Zeng Guofan was an important minister of the Qing Dynasty and enjoyed the reputation of “the perfect man of the ages”. In the turbulent late Qing Dynasty, he was the pinnacle of his Time. However, Zeng Guofan was not born as a capable person. When he was young, he was a man of vigor and a man of passion, and he had six desires that were difficult to suppress. In the face of beauty, he admitted that he was also very moved, and would even go to molest the beautiful girls. In the end, how did he restrain himself and make himself stand out? Now, let’s take a look.
Zeng Guofan said that there are two kinds of people, namely, sages and beasts. In order to enter the ranks of the sages, he set himself three precepts: abstaining from sex, smoking, and delusional speech. The whole officialdom of the Qing Dynasty was like his alchemy furnace, and he kept improving his self-cultivation. Among these three precepts, the most difficult one for him was the first one – quitting sex.
At that time, his wife Ouyang was weak and sickly, and Zeng Guofan was in the prime of his youth, so the sickly atmosphere at Home was very depressing to him. Once, he attended a party of his classmates, which was an eye-opener for him: the home of a fellow scholar was very extravagant, a scene of bells and whistles and concubines. He was so impressed by this party that he couldn’t help but look around.
When he returned home and left the lively atmosphere of the party to calm down, he wrote frankly: during the day, I always squinted at people, really unseemly, completely forget the shame of the heart. That night, his wife became seriously ill and moaned in pain throughout the night, which disturbed Zeng Guofan and made him unbearable.
The next morning he went out to chat with friends and did not return home until late at night. Because he was full of beauty and lust, although he had not actually acted, the kidney essence had already started to consume itself, and the essence of the bone marrow could not rise to the brain through the spine, so he was not in good spirits, and his science rapidly declined, and even what others said was like a membrane in his brain, which he could not hear clearly.
In the twenty-third year of Daoguang (1843), Zeng Guofan was invited to Tang Peng’s house as a guest. He saw two beautiful women at the banquet, and when he could not hide his lust, he molested them at the banquet. Similar to these molesting moments, he mentioned them in his diary in many places. In order to achieve his great work, he was determined to break off his lustful thoughts. Therefore, he often examined his thoughts and actions in his diary.
The sickly wife at home is perhaps a reflection of his spiritual world. Zeng Guofan was determined to reform himself and listed abstinence from sex as the first of his three commandments. He believes that it is difficult to achieve great things without going to the heart of sex. Once his lustful heart expands, it will be difficult to control and will eventually hinder the success of his career. From his diary, it seems that his determination to quit sex is like fighting a war with the demon of sex, and it takes a bloody battle to completely cut off the root of lust.
In order to abstain from lustful thoughts, he would consider his heart unclean even if he teased in his bedroom and became excessively intimate with his wife in front of outsiders. He wrote in his diary, “Last year, I vowed to give up this evil, but today I have done it again, which is shameful and hateful! I have not been able to restrain myself for so long, and I feel sweaty in the face of my friends.”
Zeng Guofan’s strict self-discipline was also manifested in the 12 things he had to do every day, including “master respect”, which meant keeping his clothes neat and tidy and his mind clear and upright; “meditation”, which meant sitting still for an hour every day, like a precious tripod; and “He was careful to cultivate his moral character, not to speak bad words and not to hurt others; including “self-reflection”, recording his experience every day and leaving himself more room for reflection.
Through this kind of training, he cultivated his mind and body to discipline himself, and finally realized his ambition to become an important minister of the late Qing Dynasty. He also achieved the immortality of establishing words and virtue and merit on his way to perfection.
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