The strength of human thinking comes from cognition, and cognition comes from insight, and having insight only needs to be "blinded"!

The Buddhist saying seal gesture has long told sentient beings that as long as they don't blind their eyes, "it's enough!" A newborn child, his eyes have not yet opened, and his heart is red, so it is called "pure heart"!

In the face of the countless phantoms of this world, the ebb and flow of right and wrong, the starting point of human wisdom is the same.

The huge gap is due to the fact that most people have blinded themselves and lost the most basic function of seeing and seeing the world.

If you lose your function, you can't see clearly, so you go with the flow, and you can only be a chess piece;

When people look at the world, what distinguishes them from animals is that they have a view of right and wrong. Values, worldview, and outlook on life are all developed from this.

The view of right and wrong is how people see the world!

And what people see, they will think, and in this process, the gap between the profundity and shallowness of thinking is widened.

A shallow person is "blind", and even if he sees it, he does not think so;

The profound person is "not seeing", even if the eyes can't see it, but they can feel it.

A newborn child, his eyes have not yet opened, and his heart is red, so it is called "pure heart"!

In the face of the countless phantoms of this world, the ebb and flow of right and wrong, the starting point of human wisdom is the same.

The huge gap is due to the fact that most people have blinded themselves and lost the most basic function of seeing and seeing the world.

If you lose your function, you can't see clearly, so you go with the flow, and you can only be a chess piece;

When people look at the world, what distinguishes them from animals is that they have a view of right and wrong. Values, worldview, and outlook on life are all developed from this.

A shallow person is "blind", and even if he sees it, he does not think so;

The profound person is "not seeing", even if the eyes can't see it, but they can feel it.

On romance or history, Cao Cao has a recognized evaluation: "traitorous male". In our universal values, he is a man of contradictions. People who like and dislike him can always say their own reasons, but any one-sided reasons are not enough to conclude Cao Cao's coffin. Because of this contradiction itself, and the "charm" of Cao Cao's character, it is precisely the two sides of his AB in the public eye, and the more contradictory it is, the greater the "charm". Therefore, to talk about Cao Cao's contradictions, we must first talk about Cao Cao's charm.

What is the charm of Cao Cao? The main material library of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" - Pei Songzhi's note "Three Kingdoms" has given the answer. If you only look at Chen Shou's original chronicles, you will find that his Cao Cao is like in a certain simulcast, most of them are high positive energy, and the overall image is completely positive or even over-embellished. The rich historical materials cited by Pei Songzhi just made Chen Zhizhong's lofty "Cao Cao" suddenly become cordial and three-dimensional, and it was presented in the public eye after the sorting and processing of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", allowing people to see the real attitude of a "supernatural master": there are both great achievements, seven emotions and six desires, both eloquence and strategy, and conspiracy.

Such a character is something that any novel, film and television drama wants to create, but it is difficult to do. And those records of "belittling Cao Cao" also satisfy everyone's gossip mentality about this kind of "historical star", and some of the content reflects Cao Cao's true temperament in the eyes of today's values. Such a "reality show" general character display, coupled with the research and admiration of famous sages, has created the "Cao Cao" who has attracted the attention of thousands of people.

Why?

Cao Cao, who is entwined with sin

If Cao Cao is still alive today, then he quite meets the criteria of "success". However, success in the secular sense and freedom in the spiritual world are two sides of a contradiction, and most people spend their lives in the pursuit of balance in this contradiction, the so-called "moderation".

Cao Cao is no exception, he has to face all kinds of praise and suspicion in his own time, but his life achievements are also prominent, and his sins are also obvious, and he is not limited by the "mean" at all, so he is by no means the "saint" respected in our mainstream culture, that is, the benchmark of life.

This leads to the fact that when evaluating Cao Cao from a historical perspective, we have no choice but to choose a top-down perspective.

is the so-called "traitor of Qingping, hero of troubled times", if Cao Cao lives today, he may be a "gentleman" all his life, at most a "national husband" or even a "national father". However, when he chose to "serve the Son of Heaven to order not to be subordinate" in the troubled times, he unknowingly became the person who carried the fate of the entire country. Under such a grand historical mission, Cao Cao's merits and demerits must be objectively evaluated.

Cao Cao's work, naturally, is to unify the north and pacify the troubled times, which everyone is already familiar with, and even exalted too much, today in this article we will mainly talk about his faults.

When it comes to Cao Cao's merits, "meritocracy" is something we can't avoid, but is this really his merit?

In the early days of Cao Cao's business, he did appoint many people with different backgrounds

We know that in addition to the local forces of Liang Pei, who was the core of the clan generals, many of the talents who joined Cao Cao in his early years came from the scholar class with the Ruying cultural family as the core. And Xun Yu, the representative of it, is even more famous for being virtuous. Most of the talents recommended by him have both ability and political integrity, but it is not without examples of "meritocracy", such as Cao Cao's favorite Guo Jia.

So, when did the phenomenon of "taking people cheap" appear, and who holds such a view?

The answer is Cui Yan and Mao Jue. A year before the promulgation of the "Decree on Seeking Talents", Prime Minister Peng and Heqia once wrote a letter, believing that Mao Jue and Cui Yan, who were in charge of promoting talents, were loyal and thrifty, but taking this as the only criterion for talents would form a hypocritical atmosphere of blind imitation, which was extreme and unreasonable. In the biographies of Cui Yan and Mao Jue, the upright and square records of the two are impressive, especially Mao Jue, whose simple style did have a wide influence at that time.

Cui Yan is pure use

Cao Cao's attitude towards this was also "supportive" on the surface, but seven years later, shortly after Cao Cao accepted the honor guard of the Son of Heaven as the king of Wei, Cui Yan and Mao Jue were inexplicably wrongfully killed. Is all this just a coincidence? Or is it just that Cao Cao is old and suspicious, and kills people because of a moment of suspicion?

In fact, if you put the "Seeking Order" in the context of Cao Cao's dynasty, these questions are not difficult to understand.

According to Lu Bi's statement in the "Collected Explanations of the Three Kingdoms", we can clearly see that Cao Cao has started the pace from "Han Xiang" to "Han thief" from 208, until 218 and 219 because he was obstructed by Liu Bei and Guan Yu's Northern Expedition, which announced the failure of the plan to become emperor on behalf of the Han Dynasty. Cao Cao himself had to pretend to compare himself with King Wen of Zhou, leaving the task of acting for Han to Cao Pi, and then passed away.

Then, since Cao Cao wants to establish a new dynasty, he naturally has to fight against those forces that maintain the Han family, and this force comes precisely from the late Han scholars with the Ruying cultural family as the core. Xun Yu, Xun Yue, Mao Jue, Cui Yan, Kong Rong, etc., although they support the Han for different reasons, they are all representative figures, and they are also the backbone of the Han family.

Xun Yu and Cao Cao finally turned against each other

And their weapon is precisely the ideological public opinion dominated by Confucian scriptures, and its assessment criteria for talents emphasize the cultivation of virtue. At that time, the common way to enter the scholar was "filial piety and honesty", which referred to filial piety and honesty, which was enough to prove it. In such an environment, Mao Jue and Cui Yan's control of talent channels has become a stumbling block for Cao Cao to represent Han.

The so-called "Pifu is not guilty, but he is guilty", even if the two of them did not have the intention of "rebellion", Cao Cao had to clear the last power position of the loyal ministers of the Han family.

When we combine the book of Heqiao and the political background at the time, and then look at this "Seeking Talents", it is actually more like a "tactful" criticism of Mao Yu and Cui Yan.

In other words, Cao Cao was not purely thirsty for talent, nor was he purely reforming maladministration, but used the meritocracy order as a means to suppress dissent. Moreover, after the "Order", Cao Cao also issued two orders to seek talents, namely "Short Order for Selecting Scholars" and "Ordering for Promoting Virtue and Conduct". The timing of the promulgation of the two orders corresponds to two important steps of Cao Cao's dynasty of Han:

In 214, Cao Cao was edicted by the Son of Heaven as the Duke of Wei to the throne of the princes, and in the same year, he promulgated the "Short Order on the Removal of Scholars"; In 217, Cao Cao was given the honor guard of the Son of Heaven as the king of Wei, and in the same year he issued the "Decree on Promoting Virtue and Conduct". The two orders can be seen from the name, and they are in the same vein as the "Meritocracy" of "Meritocracy", which further proves that the "Meritocracy" advocated by Cao Cao is actually buying people's hearts for his own Emperor of the Han Dynasty.

Now, when we look back at Cao Cao's "words of approval" to Cui Yan Mao Jue in "Three Kingdoms", we actually have reservations. Of course, the idea of "meritocracy" itself is not necessarily unreasonable, but at the same time, we must also see that although the Eastern Han Dynasty's tradition of taking scholars focuses on virtue, it does not exclude other kinds of talents.

What caused the regulation of rents to lose its governing base in just a few years, and caused the irretrievable decline of the whole country? The author believes that if we want to explore the decline of the rent-seeking system, we must start with the system of equalizing land, which has always been tied to it.

1. Rent regulation before the Tang Dynasty: the system of "land tax" promoted on the basis of the uniform land system

As we all know, in the early and middle Tang Dynasty, the system of rent regulation has been used to control taxation, although this system seems a little rough today, but in fact, as the most important economic system in the Tang Dynasty, the implementation of rent regulation is behind the cooperation of a series of economic foundations. Among them, the Junda system is the key to its implementation.

The uniform field system is a system that has been widely practiced in the north since the Northern Zhou Dynasty, and with the unification of the Sui Dynasty, the uniform field system began to be established throughout the country. Taking the Tang Dynasty as an example, it is recorded in the Book of the New Tang Dynasty:

"Zhu Ding male gives 20 acres of Yongye field, and 80 acres of mouth field, of which the male is more than 18 years old, and he is also given according to Ding Nan. The old man, the driving disease, and the waste disease were each given 40 acres of land, and the widows and concubines were each given 30 acres of land. First, there is the number of Yongye people who fill their mouths. ”

It can be seen that the equalization of land stipulated in the equalization system is a kind of equalization method based on a certain benchmark, although it is limited by the actual situation and cannot achieve complete equalization, it is already an extremely valuable rule for the distribution of acres of land.

Mr. Qian Mu has a wonderful evaluation of the Juntian system in the "Outline of National History":

"The intention of this land system is not to ask for an absolute equal amount of land, but only to ask for a slight limit for the rich and a minimum level for the poor."

This is also true, and the equalization system grants barren land to peasants, and collects taxes on the basis of this. Due to the purpose of "equalizing land" deliberately maintained during the implementation of the "equalization system", farmers who were granted land paid "rent (grain)" according to Dingkou. In addition to taxes, "yong" was the labor that private households needed to bear, which in the Tang Dynasty was 20 days a year, and "tuo" was "household survey", and according to the different regions, the households handed over local specialties.

Although this tax system seems to require households to provide labor and taxes on the basis of land, in the process of implementation, the main unit of tax payment and service is Dingkou, so this system still cannot be separated from the scope of "poll tax". The limitations of this method of calculating taxes according to Ding also became one of the motivations for the mediation of rent in the mid-Tang Dynasty.