In a blink of an eye, another year passed, Liao Huansheng came to chat with me, I remembered, that year after returning to Beijing and Feng Duo, Huansheng drank a wine, on the wine table that trip to Erling was mainly related to Maitreya and chatted with them, I didn't expect Liao Huansheng to be very interested, and when he returned home, he plunged into the literature and history materials to study, and within half a year, he actually wrote a monograph on Maitreya, which attracted the attention of the academic circles of literature and history, and his view that Maitreya tried to create a country with unity of religion and government was recognized by more and more scholars。 Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

But his visit, but brought me the latest journal in the field of history, there is a scholar on Zhang Xianzhong's research, his views subverted most people's impression, Zhang Xianzhong is a Maitreya believer, adhering to the Maitreya teachings, Sichuan ten rooms and nine emptiness, the tragedy of a hundred miles of barren grass is not entirely Zhang Xianzhong's perverted murderous psychology masterpiece, but with the late Ming Dynasty Sichuan more than 70 bandits to do chaos, officers and soldiers to kill good and risky merits, and a tragic locust plague related. The evidence cited by this scholar is a stone tablet that has just been unearthed from Rong County, Chongqing, which describes the incident of Zhang Xianzhong opening the altar because of the ravages of locust plague and donating military funds to help the victims.

Liao Huansheng told me that his research during this period has increasingly subverted his view of history. He has long been accustomed to history serving the ruling class and constantly falsifying history, but the study of Maitreya has made him feel that history seems to be alive and intelligent, trying to correct the irrationality in the process of evolution, like a living being, trying to complete the evolution of personality and spirituality. It will suddenly give you some new evidence from places you don't think of, subverting your perception of the historical process and leaving more contradictions. But you can feel the tenacity and indomitability of this history.

He thought I would scoff at his perceptions, but I didn't, and I knew in my heart that it was not so much history that was purifying itself, but that someone was trying to change and improve the original historical blueprint. It seems that the idea that the six paths of Maitreya are not the same is wrong, that the history of the past does not only exist in the past, but that the history of the future will never have only one direction.

Of course, I can't explain to Liao Huansheng the origin of all this and my conjectures, this is not an academic category for a long time, and it would be religious madness to take a step forward. But I'm still curious, how did Liao Huansheng realize all this?

Liao Huansheng didn't think my question was so deep, and told me very calmly that Maitreya is a standard cult in the official history, and the account is very brief and one-sided, but he focuses on collecting some local chronicles, genealogies, inscriptions and other documents to restore the real historical events.

He turned out the rubbings of the inscriptions printed in the journal that were not clear, and told me that in that year, Zhang Xianzhong set up an altar, and the mage you see, the inscription is engraved with the name of the law, and the last person who erected the monument is Baoning Fang, and the official position is the waiter of the Ministry of Rites, but these two people I have checked all the history books and have not recorded, as if they came out of thin air.

"Perhaps it was the frequent conquests and the loss of most of the paperwork. "That's the only plausible reason I can think of.

"For more than 40 years before and after the Onishi regime, it attached great importance to the use of literati in Shudi, and the six departments were complete. After the battle of Phoenix Mountain and the death of Zhang Xianzhong, the Daxi regime still pushed Sun Kewang to be the main and moved to Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Burma. During the period, the history of the two repairs to the country, the historical data is detailed, and it can be checked, but there is no record of this Boryeong Fang. Liao Huansheng replied very resolutely, and it seemed that he had studied deeply.

"There is an even stranger thing, half a year ago, Feng just got a rare ancient book "Shu Bi", knowing that I was studying Maitreya, so he got it to me, this book is an engraved copy in the early Qing Dynasty, which is earlier than the version I saw in the national map. But I flipped through it and found the problem, and I went to the national map to compare it, and then I understood the problem."

I have heard of the book "Shubi" for a long time, which is about a man raised in the late Ming Dynasty, in order to avoid the peasant uprising, Zhang Xianzhong's massacre of the city, the rebellion of the Southern Ming troops and the massacre of the Qing army, he was displaced for more than ten years, and saw the hellish scene on earth in Sichuan.

"The version I got recorded that Zhang Xianzhong broke through the city of Chongqing, intending to chop off 30,000 or 40,000 soldiers to punish and disintegrate the resistance of other Ming troops, but a master of dust suddenly came to the city, entered Zhang Xianzhong's camp alone, stated the pros and cons, and donated 500 taels of gold to reshape the golden body of the big Buddha in Guangshan Temple, and wanted to buy these 30,000 hands. Zhang Xianzhong was moved by his mercy and released all the soldiers, and only led more than 500 generals to chop their hands. But this paragraph is not recorded at all in the "Shubi" of the national map. I'm wondering, could it be that the Qing Dynasty historians deliberately planted false accusations for Zhang Xianzhong? But why did they just change a market account that had no influence?"

When Liao Huansheng left me, my mind was extremely dizzy, and the voice of Zhang Xianzhong to rehabilitate Zhaoxue was not scarce in the historiography of the past two years, but it came more from the analysis of existing historical materials. But no one has ever thought about why a large amount of new evidence has appeared in the past two years, and even the Baoning Fang clan and Master Lichen, who have never been recorded in the annals of history, have appeared? Is this really the selective neglect of historical research? Is it not that history has distorted Zhang Xianzhong, but that Zhang Xianzhong made a different choice in that history?

Could it be that Chef Fang and Master Lichen have succeeded? How big is the pace of their success? Will the history books have to be rewritten in a few years, more than ten years later? What is the goal of Chef Fang and Lichen?

I can no longer imagine along this absurd path, but in my heart I always feel that Zhao Jiuming may soon appear in that period of confused history, as before, after a bright wave, the river of history will return to normal.

Another year passed, and I heard the news of Lao Cai's death, he collapsed on the mahjong table, but went calmly and peacefully. But I soon received a letter from him, and his son rushed back to pack up Lao Cai's belongings, and found an envelope with the recipient and address written but did not have time to send it.

Lao Cai said in the letter that there is one thing he has not told me, mainly because he himself is not sure of the truth of the matter, and no one will believe it when he says it, but his body is failing day by day, so he will talk to me in this way.

After the incident of the air-raid shelter in the fifties, Lao Cai has always wanted to erase Chef Fang from his memory, originally, he felt that this was a very simple thing, after all, after Chef Fang entered the cave, he never came out, and then with the development of urban construction in full swing, the area of Eeling has undergone earth-shaking changes, high-rise buildings have risen from the ground, and the original air-raid shelter entrance has now disappeared. However, Lao Cai had always had a strange feeling that Chef Fang seemed to be by his side, staring at him silently.

Lao Cai knew that this was purely an illusion, so he laughed at himself twice and didn't take it to heart. But in 79 years, he and a few colleagues went on an outing in Nanchuan and walked aimlessly to an ancient temple in the mountains. The temple is dilapidated, ventilated on all sides, and has long been left without care, but the Buddha statues enshrined in the main hall are well preserved.

Lao Cai took a closer look at the Buddha statue, and suddenly felt a little familiar, and when he looked at it again, a kind of fear poured from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, this was the master of dust he had seen when he ran to Langzhong to deliver a letter for Chef Fang that year. Although the statue is not so finely molded and the shape is not realistic enough, the face and demeanor are no different from dust.

Lao Cai hurriedly ran to the apse, as he expected, he saw another broken statue, the damage was even worse, the color peeled, revealing the rotten wood, and one arm was broken, but he could vaguely see the face of the statue, it seemed to be smiling but not smiling, and there was a bit of an empty look, who was it not the chef Fang? The locals told him that this temple had been in the Qing Dynasty, and it seemed to be called the Thousand Hands Temple, which had been abandoned for decades.

Lao Cai came back and fell seriously ill, and also suffered from insomnia and sleepwalking, which took more than a year to slowly recover. But in '87, Lao Cai saw a news in a local newspaper that a group of old photos taken by foreign missionaries in Sichuan during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had been discovered, and the newspaper selected two of them and published them in the newspaper. The photo shows an old bazaar, with vendors and pedestrians looking curiously at the camera.

But Lao Cai saw a familiar figure in the corner of the crowd, wearing a shabby jacket and trousers, with a little hunched back, holding a dry tobacco pouch, looking at the sky stupidly, but it was the appearance of a chef.

In Lao Cai's letter, he put an old newspaper with regular cuts, which had turned yellow on all sides, and the photo was in the middle. The newspaper was poorly printed, and the people in the photo were a little blurry, but I was able to spot the image in the upper right corner of the photo that didn't fit in with the people around me.

But for some reason, I didn't feel strange, but my mind was very confused, I couldn't remember where I saw it, when I saw it, what kind of scene it was, what kind of story it was, but I firmly believed that it was not a stranger.

(Postscript: This is the longest story written by Umemura and the longest delayed, and it took almost a month, ashamed and ashamed.) On the one hand, Chang Ye's narration was very confusing, of course, it may be that there are some problems in my memory, and now there is no one to ask for confirmation, there must be a lot of elements of my imagination, but more importantly, I was just listening to it as a story back then, and now when I plan to write it down, I found that there is a huge gap between the reality and my imagination. So much so that I now firmly believe that maybe in the near future, in the bustling crowd, I will definitely meet Chef Fang, whom I have never met, but who is very familiar, just like although there has been no Fang Mojin for twenty years, I still feel that he is in an inconspicuous little corner, looking at me with a mocking smile. Finally, I would like to say thank you to my friends who have been tirelessly chasing books, behind every bit of life, there is a wonderful cause and effect, so I am willing to continue to write. ）