Tan Sitong: There is a heart to kill thieves, unable to return to heaven and die as they deserve

Beizheng South Road, Liuyang City, Hunan Province, is a lively street with bustling people and cars. A large mansion, quaint vermilion lacquer, extraordinarily peaceful, this is the former residence of Tan Sitong. Tan Sitong (1865-1898), a native of Liuyang (present-day Liuyang, Hunan) in the Qing Dynasty, was a revolutionary and thinker. He was a famous figure in the "Hundred Days Restoration" movement at the end of the Qing Dynasty, one of the "Six Gentlemen of Wushu", a modern bourgeois enlightenment thinker, and inspired generations of Huxiang students to devote themselves to the national salvation movement.

Teenagers study

Tan Sitong was born into a feudal bureaucratic family, and his father JiXun (字敬甫) was an official in Hubei. Tan Sitong began to read the Four Books and Five Classics from the age of 5 and learned to compose poems and fill in words. The young Tan Sitong was unusually intelligent, courageous, and well-written. When he studied with his father in Beijing, he studied under the Liuyang scholar Ouyang Zhonghu. Ouyang greatly admired wang chuanshan's scholarship and integrity, and Tan Sitong later admired Wang Chuanshan and was influenced by it.

Tan Sitong read extensively, pursued the benefits of the world, and was extremely disgusted with the traditional Shiwen Eight Strands, and once wrote down the four words "How can this be reasonable" in textbooks. Tan Si was open-minded and open-minded, serving righteousness for others, and admiring the ancient warriors. At the age of 12, he began to learn sword martial arts with the "Tong Gibbon" Hu Qi, and the "Righteous Hero" Great Sword King Wu. Although Wang Wu was despised by the orthodox feudal scholars, Tan Sitong always maintained a close friendship with him. Wang Wu's spirit of unruliness, heroism and generosity, and rebellion against the world certainly had an impact on Tan Sitong. In the same year, he also studied Chinese classics systematically with Tu Qixian as a teacher, and came into contact with natural sciences such as arithmetic and Gezhi.

In 1877, his father was released from the Beijing official and granted the Gansu Gongqin Jiedao. Since then, Tan Sitong has traveled and lived in his father's Lanzhou Renshou office many times, and continued to study. He also often rode with his father's servants in the northwest wilderness, climbing mountains and wading through the sand. At night, tents are set up, bonfires are lit, wine is fought, and pianos are sung. This unbridled life and the spirit of bravery and perseverance have prompted him to like "the unruly writing" and "talk about the strategy of the overlord of the world".

In his youth, Tan Sitong was forced by his father's orders, and he went to the north and south provinces for the sixth time, but because he did not like the examination of shiwen, he repeatedly failed the examination. Therefore, in 1884, Tan Sitong chose to run away from home and traveled to Zhili (present-day Hebei), Gansu, Xinjiang, Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, Shandong, Shanxi and other places, traveling more than 80,000 miles, observing the terroir, making friends with righteous people, visiting famous families, and opening his eyes. He traveled back and forth to various places in the north and south, looked at the social terroir, and extensively viewed the "victorious traces of the situation," and also witnessed the situation of mourning in the wilderness and the displacement of the disaster victims, which greatly deepened his understanding of society and sympathy for the suffering masses at the lower levels.

In 1888, under the guidance of the famous scholar Liu Renxi, he began to seriously study the works of Wang Fuzhi and others, absorbing the essence of democracy and materialistic ideas in them, and at the same time widely collecting and reading books that introduced Western science, history, and politics at that time to enrich himself.

Throw yourself into the law

In the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War of 1894, the Qing army suffered a crushing defeat, lost power and land, and the crowd was indignant. On May 2, 1895, Kang Youwei united more than 1,000 people who participated in the examination in Beijing to petition the Qing government, demanding that peace be rejected, the capital moved, and the law be changed. The deep national catastrophe scorched Tan Sitong's heart, and he was indignant about imperialist aggression, resolutely opposed the signing of a peace treaty, and was extremely indignant at the Compromise Act of the Qing Government "tolerating the lives of forty-seven million people in one fell swoop." Under the influence of the trend of changing the law, he began to "examine the changes in the world over the past few decades and study the facts of them" and painstakingly studied the fundamental plan to save the nation from peril. He felt that "where the trend of great transformation is, where the atmosphere is drowned, and those who are not saved by the old", it is necessary to carry out reforms to the decadent feudal autocratic system in order to save the people and survive.

In 1896, Tan Sitong became acquainted with Wu Yanzhou, Xia Zengyou, Wu Jiqing and others in the capital, and Wu and Xia were all famous Buddhist scholars of a generation, and Tan Sitong fell in love with Buddhism. Although Tan Sitong studied Buddhism very late, his foundation for learning was extremely thick, and what he learned in his early years was complex and profound, and he could see everything from Kong Mengmozhuang, Theory of Mind, and Christian Science, and only by studying Buddhism could he unify all kinds of learning in Buddhism, and gradually take Buddhism as the basis and guide his righteousness of "benevolent learning". Tan Sitong came to the top with a grand wish and a refined heart, a total of more than a year, and was able to visit the Three Treasures, especially in the Fa Xiang and Hua Yan Erzong.

In the summer and autumn of 1897, Tan Sitong wrote an important work called Renxue, which was the first philosophical work of the Reform School and constructed a new theoretical system of Chinese law change. "Renxue" collects the "Analects", "Li Ji", "Zhuangzi", "ShiJi" and other Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist, and Ink reforms, and adopts the western ways of reform such as democracy, freedom, and human rights, and proposes to "take Western law as appropriate to make up for the demise of ancient Chinese law", which is praised by the ideological circles as "a shocking text" and "a declaration of human rights".

After "Renxue", Tan Sitong began the practical practice of changing the fa. In 1897, Tan Sitong founded the Shiwu School, built the Liuyang Confucian Temple Arithmetic Museum, and published the Xiangxue New Daily, which widely disseminated the idea of restoration. Tan Sitong said: "The people are the foundation, and the king is the end." If the monarch is arrogant and indulgent and cannot do things for the world, the common people have the right to abolish him. To implement the change of law is to abolish the absolute monarchy and return the government to the people, which is the fundamental way to save the country! ”

In early 1898, Tan Sitong accepted the invitation of Chen Baozhen, the governor of Hunan, and returned to Hunan to assist in the new policy. He first strengthened the strength of the reform school in the Shiwu Academy: he served as a sub-teacher himself, arranged for Tang Cai to be a permanent Chinese teacher, assisted Liang Qichao, who was appointed as the chief teacher, and vigorously publicized the theory of reform of the law. Confucius's doctrines of restructuring, equality, and civil rights have taken advantage of the wind and wave and have become more and more magnificent.

In March 1898, Tan Sitong, Tang Caichang and others founded the Southern Society, a restoration group. With the aim of uniting the restoration forces of the southern provinces, stressing patriotic principles and the law of salvation, the Southern Society "gave speeches on the general situation of the nations and the principles of political science." In order to strengthen the propaganda of the theory of changing the law, Tan also founded the Xiang Bao, as the organ newspaper of the Southern Society, with him as the chief writer. Due to his efforts to the Hunan New Deal, he is known as a "New Deal talent".

After the failure of the Penghu Reform Law, Tan Sitong tied his hands when he had the opportunity to escape, determined to die to martyr the cause of the Law Change, and used his own sacrifice to make a final resistance against the feudal stubborn forces. When he was dying, he also said loudly: "I have the heart to kill the thief, I am powerless to return to heaven, and I will die where I want. Hurry! With a kind of tragic feat of martyrdom, Tan Sitong ended the efforts of the Xiangxue spirit of "applying to the world" on the traditional road, and opened up a new road of salvation for Huxiang Zhishi.

Source: "Learning to Strengthen the Nation" learning platform