Generally speaking, the Western Han Dynasty was the era in which Confucian classics dominated, and the Eastern Han Dynasty was the era in which ancient Chinese Confucian classics were born out of modern Chinese Confucian classics and gradually replaced them. This phenomenon is particularly obvious in the study of Chunqiu.
From the founding of the Han Dynasty to the era of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, after more than 60 years of experiments, elimination and selection, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty finally ousted a hundred schools and respected Confucianism alone. Dong Zhongshu is a representative of Confucian classics in the Western Han Dynasty. He not only played an important role in establishing Confucianism as the guiding ideology of governing the country, but also reformed Confucianism according to the political needs of the times. The preface to Hanshu Wuxing says: "In the Jason Wu era, Dong Zhongshu began to preach Yin and Yang and became a Confucian." Dong Zhongshu integrated the theory of Yin-Yang and Five Elements into the Confucian system, and developed from the philosophical "harmony between man and nature" to the political unification, which made the Confucian classics, especially the biography of the Spring and Autumn Ram, serve the unified and consolidated Han empire at that time very effectively.
From the Han Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, researchers of Chunqiu, Gonger Zhuan and Yi all focused on the exploration and interpretation of the book. The so-called righteousness refers to the great righteousness, which is the profound content contained in Spring and Autumn Annals. The so-called method refers to calligraphy, also known as book examples, that is, the specifications and styles of notes. According to predecessors, all kinds of calligraphy examples express Confucius' attitude towards people and things. As the task of Chunqiu Zhuan, we should be duty-bound to explain the righteous examples of Chunqiu. The two biographies of Gong and Yi mainly find out the subtle meanings of respecting the king, resisting foreigners, respecting the humble, praising and criticizing the beautiful thorn from the simple notes of the Confucian classics. Zuo Zhuan focuses on annotations, but it also clarifies the meaning in many places. For two thousand years, except for a few people of insight, there are almost no researchers who don't make a living by "righteousness", and there are more and more boring ones. The outline-style and title-style chronicles have developed into subtle meanings, which are unique in academic history, and there are countless monographs.
The sentence-by-sentence interpretation of the Spring and Autumn Annals in the Biography of the Ram has been very arbitrary, and Dong Zhongshu's research on the Biography of the Ram has also intensified. The Spring and Autumn Stories and Xian Ce recorded in Dong Zhongshu's Biography are important works to clarify the Biography of the Ram. There are so many great meanings he expounded that later generations have to sum them up by numbers, such as three systems, ten fingers, six subjects, five beginnings and so on, among which the most important is the theory of three systems. Gu Jiegang made a brief explanation in his long article "Politics and History under the Theory of the End of Five Virtues":
The theory of creating three similarities attributed the evolution of dynasties to the cycle of three similarities. The names of these three series are black series, white series and red series. At that time, the ritual and music system was customized according to which one was unified for the son of heaven.
Dong Zhongshu used this theory to compile a historical law of mind-building. In the spring and autumn period and numerous dew, three generations of restructuring qualitative, he said:
Tang was appointed king, and it's going to be summer. Time is white. Pro-summer, so dangerous, less than Tang called emperor Yao, Shennong for.
King Wen was appointed king, and the day should be changed to the number of weeks. Red is close to yin, so summer is called Emperor Shun. Regard Xuanyuan as the Yellow Emperor and Shennong as the Nine Emperors.
Therefore, Spring and Autumn Annals should be a matter for the new king, and it was a black system at that time. It is still dark, short summer, pro-week, so Song.
In other words, every new dynasty was established in accordance with the destiny, representing the unity in the three unification cycles. After the establishment of the new dynasty, the successors of the previous two dynasties will be kings according to their destiny, and their original laws and systems can still be inherited within the fiefs of the previous two dynasties. For example, when the Zhou Dynasty was established, Shang, Xia and Zhou Dynasties were unified. The problem lies in Chunqiu. During the Spring and Autumn Period, that is, the early Eastern Zhou Dynasty, the Emperor of Zhou existed in name only. Dong Zhongshu's ram scholars tried their best to conceive a new theory, thinking that in the era of Confucius, the Zhou Dynasty did not exist, but Lu replaced the Zhou Dynasty and Confucius replaced the Zhou King. Confucius, on the other hand, has virtue but no position, so he is the king in name only, that is, "the king of the plain": "When Confucius wrote Spring and Autumn Annals, he was king first and tied for everything." Wang Chong also said: "Confucius is not a monarch, and Wang Su's career is in the Spring and Autumn Annals." In their view, Confucius wrote the Spring and Autumn Annals, which is a way to designate the monarch as Ping Yuanjun to show future generations, while Confucius represented Lu and became the new system (black system) after the (red system). However, Confucius is only a king after all. The king's law he formulated has not been implemented, and Lu has not really inherited it. It was the Han Dynasty that really inherited Zhou Tong. As for the Qin dynasty, in the view of the theory of three unifications and Confucian classics, it was short-lived and tyrannical, and it was not a dynasty at all. Creating a theoretical basis for the fate of the Han dynasty is the core of the theory of three unification and ram science.
Another master of Confucian classics in the Western Han Dynasty was Liu Xiang. Specializing in the biography of Liang, combined with the five elements theory of Shangshu Hongfan. His Biography of Hong Fan's Five Elements has been lost, but there are many explanations from Dong Zhongshu and Liu Xiang about the disasters of heaven and man, yin and yin in the Records of Five Elements of Han Dynasty.
Han and Confucianism emphasize "applying the world", and their eyes turn to history, with the aim of caring about reality and taking subjective understanding of historical phenomena as the basis for explaining and guiding reality. Their explanations of history and reality are based on the Book of Changes and the Book of Songs, but the most important argument is Spring and Autumn Annals. In a sense, it is absurd to link personnel with justice, national politics with disaster in theory, but sometimes it is a constraint on the monarch in actual political life. Dictators have unlimited power, and only saints in heaven are superior to human beings. With the help of providence or saints, human beings can be restricted to a certain extent, so that they can travel on the normal track as much as possible.
The theological tendency of Confucian classics in modern literature, its vicious development is to make Confucian classics a vassal of theology, and the understanding of scripture is getting farther and farther away from academics, and the symptoms of arbitrariness and triviality are getting more and more serious. At the end of the Western Han Dynasty, it finally reached the critical line of "poverty will change". Liu Xin, the son of Liu Xiang, was the first to attack. Since then, there has been a debate on the study of Confucian classics, and there has been a debate on Zuo Zhuan and Gong Yi in the study of Spring and Autumn Annals, which has gradually become the mainstream of Spring and Autumn Annals. Just like modern commercial warfare, a strong political background and high-sounding advertisements can play a temporary role, but in the final analysis, the winners will always belong to high-quality products.
In the era of Emperor Ai in the Western Han Dynasty, Liu Xin inherited Liu Xiang's position of receiving the Five Classics and was appointed as a school book. When he saw Zuo Zhuan, an ancient prose hidden in the palace, he became very interested, so he wrote to ask for a position as a scholar. He was the first person in Han Dynasty who publicly defended Zuo Zhuan and studied it carefully. He wrote chapters or notes for Zuo Zhuan, and now there are only twenty articles left. Judging from these lost articles and Tu Yu's words of "creating righteousness" (Preface to the Spring and Autumn Annals), his chapters and sentences have not left the style of study of modern writers. When discussing the study of ancient Chinese classics in Han dynasty, predecessors often described them as different. In fact, the dispute over ancient Chinese prose is not so much a school dispute as a sectarian dispute, and the crux of the dispute is often whether to learn from an official in order to obtain official knowledge (that is, fame and fortune). This point can be fully explained from the relevant materials of scholars such as Liu Xin in the Eastern Han Dynasty.
Shortly after Liu Xin, there was another controversy between modern writer Fan Sheng and ancient writer Chen Yuan. As a result of the debate, Emperor Guangwu of Han Dynasty finally listed Zuo Zhuan as a scholar and established a doctor. It was abolished soon, but the influence of Zuo Zhuan became more and more important. In the middle and late Eastern Han Dynasty, two famous scholars of Zuo Zhuan finally appeared, namely Jia Kui and Qian.
Jia Kui's father got Zuo Zhuan from Liu Xin, According to You from Jia Kui, and wrote monographs such as Zuo Zhuan, Zuo Zhuan, and Interpretation of the Spring and Autumn Classics, but they all died. There are many versions of lost articles in Qing Dynasty, among which Li Yide's Notes on the Spring and Autumn Jiafu is the best.
Jia Kui's learning originated from Liu Xin, and then turned to the essence. Judging from the existing lost articles, he paid more attention to the exegesis of famous things and the explanation of historical facts, but he still focused on righteous examples in his overall research and never ignored the search for trivial words and righteousness. If he lived in seclusion for six years, "Song people took Changge", and Changge belonged to the State of Zheng. Jia Kui thinks that if the word "Zheng" is not marked, it means "stabbing it without caressing its city". In fact, I'm afraid that "Song people besieged Zheng and cut down Changge" is still the five-year collection of scriptures by Tu Yu, which is a continuation of the book, so there is no need to mark the word "Zheng" any more. Take this example, and you can promote the rest. As the backbone of the classical Chinese school, Jia Kui did not avoid quoting Gong and Yi directly when interpreting Confucian classics, such as The First Month of Spring written by Huan for three years, but did not write the word "Wang". Scholars have their own explanations, and Jia Kui's explanations are all based on the first and second years of Huan in Liang Zhuan. In the same year, a year later, Jia Kui's theory was based on the biography of the ram. These far-fetched things are all influenced by the theory of petty talk and righteousness. If we put these aside, we can understand the ancient meaning of the ancient system from his exegesis of historical events and famous things, such as the "Eleventh War" in two years and the "Great Reading" in six years.
Being pious and cautious, he is roughly the same as Zheng Xuan, and his scholarship is close to that of Zheng Xuan. He is the author of Zuo Zhuan's Friends in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Growth Theory in the Spring and Autumn Period. Judging from the existing lost articles, his annotations mainly have three characteristics, namely: paying attention to the interpretation of etiquette and interpreting Zuo Zhuan with "three rituals"; Good at textual exegesis; Dredge the meaning of the text, often get the author's meaning, and spread the god of the article. On the whole, he and Jia Kui are both representatives of Zuo Zhuan in Han Dynasty, so that Confucius quoted their views in A Theory of Justice and often misused Jia Fu Yue.
At the same time, He Xiu, who is sincere about kimono and Zheng Xuan, is the temple army of the modern literature school in Han Dynasty. Like Dong Zhongshu, He Xiu specializes in Biography of the Ram, for which he made notes, namely the existing Biography of the Ram in the Spring and Autumn Period. Some of Dong Zhongshu's inventions in Ramology have been lost, but all of He Xiu's ideas have been preserved in Xie Jie. The most important ideas in Gongyangology are the so-called "three schools" and "Zhang San". Three-series theory has existed before, and the three-generation theory began with Dong Zhongshu and developed after what revision. Biography of the Ram put forward the concept of "three" in December of the first year, which means that Confucius wrote Spring and Autumn Annals with different historical facts, such as what he saw, what he heard and what he heard. It is customary to write history in detail. The so-called "different words" means different details. He Xiu, on the other hand, gave birth to a series of "great righteousness" on the basis of "different words", saying that these three generations are three historical stages from chaos to governance and continuous evolution, so later generations call them "according to the troubled times", "ascending the world" and "peaceful the world". Obviously, this kind of ode sung for the son of heaven in Han Dynasty is far from Confucius' historical view, but it is close to Han Fei's historical evolution theory of "unexpectedly repairing the ancient" (Wu note).
He Xiu, who claimed to be a Taoist guardian, felt very sorry for the prevalence of Zuozhuan at that time, so he wrote three books, Rammoshou, Zuoshi Gaoyi and Tuoba Feiji, which not only attacked his old enemy Zuozhuan, but also attacked the allied Tuoba Zhuan. Zheng Xuan, a master of Confucian classics who integrated modern classical Chinese, wrote three books, namely, Fa Mo Shou, Gao Zhen and Qi Fei Ji. Fu Qian, a taxi friend from Zheng Xuan, also took part in this debate, and wrote On Zuo's Family in the Spring and Autumn Period and Debate in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Han Dynasty. When He Xiu saw Zheng Xuan's works, he knew he was defeated. He once lamented, "Kang Cheng came into my room and attacked me with my spear?" The dispute between ancient and modern literature and the study of Chunqiu in Han Dynasty ended in the failure of Zheng Xuan's Integration of Ancient and Modern Literature and He Xiu.
The representative figure of the Spring and Autumn Period in the Three Kingdoms Period was Wei Wangsu. Masters of Confucian classics, such as Zheng Xuan, have annotated the group classics many times, including twelve volumes of Chunqiu Zuozhuan. It's a pity that it doesn't exist now, and a volume of "Yu Han Shan Ju Shu" has been compiled. In order to establish his own authority, he rejected the authority of the previous generation of Zheng Xuan and deliberately distinguished himself from Zheng Xuan. However, his technique is not brilliant. According to Pi's History of Confucian Classics, Wang Su has a good knowledge of modern prose, "refuting Zheng Zhi's ancient prose with modern prose, or refuting Zheng Zhi's modern prose with ancient prose". This unscrupulous practice is detrimental to the literati's morality, and he is Si Mazhao's father-in-law and good at forging books, which makes his image worse in the eyes of future generations. It is impossible to make a comprehensive evaluation of the value of his Zuo Zhuan Zhu. Only from the lost words he saw, he had noticed its fluency and liveliness. At the same time, other famous people who studied Zuo Zhuan were Ji Kang, Dong Yu and historian Yu Qian.
Wu Dong's style of study is close to the Central Plains, and he has been studying China's classic works. The ministers who studied Zuo Zhuan were Zhang Zhao and Shi Xie, both of whom wrote monographs. Shu Han, due to the inconvenient transportation, still adheres to the tradition of today's literary schools. Since Liu Bei used to be a teacher who served Zheng Xuan, Yin Mo, who studied in Jingzhou and was good at Zuo Zhuan, was appointed to teach his son Zuo Zhuan after Shu was pacified. However, judging from what he said when he arrived in Luokou after the demise of Shu, it seems that he didn't learn anything useful from Zuo Zhuan.