The world is unpredictable, and history teaches you to choose. But is history really useful to us? How does looking at history with the eyes of changing situations help us ordinary people's lives?
There is such a person, who has gone through five dynasties and used his own personal experience to tell us how important it is for individuals to see through the truth of history, and he is the scholar and doctor of the Southern and Northern Dynasties period: Yan Zhitui.
Yan Zhitui in his youth can be said to have witnessed the most prosperous time of the Southern Dynasty. With the outbreak of Hou Jing's rebellion, the prosperity of the Southern Dynasty was in vain, and soon after the Liang Dynasty was also destroyed, and the conqueror was the Western Wei regime from the northern Guanzhong region. Yan Zhitui became a prisoner of the Western Wei army.
Interestingly, just two years later, Western Wei itself perished and was replaced by a regime called Northern Zhou, so Yan Zhitui wanted to take the opportunity to flee the place. After going through countless hardships, he finally settled in the Northern Qi regime in the North China Plain, and lived a stable life of about twenty years. Subsequently, Northern Qi was destroyed by Northern Zhou, and Yan Zhitui once again became a captive of the country.
History is always strikingly similar, dramatic scenes repeat themselves, and just four years later, the Northern Zhou regime, which had just unified the north, itself perished. Then the Sui Emperor Yang Jian took the throne and began the reign of the Sui Dynasty.
After listening to such a complicated process, the head is about to explode, right?
In a nutshell, Yan Zhitui experienced five dynasties in his lifetime: the Liang Dynasty, the Western Wei Dynasty, the Northern Qi Dynasty, the Northern Zhou Dynasty, and the Sui Dynasty, and he witnessed the demise of the previous four dynasties.
Such a complicated life must have allowed Yan Zhitui to see a lot of things that ordinary people can't see. He wrote many of his feelings in the chaotic world in a book called "Yan Family Training". Hopefully, these lessons will help his children and grandchildren understand the world and grow up healthily.
When Yan Zhitui lived in Northern Qi, because the highest ruling class in Northern Qi at that time was the Xianbei nobles, who spoke the Xianbei language, and there was a Northern Qi emperor who liked to play the pipa the most, so one of his scholars' friends taught his son to learn the Xianbei language and pipa.
What this scholar meant was that young people should have to excel, not only to learn well, but also to learn the skills of pleasing the emperor and the dignitaries. Speaking xianbei language and playing the pipa is to get close to and serve the dignitaries and nobles and to do what they like. Finally, this scholar also said to Yan Zhitii with considerable experience, it is also very important to learn these things!
Yan Zhitui questioned this: Will the noble person in front of you always be a noble person in the future? In order to please him, you don't even want an independent personality, in case one day he is knocked to the ground and becomes a prisoner of the order, not to mention whether he will be affected by him, what value will your efforts have at that time? What else can be rewarded?
So he recorded this matter in the "Yan Family Training" and warned his descendants not to do this. By serving people, the first independent personality will be gone, not to mention that no matter how well these high-ranking officials and nobles are served, they may not be able to become high officials themselves!
The scholar's distorted educational philosophy is actually a typical representative of the utilitarian ideas that we usually criticize. One of the characteristics of so-called utilitarianism is that it only looks at the present and ignores the complexity of the future. This kind of thinking seems to be a lack of foresight for the future, and one of its important roots is precisely the lack of insight into history.
Yan Zhitui has experienced too much and seen too much, so there will be such a real doubt. Before coming to Northern Qi, he had witnessed the demise of the Liang Dynasty and the Western Wei Dynasty, and had seen many miserable lives that were still beautiful yesterday and had become prisoners of the order today. Even Yan Zhitui himself had experienced such a process.
These rich life experiences have been sublimated into a profound reflection on history, so Yan Zhitui has a wiser judgment than ordinary people. Since yesterday's wealth cannot be guaranteed forever, do you know that the nobles you serve today are not tomorrow's prisoners?
Yan Zhitui's prediction was very accurate, and the Northern Qi regime did not last long. At the time of the fall of Northern Qi, those who sought to attain enlightenment only by serving the nobles of Northern Qi, in most cases, had no other way to do anything other than to be prisoners of the same rank?
If life is unfortunate to encounter chaos, it is difficult to resist the fate swept by the rolling tide of history. But at any time, we can choose whether we are willing to be independent and self-reliant.
Through this story, Yan Zhitui told the world that even if they cannot change the fate of displacement, they must always take their lives into their own hands. Don't easily entrust your future to others, not only because it is too humble, but even from a pragmatic point of view, the risk is high.
The host, Jiang Peng, is an associate professor in the Department of History of Fudan University, who has published "The Feast of the Northern Song Dynasty and the Rise of Song Studies", "The Essentials of Virtue and Government: Wisdom in the > of Zizhi Tongjian <", and participated in the editing of the "Translation of Matteo Ricci's Chinese".
10 historians from Fudan, Nanda, the Academy of Social Sciences and other famous universities used 180 episodes of courses to analyze the great changes in Chinese history, explore the reasons for success or failure, and sort out the fundamental context of China's 3500 years of development.
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