Wentang

Chapter 455 Academic Controversy (Two in One)

Doctrinal disputes are not like wars, where the winners and losers of wars are clear at a glance, and if they are not convinced, they will all be killed.Doctrinal disputes are more ideological. If I don’t agree with you, I don’t agree with you. If I say it a thousand times, I won’t agree with you. No matter how reasonable you are, it’s useless.

There is a good saying that your reasoning is worthless in front of others.

That's why he didn't catch Jiang Ning He's family, there was no need for that.

It is very difficult to destroy a family that has been passed down for hundreds of years just like this.

Of course, the main reason is that the He family took the initiative to admit defeat.

Speaking of which, the Patriarch of the He family is also a ruthless person, knowing that the matter is irreversible, he decisively admits defeat and admits that his family's research on Xiao Dai's Book of Rites is not as good as Yue Shan's.

In fact, it is acknowledging the existence of universities and acknowledging the Four Books divided by Yueshan.

The other aristocratic families are also very wise not to attack this point, and they have reached a consensus.

We admit that we lost this round, and we will continue on another battlefield.

It can be seen from this that this academic dispute involves too many aspects, and it is unrealistic to end it with one person and one book.

It will take a long time to decide who wins and who loses. In the end, whoever has a more comprehensive and perfect theory, which is more in line with the social needs of the time and caters to the rulers, will be the winner.

Moreover, the winner does not take all. The loser can still survive and pass on his knowledge until it recovers or disappears in the long river of history.

Therefore, the publication of Yue Shan's "Education" did not make the old school surrender, nor did it quell the dispute, but instead made the battle more intense.

But his book is just as crucial.

It has perfected the theory of the new school, strengthened the confidence of the new school, and provided a powerful weapon for the new school to fight against the old school.

At the same time, many neutrals or conservatives found resonance after reading this book, chose to join the new school, and further strengthened the new school.

Although everyone is fighting fiercely now, it is because this struggle has just begun and everyone still feels it is fresh.

In addition, the new school has just emerged, and the old school wants to take the opportunity to nip it in the bud.They drop the idea once they find it impossible.

After that, there was a protracted tug-of-war. Everyone had nothing to do with their mouths, spreading their own knowledge and suppressing each other's theories.

After playing for a long time, everyone is tired and there are not so many things to do. Just do whatever you need to do, and leave the rest to time.

As for whether he could win in the end, Yue Shan wasn't worried at all.

It is the imperial court that really plays a key role in this battle, and the imperial court prefers whoever can win.Who does Li Shimin lean towards?

Even now, the two books, The Analects of Confucius, Justice and Education, have openly appeared in the Imperial College, and all government students have a copy.

Although it has not been officially listed as a compulsory subject, from time to time, a gentleman will ask a few questions about the above content.

Of course, the tyrants of the aristocratic family will not be arrested without a fight, and dispatched the censor to impeach Kong Yingda for using public affairs for personal gain.

As for why Kong Yingda was impeached... because this matter was really not an order from Li Shimin, it was Kong Yingda himself who added these two books to the must-read list for government students.

It is not a problem to say that he used power for personal gain.

But who is sitting on the dragon chair?Yue Shan's future father-in-law, will he punish Kong Yingda for his crime?So Li Shimin and a puddle of mud muddied the matter.

If he tried it with someone else who he didn't like, he would get impatient if he dared to write books in the official school.

Afterwards, Kong Yingda did not restrain himself, and directly published the "Analects of Confucius" in the name of Confucius' direct descendants, and claimed that this was the original intention of his ancestor Confucius.

As I said before, the ancients wrote books without sentence reading, and sentence segmentation became a big problem. Different interpretations of sentence segmentation may mean two completely different meanings.

This is the origin of the rotten stalk used by online novels in later generations, "people can make it from what they can't make it known".

Yue Shan proposed punctuation marks in the Five Books of Yue Xue, and quickly promoted the world to solve this problem.However, there is still no conclusion on how to sentence sentences in the classics left by the ancients.

So now there are several different versions of the Analects circulating on the market.

Kong Yingda himself is a well-known Confucianist all over the world, and he is also a direct descendant of Confucius. The Analects he put forward has special significance.

The new school is naturally happy, while the old school is like mourning.Everyone knows that Kong Yingda is the core figure of the new school, and his Analects must be for the purpose of the new school.

Sure enough, his version of the Analects fully echoes Yue Shan's Analects of Justice.

It's not that Kong Yingda is agreeing with Yue Shan or something, but that Yue Shan's new learning is too much to his liking.

As mentioned above, Kong Yingda is also trying to find a way to reinterpret the Analects of Confucius.It’s just that due to the limitations of the times, I couldn’t break through the bottleneck and write something new. Later, I got a general idea after being reminded by Yue Shan.

But before he could turn his thoughts into articles, Yue Shan's Analects of Confucius came out.The key is that the main idea of ​​the Analects of Confucius is consistent with his thinking, and it is a step further than his thinking.

This is also one of the reasons why he was willing to help Yue Shan and later joined Xinxue.

His sentence-reading version of "The Analects of Confucius" is different from Yue Shan's Analects of Confucius.

The latter is the interpretation and expansion of the Analects, he just added punctuation to the Analects.

But don't underestimate these punctuation marks. Sentence reading has too much influence on a book. To put it to the extreme, a difference of a comma may affect the artistic conception of the whole book.

The most important thing is the right to speak. Whoever marked the version you use will naturally have a certain tendency towards this person when you stand in line.If the world uses Kong Yingda's version of "The Analects of Confucius", then the new learning will also benefit.

The old school naturally didn't want to be caught without a fight, so various gossips spread, saying that Kong Yingda's misinterpretation of the knowledge of his ancestors was an unworthy descendant.

Some people simply say that although Confucianism originated from Confucius, after thousands of years of inheritance, it has become the knowledge of the people of the world and not the knowledge of the Confucian family, and Kong Yingda's version of the Analects of Confucius has no meaning.

It can be said that the Confucian family, which was originally invincible, was completely thrown into the water because of this book, and it was both prosperous and humiliated with Xinxue.

After learning about this incident, Yue Shan quickly found Kong Yingda and advised him not to take this risk.

Kong Yingda said bluntly, "It is the Confucian family who benefit the most from the advent of new learning. My Confucian family is not a person who just sits and enjoys it. Whether it is to restore the original knowledge of the ancestors or to make the Confucian family rich, they must participate."

What else could Yue Shan say, he naturally left happily.

Although the old school has repeatedly slandered Kong Yingda, the influence of Confucius' direct descendants is still too great, and more and more scholars have accepted his version of "The Analects of Confucius".

The following new schools are also spreading rapidly. Although they are not as powerful as the old schools, the gap is narrowing every day.

At this time, Wang Ji was unwilling to be lonely and took out his "Zhouyi Zhu".

He himself is a master of the Book of Changes, has studied the Book of Changes all his life, and has a set of book-written understandings.Now it's just sorted out into a book, so it doesn't take long.

The appearance of "Book of Changes" seemed to add fuel to the fire, making the already fierce dispute between the old and new schools even more intense.

And the new school has gained a great momentum with one more classic, while the momentum of the old school, on the contrary, has fallen back a bit.

Not only that, the appearance of "Book of Changes" seems to be a signal, and many people from aristocratic families or people with family backgrounds have stood up or spoken out or published books.

Among them, Meng Shi is the most enthusiastic.

In the previous thousand years, Mencius' knowledge was not valued by others, and the descendants of Mencius naturally could not enjoy the shadow of their ancestors.

Now Xinxue elevates Mencius's status as a Confucian sub-sage, and from then on their Meng family is the home of the sub-sages.

And coincidentally, this generation of Meng family patriarch Meng Yao may not have any other skills, the best thing is reading, pretending to be knowledgeable.

Not only did he stand up to support the new learning, but he also took the initiative to take out the "Mencius" in his family's collection and his research experience in the past dynasties.

In addition to the Meng family, there are also several aristocratic families who study the doctrine of the mean who also stood up to support the new study.The Doctrine of the Mean was also not taken seriously before, and Yue Shan listed it as one of the Four Books to exaggerate its importance. All the families who studied the Doctrine of the Mean benefited accordingly, and they naturally had to stand up and support it.

Moreover, these people not only stood up and waved their flags, but also modified their own inheritance according to the logic of the new study in order to join the new study, making it more in line with the new study.

During this period, a very unexpected thing happened to Yue Shan, that is, the heads of these families came to him with the books compiled by themselves to "rectify".

At that time, Yue Shan was still wondering, when did he have such a high influence?

It was Wang Ji who solved the confusion for him: "The reason why these people came to you was not to ask you to help revise, but to test whether you have any plans to write "Mencius Justice" and "The Mean Justice."

Only then did Yue Shan understand what was going on.

He was the first person to elevate Daxue, Mencius, and Zhongyong to the same height as the Analects of Confucius, and he compiled the book "Education" based on "University".

So in the eyes of everyone, he must have had a deep study of the two books of Mencius and the Doctrine of the Mean.

The Meng family and those aristocratic families who study the mean are afraid that he will suddenly write another book like Mencius justice and the mean justice, and they will be the ones who will be beaten in the face.

Therefore, they did not dare to take out their own research results rashly when they were not sure about Yueshan's plan.

But if he wanted to take advantage of the new learning, he couldn't do nothing, so he tried Yue Shan's tone under the guise of "Ax Zheng".

Yue Shan didn't know whether to laugh or cry about this matter, but he was also secretly happy. This is influence.

He carefully read the books compiled by these several companies and found that they were indeed unique, but due to the constraints of the times, there were still many places that were too conservative.He made some suggestions based on his own memory.

In the end, I promise again and again that what you have written is already very good and more in line with my ideas, and I will not be able to write anything better than yours in a short time.

Even so, after these companies went back, they dared to release it after revising it according to his suggestion, and claimed that their interpretation was guided by Yue Longshou.

Yue Longshou is Yue Shan, because he lives in Longshou Mountain, so many people privately call him Longshou Layman, and some people call him Yue Longshou.

In fact, everyone thinks too highly of Yue Shan. He proposed the concept of the Four Books entirely because later generations have the saying of the Four Books and the Five Classics.I don’t know much about Mencius’s Zhongyong, especially after reading the full text of Zhongyong.

But it would be a lie to say that he has no thoughts of his own at all.

In his previous life, he had seen too much information, which was stored in his memory in the form of fragments.It is not an easy task to combine these memory fragments into a smooth and self-consistent logical system, which requires a certain amount of reading and life experience.

The two books, The Analects of Confucius, Justice and Education exhausted all his life experiences.Although there are still a large number of memory fragments in my mind, I have no ability to form them into a new theoretical system.

Forcibly writing it is nothing more than copying the contents of the first two books.

Therefore, preparing to write a new book internally in the short term is not about modesty, nor is it to reassure others, but really powerless.

But in the eyes of others, he is modest and has received a lot of praise.

With the examples of the Meng family and several aristocratic families studying the mean, more and more neutral literati have chosen to turn to the new school.

With the support of these people, Xinxue finally took a crucial step, entering the big literary circle from a small circle.

It is no longer a dispute between aristocratic families and new dignitaries, but a dispute over the academic direction of the entire literary world.

Yue Shan was also very happy to see Xinxue grow stronger day by day.Especially the addition of the family headed by the Meng family was beyond his expectation.

To be honest, he didn't know there was another Yashengmeng's family at all.No way, people in later generations only know the Confucian family in Qufu, and basically no one mentions the Yasheng Mencius family.

They are not descendants of Mencius or people close to them, and few people pay attention to them.

But this does not mean that their inheritance does not exist, on the contrary, it has been passed down for thousands of years.And from generation to generation, people have become officials, and every few generations, capable people are born to continue the family's glory.

Leaving aside, let’s just say that Meng Haoran, the Tang Dynasty poet we are most familiar with, is a descendant of Mencius.There is also the aforementioned Meng Yao, his son Meng Shen, an official to Fengge Sheren, and the governor of Tongzhou.

And Meng Shen is the best at maintaining health. He lived to be 93 years old and wrote the world's earliest surviving dietotherapy monograph "Diet Therapy Materia Medica", known as the originator of dietotherapy.

So even leaving aside Mencius, the Meng family is a family that has been passed down for thousands of years, and has considerable influence among scholars.Their choices can affect a large number of scholars' perceptions of new learning.

The surrender of some aristocratic families has allowed the new learning to take root in the literary world, and no one can use "pseudo-learning" to denigrate them.

Even if Yue Shan is gone now, his title as the founder of the new learning will always exist, and there is no need to worry about being snatched away.

It is a happy thing for Xinxue to grow and take root in the literary world, but at the same time, it also has a lot of negative effects. For example, it is difficult to lead a large team.

Every aristocratic family that joins Xinxue has its own interests, and the Meng family is to promote the learning of their ancestors and improve their family status.The few small families who studied the mean also wanted to expand their own influence.

There are several studies on the mean, each with its own interpretation, and there is naturally competition among them.This kind of competition will not disappear with the addition of new schools, but will become more intense.

There is nothing Yue Shan can do about this situation, everyone is gathered because of knowledge, and there is no affiliation relationship between them.

Those aristocratic families may give him some face as the founder of the new school, but they won't listen to him when it comes to fundamental interests.

But if you think about it carefully, it is not worth making a fuss. There are also contradictions among the old schools.This situation has not changed for thousands of years, and naturally it will not change because of the emergence of new learning.

As long as everyone calls themselves Xinxue when speaking to the outside world, it will be fine.

On this day, after Yueshan sent away another patriarch of a small family who came to ask for "axe correction", Bao Dalin came over and handed him a letter.

The letter was sent from Lingnan, but when he opened it, he was surprised to find that a long-lost name was mentioned in it.

　The big chapters are not easy to divide, so they are put together.

　　By the way, please ask for a monthly ticket recommendation ticket or something, please.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)