China is known as a "land of etiquette", and respecting teachers is a traditional virtue in our country. Teachers bear the important responsibility of "preaching, teaching, and solving doubts" to students, and are called "soul engineers of all mankind." Since ancient times, there have been many touching stories about honoring teachers in China. "Cheng Men Li Xue" is one of the representative allusions.
The story "Cheng Men Li Xue" tells the story of Song Dynasty scholars Yang Shi and You Zuo who sought advice from Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi. The original text reads:
"Yang Shi met Cheng Yi in Luo. Shi Gai was forty years old. One day he saw Yi, and Yi sat in silence. Shi and You Zuo stood there and couldn't leave. Yi Jijue , then the snow outside the door is one foot deep."
It means: Yang Shi and You Zuo came to Songyang Academy to visit Cheng Yi, and they met this old gentleman sitting in meditation with his eyes closed. sleep. Cheng Yi knew clearly that two guests were coming, but he refused to say anything and ignored them. Yang and You were afraid of disturbing their husband's rest, so they had no choice but to stand respectfully and wait silently for him to open his eyes. After waiting like this for a long time, Cheng Yi suddenly woke up. When he saw Yang and You, he pretended to be surprised and said: "Ah! Ah! The sages have been calling here for a long time!" It means that you two are still here and haven't left. It was a very cold day in winter. I don’t know when it started to snow. There was snow outside the door, more than a foot deep.
This story is called "Cheng Men Li Xue". It was widely circulated among scholars in the Song Dynasty. Later, it was used to describe respecting teachers and sincerely asking for advice. People often quoted this allusion and idiom.
Character introduction
Cheng Yi, a Neo-Confucianist and educator in the Northern Song Dynasty. He is the younger brother of Cheng Hao. Both of them studied under Zhou Dunyi and were both the founders of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties, known as Ercheng. Er Cheng is from Yichuan, Luoyang. The Ercheng theory was later inherited and developed by Zhu Xi, and was known as the "Cheng-Zhu School" in the world. Yang Shi and You Zuo studied with Er Cheng and were very respectful. Yang You and Yang You originally had Cheng Hao as their teacher. After Cheng Hao's death, they were already forty years old and had passed the Jinshi examination. However, they still had to go to Cheng Yi to continue their studies. The story happened on the day when they first came to Songyang Academy to pay homage to Cheng Yi.
Ercheng’s academic ideas focused on moral education and emphasized self-cultivation, and the methods were to gain knowledge, investigate things, and explore principles. "To achieve knowledge, wisdom will gradually become clear." To achieve knowledge is to exhaust the principles, that is, to exhaust the principles of heaven. The way to gain knowledge is to "investigate things". "The grid is the ultimate." The "grid" is the internal perception of things and the understanding of their principles. "The ears and eyes can see and hear but cannot go far, the breath is limited to the ears, and the heart has no distance." Therefore, the key to understanding things lies in the "heart". The heart "combines its virtues with the heaven and earth, and its brightness with the sun and the moon, and is not external." Therefore, Zhizhi focuses on "internal feelings" rather than external things.
The "Tianli" theory created by Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi played an important role in the history of ancient Chinese thought. It had an important and far-reaching impact on ancient Chinese political thought and philosophical thought, and was influenced by later generations. The respect of the feudal dynasty gradually evolved into the dominant thought in the late feudal society of my country for nearly a thousand years.