As we all know, from the time Emperor Wu "deposed hundreds of families and respected Confucianism alone", the orthodoxy and dominance of Confucianism were established, and Emperor Wu completed the basic project of the autocratic political structure. However, the same "gentle benevolence and good Confucianism", the Han Yuan Emperor failed to revitalize the Han Dynasty, but let it embark on the road from prosperity to decline, the Western Han Began to decline, the so-called "Yuan, Cheng, mourning, peace, a generation is not as good as a generation". So, is there something wrong with Confucian thought? Or is emperor Yuan's ability insufficient? Or...
"Spring and Autumn" book shadow
Such a scene is recorded in the Book of Han, during the reign of Emperor Xuan, and the crown prince at that time was named Liu Yi. Once, the crown prince Liu Yi said to his father, Emperor Xuan, "Your Majesty's punishment is too deep, and it is advisable to use Confucianism." When Emperor Xuan heard this, he said very angrily: "The Han family has its own system, which is originally based on the overlord Dao, but it is pure Ren MoralIsm, using Zhou Zhenghu!" And the vulgar Confucianism is not up to date, but it is ancient and not modern, so that people are dazzled by the name, do not know what to keep, how to appoint! From this dialogue, it can be seen that the father and son have diverged on the fundamental policy of governing the country. Emperor Xuan immediately said a very forward-looking sentence: "Those who mess with my family, the prince also!" At that time, the depressed Xuan Emperor even had the heart to depose the crown prince, and wanted to make it easier for the prince to be the prince with Liu Qin, the xian king of Huaiyang who "clearly observed the law". As a result, the thought of xu Pingjun (Liu Yi's biological mother) as his wife of the chaff dispelled this idea, and finally did not abolish his brother and establish a brother.
As the saying goes, those who do great things cannot have "the benevolence of a woman", and Presumably this is not unreasonable. If Emperor Xuan had been more domineering and more decisive in handling the matter of the crown prince at that time, perhaps history would have been a different story. Because from all indications, it can be seen that the "Han family system" of "overlordship and miscellaneous" established since the time of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty is an effective way of governing the country, and Emperor Xuan has said the key to it. This system has always been praised and followed by future generations since Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty.
The Wei Mausoleum of the Han Yuan Emperor
However, as soon as Emperor Yuan of Han came to power, he threw aside the governing principles of Lao Tzu and his ancestors, and began to worship Confucianism alone, purely moral teaching, governing the country completely under the guidance of scripture, and selecting officials and appointing people completely using Confucian standards. Then, why did Emperor Yuan abandon the "hegemonic technique" that advocated severe punishment and harsh law, and instead use the Confucian technique of "ruling the country with softness" and emphasizing "indoctrination"?
The reason for this is actually obvious. On the one hand, during the reign of Emperor Xuan, the teacher he chose for the crown prince Liu Yi was a pure Confucian student, so the crown prince Liu Yi was influenced by the Confucian Classics from an early age, making him an emperor with a deep "Confucianism" in Chinese history. According to records, the sutras studied by the crown prince Liu Yi were very extensive, including "Spring and Autumn", "Poetry", "Shang Shu", "Li", "Analects" and so on. Emperor Yuan's scriptural skills are not only far superior to those of his father, but also second to none among all the emperors of the Western Han Dynasty.
In addition, the deeper reason is that after Emperor Yuan ascended the throne, land annexation intensified, and peasants went bankrupt, some of them invested in farms and became tenants and slaves; some accepted the government's fake land and became fake farmers; and some became displaced people, and the taxes and services that these people originally undertook were passed on to the Qi people (that is, self-cultivating farmers). Coupled with political corruption, the corruption of officials, and frequent natural disasters, struggles against the rule of the Western Han Dynasty continued to break out in various places. Therefore, in this grim situation, the Han Yuan Emperor had no choice but to abandon the "hegemonic art" and purely teach morality in order to alleviate social contradictions.
From this point of view, the Yuan Emperor changed the ancestral system, and it was indeed out of helplessness. In fact, after taking the Confucian way of benevolence and righteousness as the guiding ideology for governing the country, the already turbulent society temporarily calmed down, so that the Western Han Dynasty did not collapse immediately, and survived for decades.
Confucianism has become a "painkiller", although it has an immediate effect, but the side effects are not small. Although a large number of talents were selected for the Han Dynasty, it was also determined that many people read the scriptures as officials, so after entering the army, they often did not perform their duties faithfully but only tried to maintain the Position of Lu, and the corpse was vegetarian. In other words, some "nerds" who only know books and are inattentive are elected to government agencies at all levels.
Like those "nerdy" officials, Emperor Yuan was an uncompromising literati whose ideas were naïve and divorced from reality. He always relied on eunuchs when he was in power, because he believed that eunuchs had no family and could not form a huge group of entangled parties. It was this kind of concept that gave the eunuch Shi Xianzhi the power and eventually formed the climate. Originally, Emperor Yuan, who was ill, originally wanted to ignore political affairs himself, but to control the power through the eunuch Shi Xian, but as a result, the power was sidelined, and the authority was entrusted to people, forcing the members of the auxiliary political team who were arranged for him by his father Emperor Xuan (Xiao Wangzhi, Zhou Kan, and Liu Gengsheng) to be killed or degraded.
Sima Guang said bitterly in the Zizhi Tongjian: "Even so, filial piety is the king, easy to deceive and difficult to understand." This means that the reason why Emperor Yuan lost power was not only because of Jinxing's cunning and cunning, but also because of his own low political ability. Obviously, such an emperor is doomed to be unable to manage major affairs, and it is not surprising that the Han Dynasty has declined from his hands.