Tao Yuanming (365-427), also known as Qian, the character Yuanliang, Mr. Wuliu, the private Jingjie, known as Mr. Jingjie, Xunyang Chaisang (near Jiujiang, Jiangxi). Tao Yuanming lived in the Jin and Song dynasties, an era when the political environment was very complicated. He came out and served as an official several times, wandering between the official and the hidden, and finally chose to retreat to the countryside until the end of his life. Tao Yuanming's poems followed the simple style of Wei and Jin poetry, and entered the realm of sophistication, successfully elevating "nature" to a state of beauty, and creating a new theme of pastoral poetry. Tao Yuanming himself, together with his works, built a spiritual home for future generations of scholars, so that for thousands of years, Ren Zhen will survive.
Author: Jiu Ge
has always mentioned the top of Chinese literature, and most people in the world subconsciously think of the poet Li Dusoul, and the impression of Tao Yuanming is always a little subtle.
Mu Xin once talked about Qu Yuan and Tao Yuanming in his eyes in "Literary Memoirs". He said: "Chinese poets, if you want to say great, Qu Yuan is the greatest", "Qu Yuan is the spire of ancient Chinese literature." "This is of course a high evaluation. Then he said: "Tao Yuanming is not in the tower of Chinese literature, he is an outsider of Chinese literature." ”
According to what Mu Xin said later, his general meaning is: Tao Yuanming is a double hermit. Not only did his people retreat to the countryside and disappear from the chaos of chaos, but his literary style was tranquil and peaceful, naturally hidden from all kinds of lofty arguments. So he lived and died, in obscurity. Therefore, Mu Xin said: "Tao Yuanming is not the spire of Chinese literature, he walks outside the tower", and Mu Xin himself "walked and will go on, is such an image and realm".
Obviously, Mu Xin did not hesitate to praise Qu Yuan's greatness, but he unreservedly favored Tao Yuanming. So he also said, "Sometimes, life is really not as good as Tao Yuanming."
This attitude more or less represents the ambivalent feelings of some Chinese literati towards Tao Yuanming: on the one hand, people do not feel that Tao Yuanming is great, and on the other hand, they are unconsciously attracted to it, like the unconscious pursuit of the "self" by the "self".
Speaking of Tao Yuanming, most of the pictures in front of people will change a few strokes like this:
In front of the small broken house, the yellow chrysanthemum in the east fence is in full bloom, and the old master is wearing a kudzu scarf and a short brown, and he is picking down chrysanthemums from his waist. Chrysanthemums are fragrant. He occasionally straightened up to wipe his sweat, and looked back, the sun had sunk in the west, but the afterglow reflected half of the sky softer and softer, and a few birds flew low in the sky, and after three or five clicks, they disappeared.
We flew back to more than a thousand years ago with the bird and landed on five willow trees next to Tao Yuanming's house. This time belongs to the Eastern Jin Dynasty, which is the third year of Emperor Xingning of the Jin Dynasty (365), and it has been 48 years since the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty. Tao Yuanming was born in about this year.
The period of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties (also known as the Three Kingdoms and the Two Jin Dynasties) was a well-known era of great chaos and great division in the feudal history of the mainland.
In the story of the Three Kingdoms, Wei, Shu, and Wu divide the world. Shu Han had Zhuge Liang sit in the battle and earned the most attention and tears in later generations, but the Shu State was the first to perish, followed by Cao Wei, who usurped the Han, and was concocted by the Sima clan of the Western Jin Dynasty, and finally the Wu State of Sun Quan. Cao Cao, the founder of the Wei State, once gave the last emperor of the Han Dynasty Emperor Liu Xie as prime minister, and after his death, his son Cao Pi deposed Emperor Han Xian and became emperor himself. A few decades later, there was a minister surnamed Sima under Cao Wei, who overthrew the emperor of Cao Wei, made himself emperor, and changed the name of the country to "Jin". The reincarnation of heaven, retribution is unpleasant, at this moment, it is particularly clear. Judging from the development of subsequent history, the life of the Sima Jin regime was not easy.
After the Sima family tried every means to snatch power from a different surname, it was difficult to keep the country. Not only were other powerful ministers and generals in the imperial court eyeing the throne, but also the children and grandchildren of the emperor's family were also vying for power with each other. Since the internal politics have become so corrupt, many enemies of the alien race have taken advantage of it. In Chinese history, these foreigners were called the Hu people, and at that time there were five different types of foreign Hu people, each of whom established 16 small states, known as the "Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms" in history. Among them, Liu Cong of the Xiongnu overthrew the Western Jin Dynasty, and the Sima family established the Eastern Jin Dynasty in Jiankang (now Nanjing). The Western Jin Dynasty had the problem of usurpation and rebellion, and the Eastern Jin Dynasty was not spared.
Tao Yuanming's great-grandfather Tao Kan was a famous general of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, born in poverty, and later had great military exploits, the official went to Bazhou to supervise the post, and was named the prince of Changsha County. And Tao Yuanming's maternal grandfather is the Eastern Jin Dynasty celebrity Meng Jia, who was rumored to be a beautiful talk when he ascended to Chongyang because of his wisdom blowing off his hat against the wind, he married Tao Kan's tenth daughter as his wife, and later the fourth daughter they gave birth to married back to the Tao family, which is Tao Yuanming's mother. Tao Yuanming's father and mother are cousins. Tao Kan and Meng Jia were both objects of Tao Yuanming's admiration, and Tao Yuanming once praised them enthusiastically in his poems.
No matter how you look at it, the ancestors of the Tao family are all wide. However, Tao Kan has many descendants, and they have declined one after another, and decades later, when Tao Yuanming's lineage is gone. Tao Yuanming's father had a humble official position and died very early, when Tao Yuanming was only seven or eight years old, and the family situation has fallen sharply since then.
Since Tao Kanshi, the Tao family moved from Poyang to Xunyang, Jiangzhou (now Jiujiang, Jiangxi). Later, hundreds of years later, the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi was demoted to Sima in Jiangzhou, and it was in Xunyang Jiangtou that he saw off the guests, met the pipa girl who valued profit and separated from the businessman, listened to her play a pipa song, and wrote the famous "Pipa Xing" that hurt the sorrow of the end of the world. The Tao family has long been separated, and Tao Yuanming lived with his mother in Chaisang in Xunyang, making a living from farming.
Tao Yuanming once wrote an autobiography under the pretense of "Mr. Wuliu" - "The Biography of Mr. Wuliu", in which he used more than 100 words to talk about his family background and interests:
I don't know who he is, and I don't know his surname. There are five willow trees on the side of the house, because I think it is a number. Quiet and quiet, do not admire Rongli. Good reading, not seeking to understand; Every time I have a feeling, I happily forget to eat. Sexual addiction to alcohol, poor family can not be obtained often. Relatives know that it is so, or they invite it with wine. When you run out of drinks, you will get drunk. After being drunk and retreating, he did not hesitate to stay. Ring blockage, do not cover the wind and sun; The short brown is worn in knots, and the scoop is repeatedly empty. Yan Ruye. He often writes articles to entertain himself and show his ambition. Forget about gains and losses, and end up with this.
Praise said: Qianlou's wife said: "Don't be related to the poor, don't learn from the rich." "How much is it like a human being? Poetry, to enjoy its ambitions, without the people of the Huai family? The people of the Ge Tian clan?
Tao Yuanming bluntly said that he was poor and embarrassed, there was no food to fill his stomach, there was no thick clothes to protect him from the cold, and the thatched hut where he lived was tattered, and the wind and rain were leaking on all sides. Even so, Tao Yuanming does not disdain to be in the same stream with the world, "not related to the poor, not to learn from the rich". He does not admire Rongli, does not talk too much, likes to be quiet, is good at reading, good at writing articles to entertain himself, good at drinking, happy and contented with poverty, and is willing to grow old slowly like this.
Sometimes only when he is hungry, it's okay, but he still has an old mother and wife and children to raise at home.
Meng Fuzi said: "Shi is not poor, but sometimes he is poor." It means that being an official should not have been for the purpose of making money, not entirely because the family was poor. Confucianism advocates that scholars should take the world as their own responsibility, and advocates "self-cultivation and family governance and peace in the world", so scholars become officials in order to realize the political ideal of saving the country and the people. However, Meng Fuzi added that those who come out as officials can also have a second situation, that is, to earn a salary to support their families. It is said that Tao Yuanming has served as an official five times in his life, sometimes for ideals, sometimes for poverty alleviation, and his first appearance is the second situation.
Tao Yuanming's first appearance was probably when he was 29 years old, serving as a Jiangzhou sacrificial wine. The so-called sacrificial sake is the person who presides over the ceremony when the government holds an important ceremony or sacrificial event. For his first career, Tao Yuanming wrote a poem to record his mood:
In the past, he was hungry for a long time, and he went to study.
will not be able to raise the festival, frozen and stubbornly entangled themselves.
It is the time to establish the year, and the ambition is ashamed.
Then he divided his clothes and returned to the field.
The starry air current, the pavilion is complex.
The world is long, and Yang Zhu stops.
Although there is no money squandering, the turbid wine can be feared.
——Tao Yuanming's "Drinking" 20 songs, its 19th
In the first two sentences, he confessed his distress, because he had been hungry for a long time, so he had to put down his farm tools and become an official. However, because I can't always find the way to make a living and support my family as an official, I can't get rid of the entanglement of cold and hunger. Sure enough, not long after he made sacrificial wine, he couldn't stand the atmosphere of officialdom, and soon resigned and returned to the countryside to farm.
At that time, the ruling clique of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, which favored the left side of the Jiangjiang River, was still unable to exert great efforts in the face of the invasion from the north, nor was it really determined to recover the lost territory, but was busy protecting each other and excluding dissidents. The Eastern Jin Dynasty followed the "Nine Grades Zhongzheng System" implemented during the Cao Wei period, and the recruitment and appointment of officials did not pay attention to the level of virtue and ability, but only looked at the ancestral home of the scholars, so that "there is no poor family in the upper grade, and there is no powerful family in the lower grade". It's a pity that many people who occupy high positions and important positions, including several emperors of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, often don't know anything about governing the country and securing the people, and specialize in wandering and indulging in lust. The wealthy families occupied a large number of fertile fields and mountains, and squandered and wasted their social wealth in their hands, while at the same time, the state taxes and forced labor were only pressed on the poor people. In the end, the fierce and harsh government ignited the anger of the people, and a peasant uprising broke out at the end of the Jin Dynasty in the third year of Long An (399).
This peasant uprising, led by Sun En and Lu Xun, lasted twelve years and dealt a heavy blow to the Eastern Jin regime. At that time, there was a warlord named Huan Xuan, who was the assassin of Jing and Jiang Prefectures, and volunteered to lead his troops to quell the rebellion. Huan Xuan's father is Huan Wen, and Tao Yuanming's maternal grandfather Meng Jia has been Huan Wen's assistant for a long time. At this time, Huan Xuan had not yet shown the ambition to usurp the throne, and Tao Yuanming also appeared for the second time at this time, and he helped Huan Xuan to Jiankang to ask for peace with Sun En.
When Huan Xuan pacified Sun En and his own power became stronger, he began to have ambitions and wanted to be the emperor himself. In the second year of Yuanxing (402), Huan Xuan marched into Jiankang, and then abolished Emperor An of the Jin Dynasty and established himself, the country name Chu, and changed the Yuan tycoon. At that time, Tao Yuanming was no longer serving under Huan Xuan, and he had left his post to return to Xunyang due to the death of his mother the year before.
In the third year of Yuanxing (403), another warlord Liu Yu wanted to lead troops into Beijing to crusade against Huan Xuan and welcome the restoration of Emperor An of Jin. Tao Yuanming went out for the third time, joined Liu Yu's shogunate, and gave him a clerical work to join the army and manage the army. However, Tao Yuanming soon resigned because he found out that Liu Yu also had ambitions. Sure enough, seventeen years later, Liu Yu became self-reliant on behalf of the Jin Dynasty and established the Liu Song Dynasty in Jiankang, starting the first dynasty of the Southern Dynasties (Song, Qi, Liang, and Chen).
After Tao Yuanming left Liu Yu's shogunate, the following year he was reappointed as the general of Jianwei and the assassin of Jiangzhou, Liu Jingxuan, who was the son of Liu Gaozhi, another great warlord at the time. Liu Jingxuan saw that Liu Yu pacified Huan Xuan, and after Emperor Jin An was reinstated, he asked for dismissal, and Tao Yuanming did not do it.
Tao Yuanming's three military posts were very short. Every time, he wanted to do his best to stabilize the world out of a little ideal, but the world was often not as he wished. Tao Yuanming's last official was when he was appointed as the county magistrate of Pengze, and he was 41 years old that year.
Tao Yuanming has five sons, not counting his daughters, so many children, and his family is poor, and it is difficult to make a living from farming. His relatives were persuading him to come out and find some official positions, and it happened that he himself had this idea, so he went to Pengze County, not far from his home, to be a county magistrate. After only doing more than 80 days, he decided to say goodbye to officialdom completely and go back to farming. Since then, Tao Yuanming has not come out to be an official again until he died. Even if Liu Yu became the emperor and asked him to come out as an official many times, he did not come out.
Tao Yuanming has been an official five times in his life, but in fact, the total time he has been an official does not exceed five years. Sometimes he was forced to be poor, and sometimes he was motivated by ideals.
Tao Yuanming had the ideal of helping the common people, and he said something like this in his poem:
When he was young, he was strong and powerful, and he traveled alone with his sword.
Who walks the talk? Zhangye to Youzhou.
——Tao Yuanming's "Quasi-Antiquity" nine poems, its eight excerpts
When he was young, he thought about fighting a sword alone and traveled around the world, saying that he wanted to go to Zhangye (now Gansu) and Youzhou (now Liaoning, Hebei), which had fallen into the hands of foreigners. However, at that time, there was chaos in the north, and he could not go.
Tao Yuanming also wrote a poem "Yong Jing Ke", praising Jing Ke's heroism in chivalry. Jing Ke was a ranger and assassin in the Warring States Period, and there was a relatively weak country Yan saw that Qin was invading everywhere, and he was afraid that the disaster of the country would soon come, so Dan, the prince of Yan State, found Jing Ke and asked him to assassinate the King of Qin. Jing Ke was willing to die for his confidant, he went, and after seeing the poor dagger, the assassination was unsuccessful, and Jing Ke died. However, Tao Yuanming did not mention the tragic ending of Jing Ke being killed by King Qin left and right in the poem, but emphasized the panic and panic of King Qin, thus highlighting Jing Ke's courage and deterrence, and finally revealing his infinite regret for Jing Ke's miraculous achievements.
There are many more such expressions of depression and indignation. When Tao Yuanming read "The Classic of Mountains and Seas", he wrote poems praising Jingwei and Xingtian:
Jingwei Weimu will fill the sea.
Xingtian Dance is dry, and fierce ambition is always there.
There is no concern about the same thing, and there is no regret when it is gone.
Set in the heart of the past, a good day can be waited.
——Tao Yuanming's "Reading the Classic of Mountains and Seas" thirteen poems, its tenth
Jingwei and Xingtian are both characters from ancient mythology. Jingwei is the daughter of the ancient Yan Emperor, who drowned in the East China Sea, and after his death, his soul turned into a bird, and he often carried wood and stones to fill the East China Sea. Xingtian and the Emperor failed in their struggle for power and was beheaded, but he was unwilling to give in, with his two breasts as his eyes and his navel as his mouth, he still fought tenaciously with a shield and an axe.
Tao Yuanming also has ambitions, and he has also "fiercely ambitioned to escape all over the world", and he is not born to be tranquil and calm, especially in such a turbulent era where they compete with each other and meet each other.
Tao Yuanming has a heart but is not reused, and has been hovering on the petty officials. Those who are regarded as "inferior grades" and "turbid officials" and other cumbersome positions, "knights and corporals, Lu and other peasants", are humble and thin. Even if it is a petty official, it is not easy to come by, and it is quite difficult. For example, the last time he issued the Pengze County Order, Tao Yuanming originally had no way to seek an official, and relied on the care of the county magistrate and his uncle's efforts to be appointed as an official in a small county.
Like the two major families of Wang and Xie, the treatment of their children is very different from Tao Yuanming, who was born in the Hanmen Shu clan, such as the great calligrapher Wang Xizhi's "starting secretary Lang", the literary leader Xie Lingyun "used the national public example to remove the staff and rode the waiter", and the Eastern Jin Dynasty Prime Minister Xie An "opened the Situ Mansion at the beginning, except for the Zuo Shulang".
In addition, Tao Yuanming is not like his great-grandfather Tao Kan, who knows how to be forbearant and introverted, advances and retreats in moderation, silently accumulates political capital for himself, and seizes the opportunity to soar into the sky, breaking through the obstacles of gate politics and becoming a great minister. On the contrary, Tao Yuanming saw that the disaster was about to arise, and thought of "escaping and returning to farming", staying away from the quagmire instead of facing difficulties. These are two completely different attitudes, which just reflect the ancient Chinese problem of choosing the hidden and turbid.
During the Warring States Period, Qu Yuan was sincere and loyal to the Chu State, but he was slandered for his faith, loyal and suspicious, and was exiled to Jiangnan. He was helpless to witness the death of King Chu Huai, and after the century-old ancient capital was destroyed, he was disheartened. On the banks of the Miluo River in Changsha, a fisherman met Qu Yuan and asked him why he had fallen to this point. Qu Yuan said: "The whole world is turbid, I am alone, everyone is drunk and I am sober", he is different from the world, so he was ostracized and driven away. The fisherman did not agree with Qu Yuan's words, the fisherman's idea is the same as that of most people in the world, since the world is dirty, then it is better to go with the flow and go with the flow, why bother to be pretentious and thankless.
The fisherman couldn't understand the meaning of Qu Yuan's persistence, but Tao Yuanming did, and he also chose the path of keeping the clear stream alone.
Figure | Liu Lingcang ©, Tao Yuanming statue
Fifteen years after Tao Yuanming returned to seclusion, Liu Yu, the former top boss, had become independent on behalf of Jin and established the Liu Song Dynasty. Liu Yu remembered Tao Yuanming and recruited him to be an official, but he didn't come out. Later, Jiangzhou Thorn Shi Tan Daoji went to invite again, took good wine and meat to visit the thatched house, and persuaded Tao Yuanming with the tone that the fisherman spoke to Qu Yuan at the beginning: "The sage is in the world, and if there is no way in the world, it will be hidden, and if there is a way, it will come; In this civilized world, why should I suffer like this? Tao Yuanming replied: "How dare you look at the virtuous, you can't be ambitious." Tao Yuanming did not go back on the spot and tell Tan Daoji that there is "no way in the world", but said lightly that he was not a sage, had no ambition to be an official, and finally did not accept the wine and meat delivered to the door. Although he and his wife and children were hungry at the time.
Isn't Tao Yuanming a sage? Doesn't he have the ambition to become a businessman? Obviously, Tao Yuanming rarely told a lie.
Tao Yuanming wrote a piece of "Touching the Scholar Does Not Meet the Fu", the content is as the title, which is modeled on the Western Han Dynasty modern literature and classics master Dong Zhongshu's "The Scholar does not meet the Fu" and Sima Qian's "The Sad Man does not meet the Fu". In his Fu, he exposed the darkness of society and the turbidity of the world, so that the righteous and upright people are gradually abandoned, and the treacherous and evil followers emerge one after another. The simple atmosphere of antiquity no longer exists, and is replaced by the social reality that those who follow me prosper and those who oppose me perish, so Boyi, Shuqi and Shangshan Sihao can only lament "where to go", and Qu Yuan can only express the complaint of "forget it". When the troubled times are coming, Tao Yuanming also disdains to "chase the flow and raise its waves", he is willing to be a lonely and good true hermit:
It is better to be poor than to be tired.
If the crown is not honorable, is it not ashamed to be robed?
Honesty will be clumsy, and it will be glad to end.
Embrace the lonely shirt to be a year old, and Xie Liang is at a good price in the market.
——Excerpt from Tao Yuanming's "Touching Scholars Do Not Meet Fu".
In this way, because Tao Yuanming was not recognized by the society controlled by the gate lord clan, and his political status was not high, the family tree was not included in the official department. Sixty years after Tao Yuanming's death, when Shen Yue of the Song, Qi, and Liang dynasties edited the "Book of Song", he couldn't figure out Tao Yuanming's name. In other words, only fifty or sixty years after Tao Yuanming's death, Shen Yue was already difficult to determine whether "Yuanming" was his name or his character, so Shen Yue had to write suspiciously: "Tao Qian's character Yuanming, or Yunyuanming's character Yuanliang."
As for Tao Yuanming's articles and poems that often entertain himself, they did not attract much attention, let alone popularity, in the era when Xuanyan poetry was rampant.
Since the Wei and Jin dynasties, the two Han Dynasty classics gave way to metaphysics, and the Xuanfeng was prosperous, advocating light (the upper class of the scholars were good at talking about fame and reason), and then derived the Xuanyan poems that occupied the poetry circle of the Eastern Jin Dynasty for a hundred years. Xuanyan poetry is a kind of poetry that mainly explains Lao Zhuang and Buddhist philosophy, but it is "overly reasonable and indifferent". Finally, at the end of the Jin Dynasty and the beginning of the Song Dynasty, Lao Zhuang's thoughts rested for a while, and at this time, the abbot poet appeared on the stage again.
Tao Yuanming seems to have never kept up with the mainstream, he neither likes to talk about metaphysics, nor does he like to write poems that are full of metaphysical and Buddhist principles. He only writes about the feelings in daily life, and writes about the pain and joy of farming and growing vegetables, such as picking chrysanthemums by the fence, getting up and glancing at it when he is tired, and the clouds in Nanshan are amazing; For example, the helplessness of the grass and the sparse bean seedlings when planting beans, and the joy of "the wind comes from the south, and the wings are new seedlings".
In addition, Tao Yuanming's articles and poems always have a kind of "Tianjia language" of simplicity, which is far from the mainstream gorgeous literary style in the city, and it is even more difficult to enter the eyes of the times. In that environment, even his friends were not able to appreciate his style.
Yan Yanzhi has a very close personal relationship with Tao Yuanming, originally a native of Langya, Shandong, and served in Jiangzhou as a military meritorious Cao and a history assassin. He often went to Chaisang in his spare time to find Tao Yuanming to drink together, from morning to night. He wanted to be an official elsewhere, knowing that Tao Yuanming had no money to buy wine, he generously gave 20,000 yuan of wine money. After Tao Yuanming's death, he wrote an affectionate essay for him, and gave him the nickname "Jingjie Zhengshi". In the text, Yan Yanzhi praised Tao Yuanming's character, but there were only four words for Tao Yuanming's literary evaluation: "Wentuo refers to it".
Yan Yanzhi's style of writing was called "wrong color engraving", "paved brocade and embroidery, carved and painted eyes", he and Xie Lingyun together with the same name of words, Jiang Zuo and called "Yan Xie". At that time, it was the poetry of ornate words that was popular.
Zhong Rong, a literary theory critic in the Liang Dynasty of the Southern Dynasty, wrote a "Poems", which divided 122 poets since the Han and Wei dynasties into upper, middle and lower grades, and commented on the advantages and disadvantages one by one. Zhong Rong reviews poets, usually putting the word collection in the first place. He called Lu Ji, who was "talented and beautiful", "Taikang Zhiying", and Xie Lingyun, who was "talented and rich", as "Yuanjia Zhixiong", and these people were all listed in the top grade. And Zhong Rong thought that Tao Yuanming was a hermit with noble quality, but he had no literary talent, so he was included in the middle grade (Cao Cao created the Jian'an poetry style, but because of the ancient style of writing, it was classified as a lower grade). As for Liu Xian, another literary critic of the same era, he did not mention a word about Tao Yuanming in "Wenxin Carving Dragon", and directly skipped it.
Tao Yuanming's "Touching the Scholar Doesn't Meet the Fu" was just a sigh for his inability to help the common people, but the "Scholar Don't Meet" he sighed didn't contain the regret of the severance of the bosom friend?