- Ancient Chinese was written without punctuation. However, in order to ensure a smooth tone and correctly understand the meaning of the text, it is still necessary to pay attention to the beginning and end of the sentence. Readers will mark the article by themselves, which is the so-called 'sentence reading', if you don't understand the sentence reading, it will often cause misreading and misunderstanding the author's original meaning.

Therefore, after entering Mongolia, students need to 'read clear sentences', that is, to learn to rely on the sense of language, tone of voice, auxiliary words, grammatical structure and other broken sentences of the text. However, after learning to read sentences, there are still often ambiguities and misunderstandings of the words and sentences of the article.

For example, in the joke of "stay a guest on a rainy day, leave me without a stay", the host and guest read different sentences and express seven completely different meanings, which makes people squirm. But if it is changed to official documents and books, this is no longer a joke, but a problem and a mistake.

Historically, there have been many public cases caused by different sentence readings, the most famous of which is Confucius's 'the people can make it from it, but not the people can make it known', around which scholars have been arguing for thousands of years. If there had been punctuation, the controversy would have ceased to exist.

Due to the habit of his previous life, Chen Ke couldn't stand the lack of punctuation from beginning to end of an article, so every book he read was personally marked with 'punctuation'.

In the preface to this book "Shangshu Apocryphal Scripture Examination", Chen Ke said that the article needs readers to read it by themselves, which is not only inconvenient, but also misinterprets the author's meaning, which is a manifestation of the writer's irresponsibility, or deliberately does not want to make the words clear. In order to avoid misunderstanding of his own meaning, and for the convenience of readers, he added punctuation marks in advance when the article was published.

Traditional sentence reading marks, including periods and reading marks, are equivalent to periods and commas in punctuation. In Xu Shen's "Shuowen Jie Zi" in the Han Dynasty, there are also ', '. and the '()' sign. Therefore, it is not that there was no punctuation in ancient times, but no one used it standardly.

Chen Ke made an appendix at the back of the book, listing ten commonly used punctuation marks. and clearly label its role.

He did this not only to avoid misinterpretation of the meaning of his article, nor to promote punctuation. His deeper intentions. It is embodied in the two articles "University" and "The Mean......

In Chen Ke's original era, people with a little bit of culture knew the Analects, Mencius, Zhongyong, and University, and were called the Four Books of Confucianism. These four books constructed the Confucian ideological system and shaped the spiritual personality of Confucian scholars, and it does not matter how important they are.

However, during this period of the Northern Song Dynasty, "University" and "The Mean" had not yet been written independently, but only two of the forty-nine articles in "The Legend of Little Dai Li". As for why it should be taken out separately, it is placed after the "Examination of the Apocrypha of Shangshu". In the foreword, Chen Ke said:

To verify that Shangshu is a pseudo-scripture is by no means to destroy the cultural foundation of Confucianism. On the contrary, he is trying to clear the source and clarify the ideological system of the Confucians. That's why I went to dig deeper. Only then will the Apocrypha be discovered. But discovering the Apocrypha is not the goal, but clarifying the ideological system of the Confucians.

So how do you find out? Do you want to find the true scriptures of the Book of Shang?

It is important to find the true scriptures of the Book of Shang. It can let us know what the three generations are like. But it is of little use to understand the ideological system of the pre-Confucians. Because this is a book of history, and it has nothing to do with the history of Confucianism.

In the same way, "Spring and Autumn" is not very meaningful. "Zhou Yi" is mainly a divination book, a book of divination. The Book of Rites is a compilation of the liturgical system. The Book of Songs is a collection of poems...... Therefore, Chen Ke concluded that the content of the Five Classics is rich and complex, and the meaning of the expression is not concentrated and clear enough, so that it cannot form a complete ideological and theoretical system.

So how to understand the ideological system of Confucianism? Chen Ke advocated merging the two essays in the Analects, Mencius, and the Book of Rites, "The University" and "The Mean", into the Four Books. 'Withdraw the Five Classics into the Four Books' so that readers can more correctly understand the way of Confucius and Mencius.

Well, this is Zhu Xi's point of view, Chen Ke just advanced his career by a hundred years. But this is definitely not a simple copy, but a reshaping of the thinking of the Chinese nation.

Because it was through annotating the "Four Books" that Zhu Xi injected his own thoughts into the Confucian classics, so that later generations of scholars accepted the ideas of science, and the whole society became a society of science.

Chen Ke wanted to preempt Zhu Xi and use Zhu Xi's method to inject his own thoughts into the "Four Books", so that the scholars of the Great Song Dynasty would accept his own ideas and then change the entire society.

Chen Ke knew that this road was a hundred times more difficult than assisting Zhao Zongji to seize the throne. Letting others accept their own thoughts and become their thoughts is the hardest thing in the world. But no matter how difficult it is, he has to do it, because God sent him here, probably just to give Huaxia a chance to reshape his soul......

Of course, Chen Ke also knew that this matter could not be done by a saint like Zhu Xi, at least at his current level. But it doesn't matter, just like when he knew that Zhao Zongshi was the future Song Yingzong, he still dared to support Zhao Zongji to compete with him, Chen Ke never lacked courage and confidence.

Or rather, he was born a bold and pretentious lord, and he didn't believe that there was anything he couldn't do......

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Considering the reader's receptivity and his current level, Chen Ke did not annotate "University" and "The Mean" as soon as he came up, but only extracted them completely from "The Book of Rites...... He didn't even change the order of the paragraphs, he just punctuated them as he understood them.

The steps are too big to be ridiculous, these things must be done slowly in the future, and if he does not integrate his own thoughts with Zhu Zi's thoughts, and form a set of neo-Confucianism suitable for China, Chen Ke will not rashly note it.

However, just this book, which has been added to the "Shangshu Apocryphal Examination", is enough to make him the focus of attention again.

Scholars in Bianjing City and even the Great Song Dynasty have long known that Chen Ke said that the "Book of Shang" was a pseudo-scripture at the scripture banquet, but it is unknown what he was talking about. Many people were not convinced, and wanted to refute Chen Ke and defend Taoism, so as to become famous in one fell swoop. Many people were purely curious, wanting to see what the argument was, and even spoke to the emperor and hundreds of officials for a month......

No matter what kind of mentality you have, anyone who cares a little about what's going on outside the window has the idea of reading this book. And this book is also exceptionally easy to buy, almost the first time, it appeared in the most eye-catching position in bookstores large and small in Bianjing.

After a maximum of two or three days, Luoyang, Yingtian, Daming, Chengdu, Jiangning, Suzhou...... Even in bookstores in Fuzhou and Guangzhou, the shadow of this book has appeared, and it is placed in the most eye-catching position. For today's Chen Ke, it is a book written with his feet, and he can also sell it commercially.

There were 300 bookstores in Bianjing alone, and there were also hundreds in big cities such as Luoyang and Jiangning, and as a result, the 5,000 copies of the first edition were only enough for bookstores in various places. And on the first day, it was all sold out. Immediately, the book was touted by booksellers as a masterpiece of 'widely acclaimed and expensive Luoyang paper', which aroused the interest of readers even more.

People are like this, if you pile them up and put them there, no one may be rare, but if they sell out at once, and others get them and you can't get them, you will feel uncomfortable.

As a result, orders from all over the country flew to Bianjing like snowflakes, and there were as many as 50,000 copies in total. Fortunately, the Bianjing Printing Society, which owns the copyright of this book, has long been working overtime to start printing, sending truckloads of brand-new books to all parts of the country, so that this hunger and thirst marketing will not be self-defeating.

The so-called word 'copyright' comes from the Song Dynasty. In those days, every page of a book came from an engraving, and all engravings had to be examined and registered with the government first. After checking that there are no taboo contents, the government will engrave a seal in the blank space in the corner to prove that the copyright of the book is under the supervision and protection of the government. Any act of piracy will be prosecuted by the government.

In order to protect the interests of the industry, the publishing guilds in various places will supervise the bookstores and do not sell pirated books, so there are basically no pirated books for sale in the cities. But beyond the city, there are vast towns and villages, where the government is beyond the reach of the whip and the guilds are powerless. Many black bookstores specializing in piracy have hidden in the meantime, producing a large number of shoddy pirated books with many typographical features. But because of its cheapness, it is still very attractive to the majority of poor scholars...... They even know very well which pirated copy has fewer typos and better paper.

This made the people who wrote books in the Great Song Dynasty very uncomfortable, but they were helpless.

But it was not a problem for Chen Ke, he instructed the Bianjing Printing Society to produce a batch of softcover editions, which were specially sold to the vast number of towns and villages, and the price was cheaper than that of pirated copies. Whoever stole his book is considered to have been in the blood mold for eight lifetimes......

Of course, this kind of anti-piracy method is only limited to people like Chen Ke, who are backed by a business empire and publish books not to make money and are not afraid of losing money.

Fortunately, the book sold really well, and in one winter, it was reprinted in one edition, hardcover, paperback and simplecover, selling a total of more than 200,000 copies, creating a sales record outside the "Thirteen Classics" and other test-taking textbooks in the Great Song Dynasty.

At the end of the year, the printing company not only recovered the cost, but also made a net profit of 20,000 yuan. Chen Keyi was happy and rewarded all the employees of the book club, which was a reward for their hard work in the past six months.

This amount of money is not a small amount, enough for the six hundred employees of the book club to live a fat year. Naturally, everyone is grateful to Dade, but they just hate Zhou Dingkun's teeth: "Didn't you say that you should save expenses?" ”

"You can't want the horses to run fast and the horses not to eat grass, right?" Chen Ke knew that he was at a loss, and said haha: "By the way, Aziz has finally arrived, you and I will pick it up." ”――

Partition -

I found that there was no dividing line and I was unhappy, and there was a more.