It is said that Fuxi was born on March 18th of the lunar calendar. There is still a custom in the Central Plains to worship Fuxi on March 18th of the lunar calendar. As mentioned above, his father is the Suiren family, so who is his mother? It is said to be the Huaxu family. There are also myths and legends about his birth. We will not go into details here unless we are talking about myths in the strict sense. It is only said that since receiving his father's teachings, he has continued to observe the sky at night to improve his knowledge of astronomy and geography, and also continued to improve the Bagua system.
Let’s just talk about what Fuxi did specifically?
First of all, since he took over the position of leader from his father Suiren, he began to expand externally, and finally unified all the tribes in China, and finally settled in Chendi, which is said to be today's Huaiyang District, Zhoukoudian, Henan City. In the end, he also did a job that most powerful emperors in ancient times wanted to do, which was to grant Zen to Mount Tai. What is Feng Chan? "Feng" refers to building an altar of earth to offer sacrifices to heaven. The ancients believed that Mount Tai is the highest among the mountains. Therefore, emperors on earth should go to the highest Mount Tai to offer sacrifices to the emperor of heaven, indicating that they were ordered by "heaven" to build a round altar and decorate it with five-color earth to repay heaven for their merits. "Zen" refers to worshiping the earth. It is held on some hills such as Zhiyun Mountain and Tingting Mountain to repay the merits of the earth. For example, later Qin Shihuang and Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty did this. p> Since he unified the Chinese tribes, because each tribe has different beliefs, some tribes believe in pythons, some tribes believe in crocodiles, some tribes believe in tigers, and some tribes believe in eagles, so in order to unify all tribes, he all obeyed Under his command, he took parts of the animals that each tribe believed in to form the totem of the unified belief of each tribe. He named him dragon, so the totem dragon of the Chinese nation came like this. He is made of: [python] The body of [crocodile], the horns of male [deer], the eyes of fierce [tiger], the [scales] of [red carp], the legs of [monitor], the claws of [goshawk], the claws of [white shark] The tail is composed of the baleen of [fin whale]. This is how the descendants of the dragon began.
He also started doing his father's old business and was good at observing. He saw that there were clouds in nature. , there will also be rain and snow, there will be thunder and lightning storms, and we will see wind and rain, birds and animals, and based on the principle of the change of yin and yang between heaven and earth, we created the early Bagua, which was later perfected by King Wen of Zhou Dynasty and others. Bagua is called late Bagua.
Fuxi was often troubled by problems such as the starvation of his tribe. The main source of food was hunting animals. However, human tools at that time were too weak, so humans alone could do it. It is incomparable to many animals, and it belongs to a very weak race. The number of animals it hunts every day is very few.
Once one of his subordinates brought him a fish, which he grilled. He wanted to eat it, so he asked his subordinates where it came from. The subordinates said it was from the river, but it was difficult to catch. It was so slippery that it was hard to hold it. When he heard that, take me to see how difficult it is. So Fuxi took him to the river and showed him personally how to catch fish. It was really difficult to catch fish without any tools, so Fuxi began to use the family tradition of their Feng family to observe in detail and think in a daze. , how can I catch fish? After thinking about it, one day I suddenly saw a spider spinning silk and weaving a web hard. I couldn't help but be overjoyed, so I found some rattan, willow branches and the like, and woven it into a Then he called his men over and said: Can you use this to fish and see if it is convenient? After a while, his men came over and brought a basket of fish. He and his men were very happy when they saw it, so they took it out. This method was taught to more people, and his invention gradually spread. If the invention patent registration system was implemented at that time, the Feng family would probably be the most powerful patent family in the world. This is the famous Fuxi invention. Net fishing.
But fishing is easier. Eating too much fish will make you tired. People are meat eaters, so they still feel uncomfortable without meat.
< p> So our Lord Fuxi was inspired by fishing and thought that if these fish were collected together with a net from all around, none of them would be able to escape. So can this method be used to hunt these animals? Where can I find a hunting net? What kind of net is suitable for hunting?Our ancestor Fuxi finally discovered that most animals are afraid of fire, and finally further expanded the application scenarios of his father's invention.
He tried to ask his tribesmen to hold torches and drive the samples, puppies, etc. to a unified place. When they arrived at the centralized place, everyone counted one, two, and three together and started throwing them. Stone.
I found this method to be good, and I can kill a lot of animals every time. This time I felt much relieved. But it was troublesome to prepare a lot of stones every time. One time, a subordinate suddenly came to report to him that one of them fell into a pit and died. what to do? After Fuxi went to inspect and settled the deceased, he began his journey of thinking and discovery. He thought that if an animal fell in and died like this, wouldn't it save us much trouble? Why are you still throwing stones? Generally speaking, inventors are also doers. They just do what they say. Once they tell their tribesmen about their methods, they take action immediately. Needless to say, the result is another great harvest.
It can be seen that many small things in our lives actually contain great principles. It depends on whether we are good at discovering and applying them.
Of course, our Fuxi still has many inventions. Here is a simple list for you. When we have the opportunity to do a personal story feature later, we will talk about it in detail. What inventions are there?
3. The text was initially determined. Before Fuxi, people would tie ropes to record whatever happened. As mentioned before, this was invented by his father Suiren. Important events were tied in big knots. , knotting small things into small knots. As time goes by, I can no longer tell which knot records what. In the past, the number of animals hunted each time was pitifully small, but now what if you can hunt 100 animals at once? It takes 100 knots, large and small, but it is not exhausting. Therefore, the "Preface to the Book of Shangshu" records: "In ancient times, Fuxi, the king of the world, began to draw the Eight Diagrams to replace the knotting of ropes. This book was born from this book. ". "I appointed Zhu Xiang as the Feilong clan and made a book deed. There are six types of writing: one is pictogram, the other is borrowing, the third is referring to things, the fourth is understanding, the fifth is transferring notes, and the sixth is homophonic. The meaning of the world must be attributed to words, words. It must be returned to the Six Books, with the same text replacing the knotted rope policy." Chinese characters were created based on the shapes of things, such as the sun, moon, mountains, water, etc. This is the origin of Chinese writing. We started learning hieroglyphics, ideographic characters, etc. from many primary school textbooks. It started at that time.
4. Determine the surname
As mentioned before, his father decided on the surname Feng, which is also the first surname in China. No wonder our hero Feng Qingyang is so powerful in martial arts. On the basis of this popularity, Fuxi further derived more than 20 surnames such as Wei, Pao, Fu, Mi, Dongfang, Dian and Huang. In this way, Fuxi is the root of all surnames.
Before Fuxi, people’s understanding of the natural world was completely blank, and they had no concept of the four seasons. As soon as Fuxi opened the sky, he pointed out what is the sky, what is the earth, what is the day, what is the night, the day is yang, the night is yin, spring, summer, autumn and winter begin again and again, and according to the changes of the sun and the moon, the years, months and days are divided. This is the beginning of the Chinese calendar. The emergence of the calendar has brought great help to people's production and life and promoted social progress.
The musical instruments of Fuxi's era were mainly percussion instruments, such as knocking on earthen basins, knocking on animal skins, and knocking on stones, which were used as the beat for singing and dancing. Due to the emergence of animal husbandry, people's material life has been greatly improved.
In order to enrich cultural life, Fuxi kneaded loess into a fist-sized mud ball and poked holes with wooden sticks.
It could make a whining sound and named it "Xun" , also known as "Taoxun".
In order to hunt and fight, Fuxi taught people to make weapons, such as wooden sticks tied with stone axes, stone sickles, stone shovels, etc. The invention of weapons played an important role in enabling Fuxi to conquer various tribes and promote the first great integration of the Chinese nation.
8. Optimize the marriage system
Implement the male-female pairing system, people from the same tribe cannot intermarry, and group marriages and incestuous mating are prohibited to prevent incest and consanguineous marriages. It is no exaggeration to say that Fuxi formulated and promulgated the first marriage law.
I remember that Emperor Qianlong once smugly called himself a perfect old man because of a few small functions. If he was compared with these great men in ancient times, he would be really disappointed. Of course, the details of his perfectness will be discussed later. We will come back to him when we come to him. Let’s not talk about it here.
Now let’s briefly talk about Fuxi’s family relationships.
In addition to giving birth to him, Fuxi’s mother Hua Xu also gave birth to an awesome figure, who is Nuwa? As a Chinese, if you don’t know Nuwa, are you still Chinese? Right.
The most famous one is that Nuwa created man and Nuwa mended the sky. So strictly speaking, Fuxi and Nuwa are brother and sister. But what is more widely known is that they are still a couple.
Some people will say, isn’t this incest? The word incest is probably a word that only appeared thousands of years later. If you think about what we said earlier, he himself stipulated a system that prohibited intermarriage between people from the same tribe. What does that mean? It means that there are too many intermarriages. That’s why there’s this rule, right? If there is no such thing, then why should we stipulate it?
We are going to talk about the next emperor, so we can only talk about their children.
So what kind of offspring did Nuwa and Fuxi have when they got married? There are always the following:
Qilin, Phoenix, Shaodian, Mi Fei, these are the ones We won't talk about the others who are not emperors. We can talk about them later in other biographies. Among them, Shaodian may be more human or human, so Shaodian became Fuxi's successor. So what achievements did Shaodian have? We will talk about it in the next section.
Finally, to summarize, no relevant information was found about the year Fuxi was born, but March 18 of the lunar calendar is recorded, and there are still sacrificial activities about him on this day. I don’t know when he died, but I only know that he reigned for 111 years, which is still quite a long time.
We can summarize Fuxi’s life as a life of greatness and invention. In addition to carrying forward his father's advantage of being good at observation, he also strengthened the full use of associative thinking.
In fact, it can also be seen from here that the ancient Yao and Shun abdication and feudal hereditary were actually hereditary in primitive society. You see, behind Suiren is his son Fuxi on the stage, and behind Fuxi is his son Shaodian. So in the next section we will talk about Shaodian.