【Editor's Note】 In the history of religious fields, there are many legends about the three dynasties of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties "mutually living and future generations". This reflected the simple consensus of the people at that time that greater China, you and I, was difficult for people to understand by describing China based on foreign theories alone. A few days ago, Pan Yue, the first vice president of the Central Socialist College, wrote an article telling the story of the people of all ethnic groups during the Wei and Jin dynasties and the Southern and Northern Dynasties who, out of cultural identity, merged into a community of common destiny and rebuilt a unified country. Excerpts from the article are excerpted below, with the title separately prepared by the editors.
Text/Pan Yue
For more than a century, China has lost its political and cultural discourse power, and "historical China" is written by the West and the East. Brothers' perceptions of each other are shaped by foreign academic frameworks.
For example, there are Han chauvinist views that "there is no China after the cliffs and mountains" and "no China after the Ming Dynasty"; there are narrow nationalist views that "Manchuria and Mongolia returned to Tibet and non-China". This is all the poison of the "Oriental History" of that year.
For example, some historians have tried to use "ideology" to benchmark Western history. When the West said that "great unification" was the original sin of despotism, they blamed "despotism" on the Yuan and Qing dynasties. It is said that the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties were originally "enlightened despotism" in which "emperors and scholars ruled the world together", not far from the West, and as a result, they were transformed into "barbaric despotism" by the "master-slave concept" of the nomadic people, the high degree of centralization of power in the Ming Dynasty was a remnant of the military system of the Yuan Dynasty, and China did not produce capitalism because it was cut off by the Qing Dynasty. They come to this conclusion because they have not studied in depth the inner logic of China's failure to give birth to capitalism.
(Folklore of Lhasa, Tibet - clay sculpture "Golden Monkey Offering Peach")
For example, when the West believed that China had not developed a democratic system due to the lack of a "liberal tradition," some historians began to argue that "agrarian civilization" represented despotism and "nomadic civilization" represented freedom. If the Yuan Dynasty had not been overthrown by the Ming Dynasty, China would have had a social formation above commerce and law as early as the 13th century. They did not understand that the honor of the "free spirit" belonged only to the Goths and Germans in the West, and never to the Huns, Turks, and Mongols in the East. In Montesquieu's writings, the same conquest, the Goths spread "freedom", while the Tatars (Mongols) spread "despotism" ("On the Spirit of the Law"). In Hegel's writings, the Germans knew all freedom, the Greco-Romans knew part of it, and the Orientals as a whole knew no freedom (Philosophy of History).
These disputes and attacks come from the fact that we always look at ourselves through the eyes of other civilizations, which, while having the benefits of pluralistic thinking, are often subject to the coercion of international politics. This has been true in the past, and it will be true in the future.
Chinese civilization is not without the concept of "race", but there is a stronger "tianxia" spirit that transcends it. Wang Tong, the great hermit of the Sui Dynasty, taught almost the entire general group of the early Tang Dynasty. As a Han Chinese, he said that the orthodoxy of China was not in the Southern Dynasty of the Han People, but in the Xiaowen Emperor of Xianbei. Because Emperor Xiaowen "lived in the kingdom of the first kings, received the way of the first kings, and the people of the sons of the first kings". This is the true spirit of the world.
(Mausoleum of Emperor Xiaowen of Northern Wei in Luoyang, Henan)
The same is true of other ethnic groups.
Tibetans and Mongolians believe in Buddhism, and both Tibetan and Chinese traditions have the doctrine of "eliminating discriminating minds." In the Chinese Muslim tradition of "Yiru Huitong", there is also "the way of the saints in the western region is the same as the way of the Chinese saints." Its founding of the religion is based on righteousness, knowing the principle of the incarnation of heaven and earth, the theory of death and life, the principle of constant ethics, eating and living, not having the tao, and not fearing the heavens." This spirit of breaking down ethnic barriers is the background of Chinese civilization. A history of the Chinese nation is a history in which the "spirit of the world" transcends the "self-limitation of national nature."
The integration of the Chinese nation is also full of deep emotions. Written in the Mongolian "Golden History" written in the late Ming Dynasty, it is said that the Yongle Emperor was the widow of the Yuan Shun Emperor, and through the Battle of Jingnan, the Ming Emperor secretly returned to the Yuan Dynasty, until the Manchus entered the Pass, ending the "Mandate of Yuan"; the "Han-Tibetan History Collection" written in the early Ming Dynasty said that the Yuan Dynasty was "the Mongols who took charge of the government of the Han Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty", and the late Song Emperor (barbarian Hezun) did not throw himself into the sea on the cliffs, but went to Tibet to study Buddhism, became a senior monk of the Sassaska sect, and finally reincarnated as a Han monk named Zhu Yuanzhang, seized the Mongol throne. He also gave birth to a son who looked like a Mongol named Zhu Di. The use of "reincarnation" and "cause and effect" to arrange the three dynasties of the Song Dynasty into "mutual past and future lives" is not a canonical history, but a legend of religious wild history, a simple consensus of people at that time on the greater China, and a different way for different ethnic groups to express the feelings of "community of destiny". These emotions are difficult for people who describe China based on foreign theories alone to understand.
Deep emotions can produce deep understanding, and deep understanding can complete the construction of reality. In the end, the story of the Chinese nation must be written by ourselves.
(The author of this article is the first vice president of the Central Socialist College)