"Eight fights" is a metaphor used by Xie Lingyun, a poet of the Southern Dynasties, to praise Cao Zhi, a poet of the Wei Dynasty in the Three Kingdoms. He said: "There is only one stone in the world, and Cao Zijian (Cao Zhi) monopolizes eight fights. I have to fight, and the world is divided into one fight." Later, people compared the idiom "man of great talent" to a man of great literary talent.
Summary of the story:
Xie Lingyun, a state-owned writer of landscape poems in the Southern Song Dynasty, was a famous writer in ancient China. Most of his poems describe the scenic spots in kuài, Yongjia, Lushan and other places, and are good at depicting natural scenery, creating a school of landscape poems in the history of literature. His poems are very artistic, paying special attention to the beauty of form, and are very popular with literati. As soon as the poem came out, people scrambled to copy it and spread it widely. Song Wendi appreciated his literary talent, specially recalled him to Kyoto, and called his poems and calligraphy "two treasures", and often asked him to write poems and compositions while serving banquets. Xie Lingyun, who has always been pretentious, is even more arrogant after receiving this courtesy.
On one occasion, while drinking, he boasted: "Since Wei and Jin Dynasties, literary talents in the world have had one stone (a unit of capacity, one stone equals ten buckets), among which Cao Zijian (that is, Cao Zhi) monopolizes eight buckets, and I have one bucket, while others in the world have one bucket." As can be seen from his words, except for Cao Zhi, the talents of others are not in his eyes, and his self-evaluation is very high.
Xie Lingyun, the most famous poet in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, once said, "There is only one stone in the world (it is an ancient unit of capacity in China, and one stone is equal to ten buckets). Cao Zijian has eight buckets, and I have one bucket. I have used one bucket since ancient times and today." As a result, later generations called the outstanding scholar "man of great talent" or "the talent of the Eight Struggles". For example, in "Alas" by Li Shangyin of Tang Dynasty, there is a saying: "Fu Fei is worried about sitting in the Zhitian Pavilion and exhausted the talents of Chen Wang." In Tang Xukui's "Offering Assistant Minister Yang Neihan", there are: "Keep your mouth shut when you are warm and summer, and give me eight talents in idle words" and so on.