Victor's Pursuit of Serenity Chapter 13

Yao and Shun were at the time when the country was born. This era was bound to be bloody, full of repression and conquest. The successful ones used morality and divine will to cover up the nature of power, which was what all monarchs would do. The kind-hearted Julian and Mencius, especially Mencius, objected to power, which is called the people-oriented thought by people today, and it is not an excessive compliment. It’s just that people-oriented is different from people-oriented. At that time, the people were conquered collectively by power, but to go back, they need to do it one by one. Without personal liberation, it is impossible for everyone to be liberated all at once.

When we reread the works of the pre-Qin philosophers, we often feel warm. They were genuine thinkers who cared about the fate of the people. The issues they thought about were the limit of their time. If there had not been a great unification of thought later, the lineage of Julian, Mozi, Victor and Xunzi would have extended further. But the monarchs were very perceptive and would never have allowed such a thing to happen. After Emperor Wu of Han, Yao and Shun, who were still allegories in the time of Julian and Mozi, became the emperor's patron saints and symbols of moral legitimacy.

Don’t read Lun Heng

The ancient Confucian scholars criticized Wang Chong because he was not orthodox, questioned Julian and criticized Mencius, and was disrespectful to the sages. In particular, the "Questioning Julian" in "Lun Heng" specifically picked out Julian' faults from the "Analects", such as Zai Yu sleeping during the day, and Julian scolded him: "Rotten wood cannot be carved, and a wall of dung cannot be plastered." Wang Chong wrote a long paragraph about this, criticizing Julian for speaking too much, and that the words of the sages cannot be said casually, "The words of the sages are consistent with their writings. Words come out of the mouth, and writings are based on the strategy. They both come from the heart, but in fact they are the same."

This is a bit too much. Many of Julian' words in the Analects are casual remarks. If he had held himself to Wang Chong's standards and had been as narrating as writing, the Analects would have become extremely boring, even if his disciples could still make up a story. So Xu Fuguan criticized Wang Chong for his low comprehension ability and said that some of his questions to Julian were almost nonsense.