved in it.
After the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty, the Eastern Jin Dynasty was partial to the south of the Anjiang River, with hu pressure on the outside and clan contradictions on the inside. At the age of twenty-nine, Tao Yuanming became an official for the first time, and at this time the Eastern Jin Dynasty was on the verge of extinction. First, huan xuan, a powerful minister, usurped the throne and established Huan Chu, and then another military general, Liu Yu, raised an army to establish Liu Song, and coincidentally, before Huan Xuan and Liu Yu revealed their ambitions, Tao Yuanming happened to have served as an aide under both of them.
At the age of forty-one, Tao Yuanming decided to leave the official field once and for all and spend the last twenty years of his life as a farmer on the banks of the Xunyang River.
Later he wrote a poem about the political debate at the turn of the Song Dynasty.
He said:
Heavy Mulberry Yangtze River, three years to look forward to harvesting.
The branches began to grow, and the mountains and rivers changed suddenly.
The leaves are self-destructive, and the roots are floating in the sea.
Spring silkworms have no time, and the cold clothes want who to stay!
It is not worth the plateau, and today I regret it.
Later scholars believe that this poem is a reflection and lament for Tao Yuanming's entire history of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, and he regards his country as a mulberry tree that once had high hopes, this mulberry tree has experienced so much painstaking watering, so many days and nights of growth, but when it is about to achieve something, it has encountered a world of collapse, from which the branches and leaves fall, the rhizomes break, become fragments and foams, and are washed away by the sea. And in the whole world, all those who have expectations of it will not only fail, but also suffer displacement.
This poem is about the feelings of all those who have worked for great events throughout the ages, but have failed in the end.
In 1948, when Fu Sinian, the president of Peking University, had to abandon Peking University to cross the sea to Taiwan, he and Hu Shi recited the poem over and over again on the yangtze River.
What would it be like to feel about life in an age of killing and usurpation?
Tao Yuanming said: Probably our life is like a hibiscus flower, the characteristics of hibiscus are that it is open and sunset, and the life of each flower is only one day long.
In the Book of Verses, it is mentioned that another name is Shunhua.
"Zheng Feng" said: There is a female car, Yan Ru Shunhua.
Compared with the hibiscus flower and the woman, we think that even the most beautiful face is only a momentary beauty.
And Tao Yuanming said that the opening and falling of the sun is not only the destination of beauty, but also the essence of life.
He has a set of four-word poems, called Rongmu, and when he speaks of this kind of speech, there is a small preface in front of the poem, saying: Rongmu, nian will be old, the sun and the moon have moved, it has been restored for nine summers, the general horn smells, and the white head is fruitless.
It means that Rongmu is written by my upcoming twilight years, the summer has passed, I am about to enter the autumn of life, the core of Tao Yuanming's thinking is that youth and beauty cannot last, how to prepare for the inevitable death.
The first poem of Rongmu's poem says:
Harvest the wood and take root in Yuz.
The morning shines brightly, and the evening is lost.
If life is sent, haggard sometimes.
Quiet words, the center of the fear.
The brilliant hibiscus flowers take root here, shaking their flowers in the morning and withering in the evening. Life is like sending this statement reminds me of a kind of novel popular in wei and Jin, saying that on a stormy night, someone passed by a lonely inn, and at night he suddenly felt that there was light coming through the cracks in the wall, and he saw from the cracks that there were gods and immortals planting beans on the ground next door, and the bean seedlings were instantly several inches long, and the paintings on the wall also turned into the ladder of the moon and the lamp and the moon, and there were songs and wine, but all the joy of the night would disappear when the sun rose the next day.
Tao Yuanming said: Everything we grasp in life will become nothing when the clock rings, and we must first understand the fact that life will die, and then we can go back and find the meaning of life.
In another poem, Tao Yuanming said something similar, he talked about the beautiful day that everyone spends in their youth.
The sun is cloudless and the spring fan is slight.
Beautiful people beautiful night, Dashu and singing.
The song is so long that it is touching to hold it.
The moon between the clouds, the scorching moon in China.
Isn't it good for a while, and soon when it's going to be.
I was amazed when I first saw this poem, for thousands of years the human experience of grief has not changed, nor has the experience of the joy of life changed. There was a time when I was studying at Columbia University in Canada, that school was by the sea, at the turn of spring and summer, when the weather was sunny, we really sang and played all night on the beach, thinking that what thesis, graduation ah are very far away, as if life will be so forever young, happy. Our feeling at that time was that the beautiful person was beautiful in the night, and the dawn was full of joy and song. But when we came back from the sea and faced the pressure of life again, we encountered the question that Tao Yuanming asked.
In order to answer this question, Tao Yuanming wrote Rongmu's poem again, and in the second chapter of Rongmu, he said:
Harvesting of Rong wood, Yuztogen.
Prosperity rises, and twilight does not exist.
Chastity is fragile by people, and there is no way out of misfortune.
Bandit Yiyi, bandit Xi Dun.
We should notice that he spoke differently the second time. The first time he said it was: The morning shines brightly, and the sunset is lost. Here we use the past to finish, standing at the end of life, lamenting the passing of youth.
The second time he said that it was a prosperous dynasty, and there was no twilight. It is used in the future tense, to stand at the beginning of life and foresee its demise. The first time he said it was a knot. The second time he says it is Togen, and the root is to say: When we are not aware of the transience and accident of life, we cling to life and think that we can continue to bloom forever, then it will end in failure and nothingness.
Toghan is saying that when we perceive the brevity of life and then decide to devote ourselves to a life that is bound to die, we can give meaning to life.
Like the nineteenth-century philosopher Nietzsche, Tao Yuanming believed that since death is the inevitable end of all life, the only way is to fight death with a full life. In modern parlance, it is called a fully lived person who is not afraid of death.
What is fully lived? I think there are three meanings in Tao Yuanming, the first is to take the initiative to choose; the second is to do everything possible;
The third is obedience to the truth.
Tao Yuanming wrote about an outlier bird, he was out of the group because he did not want to go with the flow and live according to inertia, so he searched day and night, refusing to have a moment of rest. But when he finally found the tree that was strong enough to resist the wind and rain of life, he immediately folded its wings, swooped down from the air, and tied his life to the tree tightly, and never had any doubts or regrets. Tao Yuanming's strong desire to find the truth and get rid of the truth in this bird has touched countless people, especially readers under the influence of Confucianism, which is not the three principles and five constants, but the unremitting pursuit of truth.
Confucius said: "If you hear the Tao, you can die at night!" Tao Yuanming's most emotional feeling is also: "The general horn smells the way, and the white head is unsuccessful." He said: I have heard the truth in my childhood, and now I am approaching my twilight years, but I have not yet completed the path of truth.
We often say that life is short and timely. But Tao Yuanming said that life is not for pleasure, and there is no need to simply take care of the body. He said:
So if you are my body, will you not be in your life?
A body of energy, like a stream of electricity.
This means that I want to take care of my physical life because it is only through it that I can fulfill my life pursuits, and the time I have my physical body is so short that it is like lightning across the sky. Human physical life is not only fragile, but also impermanent, that is, the so-called "chastity is fragile by man, there is no way out of misfortune" Chastity is hard, physical life is like the stem of hibiscus, whether it is hard to stand in the forest, or fragile to be broken by people, this is not something we can control. But although we cannot control the blessings and deaths, we can choose to live a moral life. When we do this, we build our lives on a rock, and completely get rid of the fate of life without roots, floating into the dust, the fate of self-destruction of the leaves, and the fate of the floating sea of roots, is not good for a while, and soon how the fate and the fate of the best are gathered by people, and there is no way to bless the fate.
It was in such an era that Tao Yuanming was able to cultivate the countryside for twenty years, live with great interest, and have feelings for every grass and tree, which is definitely not passive and avoidant, but a more positive attitude towards life and great freedom of mind. For thousands of years, so many Chinese whether they are in good times or adversities, they can find inspiration in Tao Yuanming, probably for this reason.