God has a great responsibility to the people of Sri Lanka, so we must first suffer their minds, their bones and muscles, and starve their bodies and skins to get what they can. the meaning of

Therefore, if God wants to put the heavy responsibility on this man, he must first worry about his heart, tire his bones and muscles, starve his stomach, make him poor, turn what he has done upside down, and use it to shock his heart, temper his temperament and increase his abilities that he does not have.

Original text: Selected from Mencius' Gao Zi-Born in Worry and Died in Happiness during the Warring States Period: Therefore, the sky will fall on the Sri Lankan people, and they must first suffer from their minds, work hard on their bones and muscles, starve their bodies, empty their bodies, and mess with their actions, so they can endure and have benefited from incompetence.

Extended data

First, the creative background

As the most important representative of Confucianism after Confucius, Mencius developed Confucius' theory of benevolence into the theory of benevolent governance, and put forward the idea that "the people value the monarch but despise him", and advocated that the monarch should implement benevolent governance and enjoy the people. Mencius' ideological theory is the book Mencius. Mencius recorded Mencius' words and deeds and was a dialogue work.

During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, there were wars and disputes, and this article was written under this background.

Second, the theme.

Born in sorrow and died in happiness, it is selected from Mencius' Gao Zi Xia, which is a well-argued, eloquent and powerful reasoning prose.

The author further demonstrates the truth that sorrow is greater than heart death from two different angles: the development of a person and the rise and fall of a country. The full text adopts the way of enumerating historical cases and reasoning, and deduces them layer by layer, making the article compact and meticulous. In addition, the article uses parallelism and antithesis sentences, which effectively enhances the persuasiveness of the argument even if the tone is incoherent.

Baidu Encyclopedia-Mencius Chapter 2