—Yang Zhu: A Mountain That Chinese Literati Can't Bypass (4)
Paying attention to the present and paying attention to today is the golden age that each of us individuals must take good care of, is the logical starting point for Chinese life pursuit, and is also the best place to reflect the meaning of life.
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Mencius, as a master of debate, is obviously "attacking one point, not the rest." Turn a blind eye to "knowing that the world is not to be taken". Yang Zhu also has a different interpretation of "the ancient people lose a millimeter of profit and the world is not with it": Oh, you think too much, "the world is not a dime". For the so-called hypothesis, Yang Zhu was dismissive. And this is actually a direct denial of his own theory that "the ancient people lost a millimeter of profit and the world is not with it": just like the "one dime" of Yasheng Mencius could not quell the wars that were raging in the Warring States era; the "one dime" of Kang Shengren could not save the demise of the Qing Dynasty, and the "one dime" of the ancients could not benefit the world. Yang Zhu used his cold eyes to pierce the multicolored foam of the dream illusion. This is the strangeness of Yang Zhu. And Meng Sunyang, the "disciple of the Yang clan", led people to the direction of "Guisheng".
Life and death are the two forms that must exist in any living body in the world, including human beings, and they are also two insurmountable stages in the process of life: there is no death without life, and there must be death in life. The description of the state of life before birth and after death, both in ancient times and today, is a grand narrative, a joint point that determines the direction of human philosophy. Yang Zhu used the logic unique to Chinese philosophers and Yang Zhu's unique cold words to outline a new world view of Chinese's understanding of life: there is no past life, no future life, only the present.
Yang Zhu said: "Those who are different from all things are born, and those who are the same die." In life, there are virtuous and foolish, noble, and inferior, which are different; when there is death, there is rot and destruction, which is the same. Although, the wise and the foolish, the noble, can not be, stink, destroy, can not also be. Therefore, life is not born, death is not death, virtuous is not virtuous, foolish is not foolish, noble is not precious, and lowly is not lowly. However, all things are born and die together, Qi Xian qi yu, Qi Gui Qi qi lowly. Ten years to die, a hundred years to die. The benevolent saint also dies, and the fierce fool also dies. If you are born, you will be Yao and Shun, and if you die, you will rot your bones; if you are born, you will rot your bones; if you are alive, you will rot your bones. Rotten bones, familiar with its difference? And fun to live, xi after death? ”
For human beings, although the process of life will be very different, even a difference of 108,000 miles, such as virtuous and foolish, noble and lowly, such as Yao Shun and Jie. But life and death are the same: Qi Sheng Qi Dies, Qi Xian Qi Yu, Qi Gui Qi Qi After death, a person becomes nothing but rotten bones, just as trees become mounds of wood and ash. After death, man will not be reincarnated and will once again embark on a cycle of rebirth; after death, he will not go to another world ruled by God that we do not know at the moment, there is no heaven and no hell. In the face of death, Yang Zhu showed the calmness of the ancients and the latter. From the history of the development of world religions, it is the idle class like Yang Zhu who, because of their understanding of death, created a religion about the afterlife to place the soul of this world. Yang Zhu's view of death excludes the so-called religious feelings that disturb the world today, and concludes that "and fun is born, let alone after death?" "To a large extent, the desire of the Chinese leisure class to pursue the afterlife is broken—only today, although many people in the Chinese scholar class still believe in fate, in a kind of domination of the world and their own mysterious power in the emperor's queen and queen earth, this is only a pragmatic attitude, and they have never had the devout religious beliefs of Western Christians and Middle Eastern Islamists." The path of Chinese thought, since the time of Yang Zhu, has parted ways with Western thought represented by ancient Greece. Paying attention to the present and paying attention to today is the golden age that each of us individuals must take good care of, is the logical starting point for Chinese life pursuit, and is also the best place to reflect the meaning of life. Even the karmic retribution of the universal belief in the folk is only a reasonable extension of the "present" in the Chinese folk context—the "now" and "today" of future generations.
There is nothing left of life except the same birth beginning and death ending. In the eyes of some Western scholars, Yang Zhu's attitude toward death has a heroic spirit. And there is no religious feeling, lack of reverence for the world before and after death, is a common phenomenon among ancient Chinese literati, but most people are twisted and pinched, such as ancient wizards, they believe that there is a mysterious force that dominates today, but points to their ancestors; Confucianism is largely the secularization of wizards, advocating thick burial, but the dead and the living are still in the same world - from the emperor's family temple to the ancestral hall of ordinary people's homes, from the death day of the ancestors to the day of the major festivals of the Chinese. Chinese and our departed ancestors have never been separated. In ancient China, no one deliberately constructed the world before and after death, and what kind of picture it was, except for scattered conjectures, did not form a systematic understanding of the world coming. It was only under the stimulation of Buddhism that Chinese Taoism reluctantly emerged, constructing another world of Buddha and not Buddha—in fact, it was just a mixture of Chinese folk witchcraft and Western religions. Yang Zhu is not the first literati to think that there are only rotten bones in the afterlife and after death, and of course he is not the last, he just expresses the inherent concepts of most chinese literati more bluntly and systematically: people die and disappear, and everything returns to nature. It is precisely this orientation of the Chinese literati that social governance in a Chinese society that lacks religious constraints lacks a strong internal constraint. This should be one of the deepest motivations for Chinese intellectuals to be enthusiastic about politics from ancient times to the present: finding a way to make up for the lack has become a lifelong goal of Chinese intellectuals.
Yang Zhu, who faced death calmly, was the founding father of Chinese precisionism. In the era when arithmetic was not developed, he began to accurately calculate the length of life: "A hundred years, the life expectancy is great." Whoever has a hundred years has no one. There is one, the child holds to catch the old, and the few live in its half. The place where night sleeps, the place where day asleep is sent, and it is almost half of it. Pain and sorrow, death and fear, and a few lives in the middle of it. In the course of more than ten years, those who have been self-sufficient, and those who have died in the middle of the world, have also died for a while. Then what about the life of a human being? "Suppose that people can live a hundred years - a long life of 100 years is just a good wish for most people, and in a hundred years, the time to be able to live soberly and happily on their own is only a hundred halves, halves, halves, and then halves again - in today's tide of China's anti-corruption campaign, some people passionately say that they must learn to calculate political accounts, economic accounts, human accounts, and so on, which obviously has Yang Zhu's legacy. Yang Zhu borrowed the mouth of Chao and Mu Zhi and lamented that life is short, and life is so fragile that it is facing the threat of death at any time: it is easy to die in the face of the difficulties of life. Based on this, Yang Zhu raised a question that everyone must seriously consider: "Then the life of a human being is also a matter of life" "With a difficult life, it is easy to die, but what can be remembered?"
In the world, we must not only be in the midst of the ravages of cruel nature - endless natural disasters, but also in the various nets woven for us by society, we have to fight with the sky, with the earth, with people, with the times and society in which we live. This is actually an important life problem that has been explored by mankind for thousands of years, and it has endured for a long time. Only to this day, we still question this from time to time and think seriously. It is said that the ancient poems written by the Han Dynasty people have opened up a more explicit plan: "Life is less than a hundred, and it is often worried about a thousand years." The days are short and the nights are long, so why not swim with candles? For the sake of le dang, why stay in Laiz? "In today's words, grasp the happiness of the moment and live happily every day." And this plan should belong to one of Yang Xue's plans—whether Yang Zhu admits that the author is his own disciple or not. The reason for this conclusion is that Yang Zhu himself has a clear answer: "And fun to live."