The Ming Dynasty's Five Hundred Years

Chapter 221 In front of Fengtian Palace
Li Xianmu's voice echoed among the many palaces in front of the Fengtian Hall, reaching everyone's ears perfectly.

Even though they knew why they were there today, the people in the square still felt as if they had been transported to another world.

Is this still the Confucian world of the past?
The four people listed by Li Xianmu are naturally loyal men who have been praised and worshipped for a long time and are idols of countless scholars. However, when they are actually elevated to the status of the Ten Sages of the Confucian Temple, there is a sense of absurdity that comes from nowhere.

It's not that I think they lack ability or virtue, but rather that these people are too close to the times!

The idea of ​​revering the past while belittling the present, following the ancient kings but not the later ones, and adhering to the ancient sages but not the later ones, has been a long-standing concept. The re-election of the Confucian Temple was not merely about replacing a few people; it represented a huge change in the ideology of all aspects of the world.

This is why some people risk offending a high-ranking official of the second rank just to criticize Li Xianmu, because Li Xianmu truly destroyed what they were proud of from their spiritual world.

Regardless of their inner thoughts, under the current circumstances, all people could say, with either excitement or sighs, were those two words: "Indeed!"

When hundreds or even thousands of people uttered those two words at the same time, the sound reverberated in all directions. The birds that had landed on the palace roof were startled and instantly took flight. The cries of the geese flying south were also drowned out. The people standing in front of the palace truly felt what it meant for an overwhelming force to come, unstoppable.

From this day forward, the world's judgment of sages and saints will change.

The era in which figures like Song Lian and Fang Xiaoru could gain widespread respect simply by virtue of their position within the Confucian school is coming to an end.

Li Qi marveled from the heavens above, and in later generations, there was often a discussion about the importance of liberal arts students versus science and engineering students.

When this issue is discussed, it always gets blurred into whether humanities or STEM fields are more important. These two questions seem similar on the surface, but in reality they are worlds apart.

Liberal arts students are of little use. Even if you give them ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years, or even until the sun goes out and their status perishes, they will not be able to break through the feudal era.

However, the humanities, or social sciences, to some extent, even play a leading role in the world. For example, after the Renaissance, countless new ideas emerged and changed the whole world, completely smashing and destroying the old world.

However, there is an awkward fact: most of the great thinkers who can change the world are hard to define as liberal arts or science students. They are usually well-versed in both arts and sciences and have a deep understanding of all levels of society through long-term practice.

STEM fields are sciences that help us understand the objective world. Even if we bury ourselves in the lab and don't interact with the outside world, we can still arrive at the right conclusions. But if liberal arts students don't go out and understand social realities and instead sit in offices, they will inevitably produce a lot of garbage.

The ideal self of a liberal arts student: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Liberal arts students who don't actually participate in social practice: they are useless scholars.

Skillful.

In Li Qi's view, most Confucian scholars are useless liberal arts students who spend their whole lives buried in old books and are unwilling to see what the world is really like. They talk about the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors and Confucius and Mencius. The Zhou Dynasty has been gone for a thousand years and they are still reminiscing about the well-field system. To call them useless would be to tarnish the word.

It's a pipe dream to expect ancient officials to go deep into the countryside and participate in social practice.

After all, officials consider themselves superiors, governing a region for the emperor, which is to compare the common people to cattle and horses.

For ancient officials, achieving meritorious service was a huge change; they didn't need to ask for anything more. The Enlightenment hadn't started yet, and their intellectual level hadn't reached that point.

The people in front of Fengtian Hall were naturally unaware that Li Qi was secretly criticizing them.

They were all gazing at Li Xianmu, who stood before them.

With Li Xianmu's words, four of the ten positions of the Sages were immediately decided. They were all people with profound knowledge, outstanding achievements, unwavering loyalty to the country and the world and willing to die for it. They were people whose knowledge, achievements and morality were impeccable.

The four of them silenced everyone present. To be honest, it was quite difficult to be compared to them.

The saying goes, "Heroes create the times, and the times create heroes."

Throughout history, have there been many people as loyal to their country as Zhuge Liang, or as unyielding as Wen Tianxiang, who would rather die than submit?

Yes, there are, and quite a few.

However, since 99% of them were not born in the late period of a collapsing dynasty, they could not demonstrate loyalty and righteousness.

True character is revealed in times of adversity, and its deeds are recorded in history.

Conversely, it is also true that if the times have not yet reached their limit, even those with strong principles will have nowhere to demonstrate their integrity.

Han Yu, also known as Han Wengong, achieved such great fame because he lived during the great era of change in the mid-Tang Dynasty, and encountered the background of the integration of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism.

The same principle applies to Fan Zhongyan. The Song Dynasty happened to be during the reign of Emperor Renzong. The three reigns before him were the beginning of a new era, while the following reigns were marked by drastic changes and the emergence of many petty people, which made his value all the more apparent.

Thinking of this, the emperor, dukes, and court officials all looked at Li Xianmu, because they thought of Li Zhongwen Gong, Li Qi.

Li Qi was also someone who rose to prominence by taking advantage of the times. He rose like a meteor in the later period of the Hongwu era, and in a short period of time, he seized the prestige of Confucianism among scholars.

At the crucial moment of the transition between the Hongwu, Jianwen and Yongle reigns, he almost became the hope of the people, defending everything that people of his time believed to be right, and becoming a role model for the world.

"Then it becomes clear what kind of people should be selected for the Confucian Temple." Li Xianmu said loudly, "Since Confucius, have there been any Confucian scholars and sages in every dynasty who were loyal to the country and praised by the world, yet were not allowed to enter the Confucian Temple?"

Throughout history, have there been people whose virtues were exemplary and who served as role models for the world, yet were left in the wilderness and could not be worshipped by later generations?
Throughout history, have there been any ministers whose achievements rivaled the sun and moon, who sacrificed themselves for the country, and who left behind in history the evaluation of "skilled in governing the country but inept at protecting themselves"?
Those who deserve to be enshrined in this Confucian temple should be those who, even if Confucius were to be resurrected, would still praise them as truly virtuous ministers.

The capable rise, the incapable fall; this is how the world moves forward!

After Li Xianmu finished speaking, his heart was still filled with emotion. Since he entered officialdom ten years ago, the matter of reorganizing the Confucian Temple was, in his opinion, one of the two most important achievements.

Changing a person's body is easy, but changing a person's mind is difficult.

After calming his agitated emotions, Li Xianmu bowed to the emperor, indicating that he would stop speaking for now and that it would be the others' turn to speak.

This is equivalent to Li Xianmu establishing a general outline for this matter, and everything that follows, including the people chosen, must be included in this outline.

"Xianmu has spoken exactly what I've been thinking," the emperor's voice descended from above. "When ruler and minister understand and trust each other, great things in the world can be accomplished."

That being said, it is ultimately impossible. On the road to defending power, there are only victors and losers. It's like a tiger telling a sheep that it wants to be friends. If the sheep believes it, then it deserves to die.

Unless the tiger is chained up and surrounded by swords, spears, and halberds.

Since Zheng Huan, the Minister of Rites, began to compile the list of seventy-two sages, Confucius was a figure from the Spring and Autumn Period, which is two thousand years ago. In these two thousand years, there have been many states and dynasties that have risen and fallen.

Even if the selection is limited to Confucian scholars, from the Han Dynasty onwards, there were major dynasties such as the Han, Wei, Jin, Northern and Southern Dynasties, Sui, Tang and Song Dynasties, as well as chaotic periods with many states such as the Sixteen Kingdoms of the Five Barbarians and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms. It would not be difficult to select seventy-two people from among them who came from Confucian schools, had made great achievements, were loyal to the country, and were listed as great Confucian scholars of their time.

After all, the requirement of being a "great Confucian scholar of our time" already lowers the bar.

Leaving aside Song Lian, Fang Xiaoru and others, even Li Yuanming, the Minister of Rites whom Li Qi casually crushed to death, was a great Confucian scholar of his time. Such people did not need any academic achievements that could be remembered for generations; academic achievements at the time were enough.

This is somewhat like the contrast between groundbreaking giants like Newton and Einstein and scientists who, while not groundbreaking in many ways, were still top-notch in their time.

One by one, names were mentioned, followed by lively discussions. Some were not controversial, such as Lu Zhi, and Dong Zhongshu was still considered a worthy candidate for the Seventy-Two Sages.

But some things will naturally cause controversy.

This controversy quickly devolved into mutual attacks and denigration.

Ancient people and modern people are essentially no different. They will praise the historical figures they like and denigrate the historical figures they dislike.

The reason why the evaluation of the same historical figure varies greatly between ancient and modern times is actually because the evaluation criteria are different.

For example, when ancient people ranked the emperors of the Western Han Dynasty, Emperor Wen of Han was ranked first, followed by Liu Bang, then Emperor Xuan of Han, and so on.

While modern people acknowledge that the three emperors mentioned above were good emperors, they still rank Emperor Wu of Han as the first emperor of the Western Han Dynasty.

The reason for such a big difference is actually quite simple.

In ancient times, productivity was low and ordinary people generally lived in misery, so they placed great importance on whether the emperor could ensure the survival of the people.

In modern society, people don't pay much attention to people's livelihoods because they are well-fed. After all, most people have never truly experienced going hungry for three days and nine meals a day.

While there are also powerful and corrupt officials in modern times, compared to ancient times when people felt oppressed by the powerful, landlords, and clerks of the court almost every moment and were in a situation where they could die at any time, most people have not actually felt any oppression in the modern power structure.

Therefore, modern people do not understand the ancient pursuit of political clarity and order during the Zhenguan era.

To put it bluntly, modern China has achieved in all aspects, from politics, military, and economy, things that people in ancient times wouldn't even dare to dream of. The utopian world that people in ancient times envisioned is just a joke in the face of modern society.

Coupled with the humiliating history of modern times, modern people naturally regard the military prowess of territorial expansion as extremely important. Furthermore, having enjoyed peace for a long time, they have not experienced the price of war, so their minds are filled with thoughts of war.

There is no inherent superiority or inferiority in the standards of evaluation throughout history; they are simply different perspectives arising from different living environments.

But even though the evaluation criteria are different, the arguments are no different.

(End of this chapter)