In 6 18, the Tang dynasty was established.
A year later, at 6 19, Luo was born. More than ten years later, Lu was born. Ten years later, about 650, Wang Bo and Yang Jiong were born in the same year.
These four people are the four brightest stars in the early Tang Dynasty. But their fate is even bleaker than a starry night.
Wen Yiduo said that the "four outstanding men in the early Tang Dynasty" were all young talents, with small officials and big surnames, and their behaviors were quite romantic and particularly tragic. Because of their romantic behavior, they were reviled by the world and won a lot of sympathy because of their tragic experience.
By about 693, when Yang Jiong, the last of the four people, died, the national movement of the Tang Dynasty had been surging, and the voice of governing the world and prospering times was constant.
However, the arrogance of the empire did not open the door to personal luck.
Those talented people have become jealous people one by one.
1
Among the four outstanding figures in the early Tang Dynasty, bad life is the standard, but when you think about it carefully, your life is definitely the worst.
Born in the Lushi family of Fanyang, Lu has always been proud of being a "well-dressed family", but just like Yang Jiong, who was born in the Yang family of Hongnong, they are just a branch of a famous family that has been forgotten and neglected.
Birth can give them more family influence, but it can't give them more things.
With his talent, Lu became the official seal of Deng. Li Yuanyu, the king of Deng, is the seventeenth son of Tang Gaozu Tang Gaozu. He once publicly said in the palace that there were such great talents in the Western Han Dynasty as his aides, and Lu was mine.
However, despite the appreciation of Deng Wang, the talented Lu was still dissatisfied with the status quo. He has an impulse to make contributions, but he can't find a place to put it.
In his eyes, Chang 'an, the imperial capital, is full of arrogance, extravagance and power struggle of princes and nobles. In the masterpiece "The Ancient Meaning of Chang 'an", he played up the vanity fair in Chang 'an. Finally, he wrote:
Festival scenery does not treat each other, mulberry fields need to change rapidly.
In the past, Bai Yutang was to be no.1. Today, only Song Qing is here.
Lonely and lonely, Yangziju, a book a year.
The unique Nanshan osmanthus hair flies around attacking people.
All vulgar indulgence and bottomless dependence on power will eventually disappear under the crush of time and lose their reputation. Only the former residence of Yang Xiong, a great writer in the Han Dynasty, and osmanthus fragrans in Zhong Nanshan, although lonely and neglected, stayed.
The proposition of moment and eternity has the answer here.
After leaving Deng, his fate took a turn for the worse. Soon, because of "sudden unfortunate detention", he was imprisoned for unexpected troubles. Thanks to the help of my friends, I was released from prison.
Subsequently, he was demoted to Yizhou Xindu (near Chengdu, Sichuan) and served as a county magistrate (similar to the public security bureau chief). Despite extreme depression, Lu still insists on what he thinks is the most important, such as "naive nature" and "noble spirit".
The old man in Shu saw Lu covered in poetry books and asked him why he didn't "invite his name by poetry books" Lu asked, "Being honored is evil, and being humiliated is good? Beggars haven't lost his innocence ... Although my road is poor, why is my husband expensive? "
In a poem written for Yizhou officials, Lu compared himself to a bird from the north, but this bird was maverick, never in cahoots, and never out of tune with the world:
Don't stop evil wood branches, don't drink stolen springs.
I often think of rice and beams. I hope to live under the buttonwood tree.
Wise men don't invite me, fools ignore me.
Therefore, it is independent and sad.
However, the arrow of fate has never let go of this independent bird, this lonely poet with a firm heart.
In the later period of Yizhou, Lu suffered from a "wind disease" that could torture people to death.
From Lu's own description, we know his physical condition after illness: emaciation, facial deformity, hair loss, cough, quadriplegia, muscle atrophy, one hand disability, walking trembling, long-term bed rest leading to local muscle rot and great pain. ...
In the last ten years of his life, Lu dragged such a weak body through the rest of his life.
He has a strong desire to survive, and he has changed places five times and sought medical advice. Also thanks to Sun Simiao, the drug king, as a teacher, nursed back to health and explained the way to be a man. However, just as he was running around for medical treatment, his father died suddenly, and Lu was so sad that he even spit out the medicine he had taken.
After his father died, the Lu family almost went bankrupt. In order to buy medicine to cure the disease, this lonely and talented person had to beg for financial aid from Luoyang celebrities. Moreover, the funds are limited, which unexpectedly provokes the controversy of making friends and forming a party. Lu was heartbroken, but he had to defend himself, saying that he had been ill for many years and it was useless not to do current affairs. How could he be involved in nepotism?
Poverty is biting, old friends are alienated, the world is cold, and life has no nostalgia. He said sadly that although God's grace is wide, it's a pity that my life can't hold it. Although the earth has nurtured a lot, it has been cut off from my kindness in this life.
The last words he wrote were spicy and extremely painful:
It's too late to be happy, and there are too many troubles.
This Kirin pen is unique to the eastern suburbs, and this Phoenix pen is the secret system of Xishan.
Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.
At the age of 20, I'll worry about it. If it doesn't stop, people will die.
In the remaining days, desperate Lu spent all his money, "bought dozens of acres of gardens" at the foot of Yuzhou Mountain, dug a grave for himself and invited people to dredge it. He sometimes lies in the grave as if he were dead.
One day, after bidding farewell to my loved ones, I calmly stepped into the surging water after ten years of illness.
Zhang Xie, an Amin, said: "The ancient and modern scribes are extremely poor, and no one can compare with Lu. I heard about it before I got to the official position. If you indulge in it forever, you will never be able to speak again. When you throw yourself into the belly of a fish, there is no such way to die in ancient times. "
Ma Maoyuan said that Lu suddenly learned the Tao, became an official, became an official, and disappeared. Finally, in the helpless contradiction and the pain of illness, he ended his sad life by committing suicide.
2
About before and after Lu jumped into the sea to commit suicide, his good friend Luo experienced a life journey from the most passionate to the most depressed, and finally the whole person disappeared into the fog of history.
In 684 AD, after Wu Zetian directly took charge of the Tang Dynasty, Li (that is, the grandson of the founding hero of the Tang Dynasty) rose up in Yangzhou, under the banner of restoring the legal system. Wang Luobin, 65, joined the rebels and wrote a famous campaign slogan-"Please Wu Zhao". After only three months, Li was defeated and disappeared.
Among the four outstanding men in the early Tang Dynasty, Luo was the most legendary and experienced the most: resignation, seclusion, exile, joining the army, imprisonment and rebellion ... He was outgoing, enthusiastic and rich, and never lived a stable life.
Wen Yiduo commented on Wang Luobin, saying that he was "born with chivalrous spirit, meddlesome, keen on revenge and revolution, and helping spoony women break people's hearts ...".
In other words, Wang Luobin is a talented person with chivalrous spirit. At the beginning of the readme poem "The Past", he wrote himself like this:
Teenagers value heroes, while the weak wear cheap clothes.
It can be seen that he is not a poet who is weak in heart and pursues an official position.
Like the four outstanding poets in the early Tang Dynasty, Luo was also a gifted teenager, who could write poems at the age of seven. The famous poem about geese, which is well-known to all women and children, was sung live when he was seven years old. At that time, the guest asked him to write a poem pointing at the goose. He was called a "prodigy" on the spot.
When I grew up, I went to Chang 'an to take the imperial examination, and left with confidence, feeling dejected.
But you can't blame Wang Bin for his incompetence. Let's just say he was born at the wrong time. In the imperial examination in the early Tang Dynasty, the concept of family status was strong, and it became a common practice to enter through the back door. Sometimes birth is more important than knowledge. King Robin is arrogant and refuses to cater to bureaucrats. It is almost impossible for him to pass the imperial examination and become an official. If he had been born in the civilian Song Dynasty, Robin's life would have been completely different.
At the age of 33, Wang went to Yuzhou to be the family of Li (the sixteenth son), which should be similar to Deng's work, and engaged in civilian work.
Li appreciates Wang's talent. Three years later, he was asked to write a letter of recommendation, and the meaning of inspection and promotion was obvious. Luobin Wang wrote:
If you are arrogant, you don't have the heart. You talk about your strengths, your health is good, you are arrogant, you want to be a gentleman, you are confused by the country, and you are arrogant. This murderer is ashamed of it, and Kistler is proud of it? So, you can show off your ability and you won't be ordered. Sincerely.
If boasting can increase the rank, it will interfere with the national plan and undermine the gentleman's style. I'd rather beat around the bush than write this recommendation.
This is Wang Luobin's stubbornness.
Three years later, King Robin left Daowangfu and lived in Shandong for nearly 12 years. According to the analysis, this is a disappointing return of Robin who worked hard in officialdom in the first half of his life.
However, seclusion in rural areas requires an economic foundation. King Robin said that he "never expected to come to Wenda in middle age", so he could just farm and support his family. But a few years later, he found it more and more difficult to support his family, so he had to change his mind and look for jobs everywhere:
There is a way to be poor and ashamed to return to the fields.
What is the ideal fullness and realistic bone feeling? Here it is.
Under the pressure of life, Wang Luobin betrayed the old man's personality, put his attitude very low, and asked people for officials everywhere. Finally, at the age of 49, he got a talented junior official.
But as it turns out, fate often does not care for those small officials who crawl at the bottom. Luo's poems can be well written, but in officialdom, he can only sink down and get frustrated. For a time, he was even driven out of Chang 'an, followed the army out of the fortress and entered Shu.
From the historical influence, this experience made Luo become the first generation of frontier poets in the early Tang Dynasty, which opened the peak of frontier poems in the prosperous Tang Dynasty. However, from the perspective of personal fate, this experience is a portrayal of Luo's wandering life.
Life goes round and round. When Luo, 6 1 year-old, was promoted to suggestion, he was quickly framed and imprisoned. One theory is that he frequently satirized and lectured, offended Wu Zetian and was arrested and imprisoned; Another way of saying it is that he was framed and planted by his colleagues and went to prison. In a word, this is the price for old Wang Luobin to remain chivalrous and unsociable.
In prison, he wrote the famous "A political prisoner listens to cicadas":
Cicada sang in the western land and ordered me to make up my mind in my cell.
However, it needs those songs with black wings to break the heart of a white-haired prisoner.
His flight passed through the thick fog, and his pure voice was drowned in the world of wind.
Who knows if he is still singing? Who will listen to me? .
Cicada is noble and refined, and no one understands it, just like the poet himself. Who can intercede for me in this world?
After more than a year in prison, Luo regained his freedom and was later demoted to Linhai Cheng. According to historical records, King Robin "was dissatisfied and gave up his official position".
In 684, 65-year-old Luo joined Li, who was stationed in the Rebel Army, and became the Minister of Education (similar to the Secretary-General). In order to call on the world and strengthen the uprising team, Li drafted a letter to him. When a movement comes out, the ruling and opposition parties shake.
Duan's "Youyang Miscellanies" records that Wu Zetian personally discovered this abusive article. When reading "Emei refuses people, being sycophantic can confuse the Lord", she smiled and continued reading "A handful of wet soil is six feet lonely". Suddenly, she restrained her smile and pointed at the Prime Minister's nose and scolded: How could you miss someone like Luo?
There is also a famous saying in Please Wu Zhao that has been passed down to this day:
Let's see who is the master of today's world!
This eloquent essay made Wu Zetian attach great importance to the rebellion in Yangzhou and sent 300,000 troops to suppress it. Three months later, Li Bing was defeated and killed, and Wang's ending became a mystery in history: some people said that he was killed with Li, some people said that he drowned in the water, and others said that he escaped and remained anonymous.
In a word, 684 years later, Wang Luobin disappeared.
Luo wrote a poem called "Give away Xiao":
In this place, Jing Ke bid farewell to Yan Taizi Dan, and the strong man was sad and sorrowful.
No one was there at that time, and the water is still cold today.
This poem is full of chivalry, but the title of the poem is "Give away", but no one knows who to give it to. So some people speculate that King Robin may have given it to himself, thinking that he is a dead Jing Ke.
Chen Xijin, a Qing Dynasty man, accurately summed up Luo's tragic life in one sentence: "The coastal youth were down and out, and the humble officials sank, defeated by tribute, and then died of grass." However, through this sad life background, we can see that the teenager who sang geese in those days has become a strong man who won the championship and resisted the ruthless suppression of fate again and again.
three
The failure of the uprising that made King Robin desperate also changed the life track of another gifted scholar.
In Li's uprising team, there was a man named Yang Shenrang. Yang Shenrang's father is called Yang Degan, who is Yang Jiong's uncle. After the uprising was quelled, the court began to settle accounts in the autumn. Yang De and his son were killed, and Yang Jiong was also implicated. In the rising period of his career, he suffered a blow and was demoted to Zizhou (now Santai County, Sichuan Province) as a judicial soldier.
Unexpected troubles made Yang Jiong, who had been wandering in imperial officialdom, suddenly feel the impermanence of life. He left changan with fear:
Willow in the shady garden, pine on the pavilion hill.
The guest was so unhappy that he couldn't help crying alone.
At the moment, he thinks he is the most melancholy person in the whole empire. Although he was born in the Yang family of Hongnong, his great-grandfather, great-grandfather and uncle were all officials' families, but his own grandfather and father were unknown and never prominent ordinary people. He realized this very early, so when talking about his life experience, he did not hesitate to say, "I am so cheap."
However, he did not share the glory of the family, but he could not escape the bad luck of the family.
Before being demoted by his brother Yang Shenrang, Yang Jiong was going through a rare period of rising career. 65,438+00 years old, should be promoted by Boy Scouts, 65,438+065,438+0 years old, waiting for appointment in Hong Wen Pavilion. This is 16, and the court has long forgotten this prodigy. By the age of 27, Yang Jiong should have been promoted again, only to fill a small official of a school bookkeeper. Before the age of 30, he was dissatisfied with the status quo, saying that he had been an official for 20 years, and it was difficult to express his ambition because of the conflict in officialdom. He shouted "Better be a centurion than a scholar". However, at the age of 365,438+0, his luck changed. He was recommended as Prince Zhan and took a bachelor's degree in Chongwen Pavilion, starting a great leap in his career.
Only three years later, a brother who had never met before took the rest of his life into the ditch.
After four years in Zizhou, Yang Jiong went to Luoyang. When he was out of Sichuan, he passed the Wuxia Gorge. He writes poems to express his personal pursuit and personality;
Being loyal to what I do, rowing can't hurt.
Can be a mainstay, can float in Lvliang.
Where is the beauty now? Ganoderma lucidum has only fragrance.
The night apes crow in Shan Ye, and the guest tears touch the petticoats.
Will Yang Jiong appreciate the bad luck at this time, improve his poetic style and shape another him? We don't know, but it seems to be a cruel fact that suffering breeds poets. After coming back, Yang Jiong no longer paid attention to the gains and losses of officialdom, but became a poisonous tongue in imperial politics.
He is a humble official, but his friends advised him to be cautious in words and deeds so as to avoid disaster, but he didn't care. He once sneered at those treacherous and hypocritical court officials on the spot, saying that you are all "the last Kirin".
Others asked him, what is "Kirin's last"?
Yang Jiong explained to them that when you got together to hold a banquet, you all saw the trick of playing Kirin, right? Make a unicorn skin with a head and horns in advance, put it on the donkey and run as a unicorn. When you take off that skin, it's just a donkey below. That stupid donkey is called "Kirin Last".
The official suddenly realized that Yang Jiong was using this word to scold us!
Yang Jiong went on to sarcastically say that a person who wears Zhu Xi's official clothes without virtue and talent is not the same as a donkey wearing Kirin skin!
Although the future of Yang Jiong's life was ruined, he lived to be an outspoken poet and not bow to the powerful. Even Song, whose personality is very ordinary, had to feel that Yang Jiong was "angry as autumn frost, unwilling to admit defeat".
Ma Maoyuan commented on Yang Jiong's move. He is "conceited and full of the enthusiasm of the times and the idea of fame and fortune, but he is not satisfied with the vulgar bureaucratic life, and he is also a royal scholar who obeys the ruling class and advocates superiority and common storage."
In any era, being a critic has to pay a price.
Sure enough, two or three years later, Yang Jiong was demoted to Yingchuan as a county magistrate.
He died in Yingchuan County at the age of 43.
Throughout his life, it is the life of a county magistrate. However, this humble home is already the best of the four outstanding figures in the early Tang Dynasty.
four
Among the four outstanding men in the early Tang Dynasty, Yang Jiong was the last one to make a curtain call, and Wang Bo, his contemporaries, was the first one to make a curtain call and died.
Wang Bo, only 27 years old, has been shining for thousands of years. He is a genius who truly embodies the glory of the empire and is the first of the four outstanding men in the early Tang Dynasty.
According to historical records, Wang Bo was able to write poems at the age of six, and his poems were cleverly conceived and the words were ingram. Before 10 years old, he had read through historical classics and Confucian classics, and wrote a book dedicated to criticizing the mistakes of classical annotations. /kloc-when he was 0/2 years old, he secretly ran away from home, took Cao Yuan, a famous doctor and warlock in Chang 'an as his teacher, studied for ten months, and learned all Cao Yuan's housekeeping skills before returning to China.
/kloc-at the age of 0/7, Wang Bo passed the imperial examination and was named Chao Saburo, becoming the youngest official in the Tang Dynasty. Recommended by the official department, he went to Pei as an editor.
However, a genius's good luck has run out so far. Wang Bo's last decade will be a triple blow to fate.
In the Tang Dynasty, cockfighting prevailed within the royal family. With his talent and bravado, Wang Bo wrote an article "Chicken of the King of England", denouncing the cockfighting of the King of England and flattering Pei Wang. After the article was spread, the emperor was furious and decided to deliberately provoke the relationship between princes, so he ordered to remove his official position and drive him out of Pei. This was the first stroke of fate, which completely changed Wang Bo's life track.
Wang Bo's anxious life began. He once expressed the pain in his heart like this:
Heaven and earth are ruthless, and nature is powerless. Servants are endowed with the nature of sadness and loneliness, and servants are endowed with the spirit of Geng Jie's injustice.
Forget the mountain and bump in the dynasty of Tang Yao; Proud of the clouds, gaunt in a generation of Ming Sheng.
Times are good times, but how can the road of life get narrower and narrower?
He bid farewell to Chang 'an and traveled far and wide. Interestingly, the four outstanding figures in the early Tang Dynasty all went to Bashu once or many times, either as officials, messengers or tourists. The place where the four met was probably Chang 'an, followed by Sichuan.
After three years of wandering, Wang Bo returned to Chang 'an. The better his poems are written, the more famous he is. Yang Jiong later prefaced Selected Works of Wang Bo, calling Wang Bo "every article is amazing". As long as he has articles, Luoyang paper must be expensive.
However, there is a bigger crit waiting for him.
Wang Bo has a good relationship with a slave named Cao Da. Cao Da committed a crime and fled to Wang Bo to avoid disaster. Wang Bo took him in. But when the news became tense, Wang Bo was afraid that he would lose his life and even kill Cao Da after exposure.
It happened when it was discovered. Wang Bo was punished according to law, which was consistent with the amnesty granted by the court and avoided death, but he was dismissed from public office. His father was also implicated and was reduced to toe order (now Vietnam). From then on, Wang Bo gave up his official position and hid in his hometown. This is the second blow of fate, and a generation of genius has fallen into a dead end.
In the past, he wrote this farewell poem:
Across the wall of Sanqin, across a layer of fog, across a river.
We said goodbye sadly, and our two officials went in opposite directions.
After all, the world is just a small place.
Why are you wandering at the fork in the road? The child is holding a towel.
Now, he wrote a farewell poem, which became like this:
There are many difficult roads ahead, and only one person found his way in a hurry.
On the way of thousands of miles of frustration, lonely cold will destroy life, but a hundred years of body.
Thoughts are wandering and life is short.
Go or stay, it will be another person in the dream.
From open-minded to sad, there is only one life disaster in the middle, which makes people feel infinite.
In the autumn of 675, Wang Bo made his last trip. He is going to visit his father. Passing through Nanchang, I just happened to catch up with Governor Yan of Hongzhou (Nanchang) who gave a banquet in the rebuilt museum and was invited to attend. During the dinner, Governor Yan called on the guests to write poems for the new museum. All the guests know that Yan Taishou just wants to show off the talent of his son-in-law Meng in front of everyone, so he refuses to write it for Meng to play in public.
Wang Bo suddenly picked up a pen and paper and said, "I'll do it."
According to Notes of the Tang Dynasty, the satrap of Yan suddenly became unhappy and got up and left, but he couldn't help wondering what the world-famous genius Wang Bo could write. After a while, his men reported: "At the beginning, it was written' old county town of Zhang Yu, new residence of Hongdu'." Governor Yan said: "This is just a cliche." Then his men reported: "He wrote' The stars spread their wings and meet Lu Heng'." Yan Dudu fell silent.
When he heard a report from his subordinates that "the sunset is the same color as loneliness, and autumn water is the same color", Governor Yan was surprised and praised: "What a genius, this article is eternal!"
The Preface to Wang Tengting, which has a history of lighting literature for thousands of years, was born.
After that, fate gave Wang Bo a third and final blow. After seeing his father from his toes, on the way home, the South China Sea raged, and Wang Bo fell into the sea and died of panic.
In 676, at the turn of spring and summer, a superstar quietly fell.
In the winter of the same year, "Preface to Wang Tengting" spread to the capital, and scholars praised it. Tang Gaozong ordered someone to read it. When he read that "the sunset is lonely in Qi Fei, and the autumn waters are the same color," he couldn't help continuous shooting's thigh: "Singing forever is a genius!" The more I read, the more interesting I find it. Then I asked, "Now, where is Wang Bo? I want to call him into the DPRK! "
The servant here stammered, "Wang Bo fell into the water and died."
From the emperor to Buyi, this may be the biggest bad news for all people who love literature in the early Tang Dynasty.
five
The life of the four outstanding men in the early Tang Dynasty explains what it means to be jealous of talents. On the Internet, the four outstanding figures in the early Tang Dynasty sometimes homophonic as "Four Robberies in the Early Tang Dynasty", which is also very appropriate.
Their "robbery" has both personal factors and times factors. However, in the 289 years of the Tang Dynasty, it is understandable that Du Mu and Li Shangyin, who were in the decline of the late Tang Dynasty, had a bad fate, because the collapse of the empire inevitably included individual tragedies; However, the whole empire was rising in the early Tang Dynasty, but it went to the opposite tragedy. The opportunity of the empire was not open to talented people, which is why Wang Yang and others were more sympathetic and compassionate.
Life is really bitter. One must have talent, time and life at the same time in order to live a wonderful life. But how easy is it?
History is often personal sorrow that makes the times great.
The four outstanding poets in the early Tang Dynasty were sad, but when they struggled on the thorny mountain road, the Tang poetry was lucky.
Before the Four Masters, Shangguan Yi was the representative of the poets in the Tang Dynasty. His poems were deeply loved by Emperor Taizong, and the whole literary world followed suit. At that time, he was called "official style". But as Wen Yiduo said, "The palace poems in the early Tang Dynasty are still Jian Wendi's boneless heartlessness. The only difference is that the words are thinner, the tone is smoother, and the whole appearance is more flexible and gentle. This is really depressed. "
It was not until the birth of the four outstanding poets in the early Tang Dynasty that fresh vitality was injected into the Tang poetry. They expanded the theme of the poem, broke through the limitations of the court, approached the people and turned to reality, which not only described the life in the city, but also extended to the cold in the frontier. The poetic style is fresh and vigorous, and it washes away the customs of the DPRK. Their efforts laid the foundation for the prosperity of Tang poetry in the future. Hu Yinglin, a Ming Dynasty man, said: "In the 300 years of the Tang Dynasty, four people were the pioneers." .
The climb of literature is based on the scars left by predecessors. Without the four outstanding figures in the early Tang Dynasty, there would be no later famous CP such as Du Li, Wang Meng, Gao Cen and Bai Yuan.
However, many people don't understand this simple truth. After moving forward, they, in turn, mocked the backwardness and obsolescence of their predecessors and mocked their failures and sorrows. Du Fu doesn't like these people who love to laugh. He cleared his name for the four masters of the early Tang Dynasty and said:
"Lu" and "Lu" are the highest achievements of their creation under the conditions of that time.
After the life of your generation has all turned to dust, nothing will hurt the torrent flowing to the endless river.
You self-righteous, ignorant comedians will soon be eliminated, and the brilliance of Wang Yang, Luo Lu and the four great masters will remain immortal like a big river.
I remember there was a plot in the movie The Death of Wang Bo. Although it is fictional, it is still quite meaningful.
Wang Bo talks with Du Jing, his confidant. Du Jing said, "Datang needs your seal." Wang Bo replied: "You are wrong, but we need Datang."
Times, individuals, countries, destiny, who made who? This is a question worth thinking about.