Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 9

It is common to get more cars under the treatment, but in the long run, there has never been a country that has achieved reliable success by being so clever. Those who break the rules will benefit first, but "if I can go, the enemy can also go", and it is only a matter of time before the backlash occurs. In the final analysis, the mind used in human affairs has never brought practical benefits to mankind. If the most outstanding minds in a society study neither external things nor themselves, but the pros and cons of interpersonal relationships, then it is hopeless for the members of this society to live happier and happier in reality rather than in imagination.

Even in war, wisdom and tactics are not the key to victory. Civilized societies are often torn apart by barbarian cavalry, even though civilized people are smart and know many tricks. Readers of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" will be surprised that Zhuge Liang always wins battles, but the situation of Shu Kingdom is deteriorating at the same time. Many parts of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" are inconsistent with official history, but this principle is not biased.

Why don't you read "The Art of War"? No need to read it. Here, everyone is a military strategist, at least for now. In a society where the art of war is prevalent, people who don't understand it have already returned their genes to God and have completely become extinct. We don't need to read "The Art of War". We already have all kinds of wisdom to make others unhappy. As for how to make ourselves happy, we can refer to this motto - it is not written in any book, but in all books: Others' misfortune is my happiness.

Don't read books

The book mentioned here refers to the River Map and the Luoshu. The River Map is found in the Analects and Mozi, proving that this legend already existed in the Spring and Autumn Period. However, they only mentioned the River Map in two or three words, from which we know that the appearance of the Yellow River Map is a great auspicious sign. As for what the River Map depicts, whether there are words on it, or whether it is a treasure as stated in the pseudo-Ancient Book of Shangshu, it is no longer possible to verify. The Luoshu theory appeared much later, no earlier than the late Warring States period. It is impossible to know whether it was taken from folk legends or fabricated by alchemists.

The most famous statement is "The map comes out of the river, the book comes out of the Luo River, and the sage follows it" in the Book of Changes. Now we know that the earliest author of the Book of Changes was no more than the Warring States Period, but the Han people thought it was written by Julian, so the words in the Book of Changes later became the key to the establishment of Confucianism's worldview. Confucianism in the Western Han Dynasty was both complex and ambitious. The legend of the dragon horse carrying the map also originated at this time, which is the so-called "horse map coming out of the river" in the Book of Rites of Dai Da.

Dai Da's "Book of Rites" was the first to link a number chart with the Nine Palaces. The theory of the Nine Palaces also originated in the Warring States Period. It was originally said that the emperor would take turns living in nine rooms throughout the year to correspond to astronomy. Dai Da's "Book of Rites" absorbed the mathematical achievements of the Han Dynasty and proposed the system of the nine rooms in the Mingtang as "two nine four, seven five three, six one eight".

The so-called Luoshu in the Song Dynasty is this. When drawn into a diagram, it is the familiar Jiugong Diagram or the three-order form of the vertical and horizontal diagram. There is a formula called "two and four are shoulders, six and eight are feet, three on the left and seven on the right, nine on the head and one on the feet, and five is in the center", which many primary school students know now. For the ancients who had little mathematical knowledge, the more they played with this numerical diagram, the more wonderful it seemed. They even thought it was a code with the mysterious ability to explain the operation of all things.

How did the Nine Palaces become the Luoshu? It's a long story. In the Han Dynasty, there was a book called Qian Zao Du, which explained the Book of Changes. It said that Taiyi moved through the Nine Palaces from one to nine in a year, and the four seasons were born here. The directions of the Nine Palaces are just as shown in the vertical and horizontal diagrams mentioned above. Here, the Nine Palaces became related to the Book of Changes.

From the Five Dynasties to the beginning of the Song Dynasty, there was a man named Chen Tuan, who was the founder of the Book School in Yixue. No one knew what the legendary River Map looked like (the Han Dynasty had various fabrications about the Book, which were absurd and later lost), but Chen Tuan drew it out of nowhere. Others may ask, how do you know something that the ancients and saints have never said? Chen Tuan's explanation is that the order of the world is meticulous and accurate, so it can be inferred. The map drawn by Chen Tuan was collectively called the Dragon Map. It was not until Liu Mu of the Northern Song Dynasty that the River Map and the Luoshu were divided. The River Map is a nine-palace map, and the Luoshu is a five-element generation map, which is a little more complicated than the nine-palace map.

This is the opposite of the name we are familiar with. It turned out that there was another person named Cai Yuanding in the Southern Song Dynasty. He felt that Liu Mu's theory had a Taoist flavor, so he modified it and made the five elements generation diagram the River Chart and the nine palace diagram the Luoshu to match the old theories of Confucian scholars and reconcile with Neo-Confucianism. Cai Yuanding was a friend and student of Zhu Xi. Zhu Xi accepted his interpretation, and this theory gradually became orthodox through Zhu Xi, who had a great influence. The River Chart and Luoshu that people talk about today, whether in meaning or diagram, all use Cai Yuanding's definition.

I have said so much because I want to let readers who are not familiar with this matter understand the origin and development of the River Map and Luoshu. As for the belief that "the River Map and Luoshu are the roots of Chinese culture", I don't dare to worry about it. The first sentence of a paper I have seen is "According to the "Qi Men Dun Jia", Huangdi dreamed that the gods gave him books at night, and a dragon carried the map out of the Luo River, which shows that people began to use Luoshu in the era of Huangdi." Qi Men Dun Jia...Huangdi...explanation..., each word is shocking. The root of this "culture" may indeed be in the River Map and Luoshu.

Although the book theory is far-fetched, if we carefully analyze it, we may be able to see the spirit of the ancients. The inherent deficiency of Confucianism is that it has no cosmology, so Han Confucianists took the Taoist theory of the origin of all things and the world order of the five elements to establish their own theory of heaven and earth. The book school of the Song Dynasty still inherited this ambition, but it is a pity that hundreds of years later, it still insisted on the childish world diagram, which was childish for the Han people and rustic for the Song people.

Because of its impure source, the book theory was questioned by Ouyang Xiu and others in the Song Dynasty. A group of great scholars in the Qing Dynasty attached great importance to textual research and spared no effort to criticize such conjectures. From the perspective of empirical evidence, the book theory is vulnerable, but on the other hand, it can be seen that Neo-Confucianism is becoming more and more the philosophy with the least philosophical temperament. In comparison, perhaps the book theory is more lovable.

It is just that this doctrine, like some other brother doctrines in ancient times, believes that the simplest, most primitive, and least intellectually demanding theories are the most correct ones. The worship of ancestors combined with dissatisfaction with real life, the love of order combined with disgust for complicated physics, the need for ultimate answers combined with impatience with the accumulation of knowledge, this is the temperament of the ancients, and perhaps also our own.