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Nan Huaijin's three cigarettes
Yan Zhongming
(Ph.D., Jinan University, Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University)
From Dongshan Island in Suzhou, looking at the south bank of Taihu Lake, at the source of the Suzhou Creek flowing to Shanghai, where there is a bridge, that is, Miaogang. Locals say that because of the good feng shui, the best hairy crabs in Taihu Lake are produced here. There is a large courtyard on the lakeside near the bridge, and on the front wall of the gate facing the road around the lake is written "Taihu Great Lecture Hall", which is the hermitage of Nan Huaijin, a ninety-year-old master of traditional Chinese studies.
Because of a special chance, I knocked on Mr. Nan Huaijin's door in the starry night.
On the way, I kept my thoughts racing. To be honest, my understanding of Sinology has always been a bit confused, and although the historical texts have been more or less turned over, I have always been confused about those propositions. On the one hand, this is because Chinese classical works are not as hierarchical as Western works; on the other hand, many of China's sages did not write, often concise and concise, and full of meaning. Slowly, I gained a general impression and understanding of Sinology, analyzed in terms of content and logic, and felt that it was nothing more than a complex ethical supermarket, supplemented by a tradition of interpretation that was not only elaborate, just like the stars of Yu Dan carried forward. As for the answers to the questions of nature and modern society, it should be stretched to guide individuals on how to live and die. Is Sinology really still so useful, and who can clearly say the essence of its ideas? For a long time, I waited in constant disappointment for someone to answer.
Therefore, having the opportunity to face Mr. Nan Huaijin's book, a person who can be called a world-renowned and famous public secretary, is itself an intellectual adventure. I will not miss this opportunity, and decided to pick out two insidious questions to ask Mr. For advice, the purpose is of course very clear, I want to decide the basic criteria for my future treatment of Sinology.
When the trolley entered the villa, which seemed to be built in the style of the 1930s, with an entrance hall and a cloister, my question had already been formed. I would like to borrow the big man Fairbank to express the depth and seriousness of the problem, and look forward to Nan Huaijin's clear and rigorous rebuttal and elaboration:
Fairbank's research pointed out that the population of China in the Han Dynasty was only about 60 million, and this population has not changed much until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when there was a big growth, reaching more than 300 million; in addition, many chinese sages, such as Confucius and Mencius, did not have a lifelong footprint of no more than 300 kilometers from their hometown. So, my question is, in an era when the vision of these sages was so limited and the social environment was far simpler, did the summarized theories and ideas still have practical guiding significance for our society of 1.3 billion people in China today?
The second question is a step forward in the previous question: What exactly does the Inner Saint and Outer King's Way of Guoxue mean and how to practice it? That's it. I think scholars like me probably have an assassin's courage now.
However, when I entered the door, I found that my idea of asking and answering was immediately shattered by the scene in the house. The old man, Mr. Nan Huaijin, sat next to several people who were sitting precariously, in contrast, Mr. Nan was the most ordinary look.
The first thing Mr. Nan Huaijin asked me to do was to ask me to smoke and be sure to light a cigarette for me personally. I noticed that there were two packs of cigarettes in front of him, one for Zhonghua and one for pandas, and it was said that he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. In the 20 minutes of talking to him, he personally lit three cigarettes for me, and there was no way to shirk it.
I remember that when Mr. Nan Huaijin gave speeches in many places, he always liked to say that he was an old naughty boy who was "useless and had no strength", and now it seems that there is really something like it. He smoked his cigarette slowly and methodically, and without hesitation, he gave the praise and compliments to everyone in front of him. He either called the gentleman opposite an encyclopedia, or that a certain person was highly skilled; of course, my complex academic qualifications were also noticed by him, and even if I had a mole on my face, he did not hesitate to comment on it.
Listening to my question, his calm eyes swept past me and he immediately said something that surprised me and made me wonder. He said:
Fairbank did not understand Chinese culture at all, and foreigners could not be trusted to study Chinese culture.
Do you know how long Chinese culture is? Two and a half million and two thousand years. The first two and a half million have been lost, just study the "Meta Life Bud". Do you know which three books Jia Baoyu burned when he was a monk in "Dream of the Red Chamber"?
I was dazed, and I just felt that he didn't play his cards according to the card, which was completely wrong. Just as Professor Zhang Shangde first listened to Mr. Nan's lecture experience: the sky is flying, the east is a sentence, the west sentence, I want to go up and beat him.
Mr. Nan spoke more and more vigorously, and he kept quoting the scriptures:
Those three books are "Yuan Ming Bao", "Sam Tong Qi" and "Zhuangzi", Jia Baoyu realized the Tao, so he became a monk... China's current academic state, in a word, ancient and modern have been broken, And China and foreign countries are not connected...
The path of the Inner Saint and the Outer King needs to be cultivated. Simply put, it is to do good deeds and be good people. In fact, people who are truly enlightened will not talk about this. Your question is such a big topic, how many books to write...
Therefore, you can't make a living by doing learning, but you do it by people who have spare time. To study Chinese history, we should read through the Twenty-Six Histories, not just the history of dynasties...
It's unheard of. If someone else had said this, I might have left unceremoniously. But in front of me, this century old man who learned five cars, ancient classics from the Hundred Sons and Hundred Schools to the Four Books and Five Classics, from Confucianism and Taoism to alchemy practice, from the mainland to Taiwan, from Taiwan to the Americas, after smoking his three cigarettes, in his Tai Chi Dafa, I admit that he has completely fainted.
How different this old boy's thinking system is from the current academic norms. In fact, his book is full of such contradictions and paradoxes.
There are many records of self-cultivation in his life, but he did as he pleased, and still smoked two packs of cigarettes a day; he constantly pointed out the monastic mysteries to admirers from all over the world, but the sentence he often hung on his lips in his lectures was: Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, I only believe in sleep. He also often said that my books were eaten in mixed rice, which was not true, but he kept explaining them carefully. It's really a bit of a taste of buddhas saying that they can't say or can't say, but they are still talking about it all their lives.
It was CCTV that saved me. The replay of the Sichuan Wenchuan Earthquake charity performance program attracted mr. Nan's attention. I had the opportunity to meditate on what was in front of me. I do not understand how the question I have carefully prepared was disintegrated by Mr. Nam. He seemed to be telling me in a strange way that my problem did not exist at all, that it was a matter of learning from the thinking of foreigners, based on a series of unreliable inferences.
It is said that the former students of Oxford University were smoked by the professor with a pipe, is it not Mr. Nan's posture? This old boy was originally an old Zen master, a widely respected monk. Did he deconstruct my inherent logic in this way, not wanting to waste time in the language trap I had set, telling me that logic and propositions are not all knowledge, and that not everything can be proved and expressed in language with logic? Discussing the right and wrong of Chinese culture, just asking why from the language point of view, there is no practice of monasticism, just some nonsense that can be arbitrarily denied, is this the stick drink in the Traditional Chinese Zen Buddhism?
I saw a couplet hanging on the wall of his house: Opening Heavenly Shore Horse, Strange Man Among Dragons. It is true that he proved to the world with his knowledge and reputation, the good physical condition of ninety years of age, and his still agile conversation that there must be some precious truth in what he insisted on monasticism, but we do not understand and are forgetting.
I left the old Zen master's farewell with his hands folded, feeling that although we were Chinese to the letter, we were actually very unfamiliar with the eastern way of thinking that focused on monasticism.
I've never had such pain in my thinking. Can anyone tell me, without words, how can I be enlightened?
1. Mr. Nan Huaijin's writings are enlightening everywhere, so that people can find the direction of life and even the vision of human development
2. Mr. Nan Huaijin has achieved the sage of corporate culture with practical actions
Any citizen should have some knowledge of the history and culture of the country
Yubi is accompanied by a kind of warmth and respect
Source: The Little Moon of Literature and Art
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