Tao Yuanming School of Reading and Sima Qian School of Reading
The Tao Yuanming school of reading and the Sima Qian school of reading
This is an article I read Luo Zhenyu’s book “Ways of Reading”, which I think it is necessary to share with you as well about reading, reading methods and readers.
Luo Zhenyu’s ‘Method of Reading’ is not about the method of reading a particular book or a particular kind of book, but how to be a ‘reader’. The so-called reader is a person who reads as part of his life, not for exams or to make money, and who believes that reading is an end in itself and that books are treasures, as in the case of the “dry-meal man”.
Every reader has his or her own way of reading, and after reading this book, my feeling is that there are only two ways of reading. One is the reading method advocated by Luo Zhenyu in this book, which I call “Tao Yuanming’s reading method”; the other is the reading method I often advocate, which may be called “Sima Qian’s reading method”. Throughout history, the real readers are either Tao Yuanming school or Sima Qian school, if you are not these two kinds of reading method, you reading has not been on the road.
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The so-called Tao Yuanming school, not that is Tao Yuanming’s own reading method, but to borrow a sentence Tao Yuanming said, called “good reading, do not seek to understand; every will be pleased to forget to eat. This way of reading is to take yourself as the focus, the book is the spiritual food for growing yourself, you can take a bite from the east and a bite from the west. The point is what the book turns you into as a particular person, not what else is in which book that you didn’t get.
The so-called Sima Qian school is borrowed from Sima Qian’s saying, which is “to study the interstices of the heavens and the people, to comprehend the changes of the past and the present, and to realize the words of a family”. This kind of reading is to focus on learning, and books are strongholds in the world of learning. The main point is how much learning you have grasped, and whether you have a comprehensive grasp of that learning and unique insights. You will be very concerned about the consistency and integrity of the system.
**The Tao Yuanming school is based on generalized reading, and you will read faster and faster as your skills improve.**The e-book service supports reading three pages at a time on a large screen, and Luo Zhenyu invented “brush book” for this purpose, so that you can finish a book within fifteen minutes and gain something from it. Of course, brushing books is also largely about book selection, and good books can be read slowly, but this method will allow you to read through many, many books.
The Szasz school, on the other hand, is based on intensive reading and requires you to thoroughly understand the logical flow of the book, for which you usually need to take notes. I used to talk about a ‘power reading’ method that requires reading each book twice, taking away all the highlights of the book, helping the author to summarize his logic, jotting down your own insights, and also making connections with other books. This method is always a slow read, and I sometimes take two weeks to read a book and jot down 50,000 words of notes.
So these are two very different methods of reading. The difference between “extensive reading” and “intensive reading” is not enough to describe the spiritual difference between the two methods of reading. To be more precise, it should be a bit like the “Pure Clothes Sect” versus the “Dirty Clothes Sect” of the Beggar’s Association, or the “Moderate Muslims” versus the “Muslim Fundamentalists”, the “Southern Sect of Enlightenment” versus the “Northern Sect of Gradual Enlightenment”, or the Liberals versus the Conservatives.
The Tao Yuanming school of reading is like a traveler. He has traveled to many, many places in the sea of books and met many, many people. He chats with each person about that person’s strengths, and he will learn a little something from each person without caring too much about who said what wrong. He was always getting to know another person through one person, and more through that person, and he was slowly building a huge web in his mind.
The Sima Qian school of reading, on the other hand, was like an invader. He regarded learning as a territory, not only to conquer the strongholds, but also to plow the court and sweep the holes should be collected, and then also to comprehensive management, but also hope to transform the territory in accordance with their own style. What he constructed was not a net but a blueprint, and he would be anxious if there were any blank spaces or any contradictions or irrationalities in this blueprint.
As you can imagine, these two factions must have their own strengths and weaknesses. Since I am more of a Sima Qian school, I would like to focus here on the benefits of the Tao Yuanming school.
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- The biggest benefit is that your life will be incredibly enriched by reading. * You’ll experience all sorts of lives all over the world, in all periods of history, including out of your imagination, experience extreme emotions, hear about weird ideas, and meet people with unbelievable wisdom. When you come across something, you may come up with two similar allusions, three famous people’s sayings, and four perspectives before anyone else has a clue what’s going on. As an erudite person, your values, outlook on life and worldview will be much broader than the average person. You will often feel that you were too naïve a few years ago, and you will keep growing.
There used to be a report that a few old engineers at a rocket base couldn’t read any other books in their spare time and only loved Jin Yong novels. I felt unfair for them, they deserved better recipes. If they could read some other books, their scientific career would be more worthwhile.
The Sima Qian school sometimes hates to sacrifice themselves to a book, while the Tao Yuanming school nourishes themselves with books. It’s important to feed yourself. Luo Zhenyu can talk about any topic in an interesting way, and he feels the fun and meaning of life at any time, so he lives a good life. If you only know what you do every day, not to mention the vulnerability of the skill structure, what can you talk to people? What can you think about when you’re alone? What can you see in your eyes? One can’t even imagine what it would be like to be yourself as a reader; you have to reach it to witness it.
- The second advantage of the Tao Yuanming school is ease. * You have a chance encounter with a book and a relationship where you don’t have to be responsible for it. You can pick up a book at random, no matter what it is, and flip through it, you will always get something out of it and make a connection. Luo Zhenyu said that when he was a teenager, he flipped through a book about literary theory, the subject of the book he was very indifferent, but there was a very strange comment on a novel in the book, and he remembered it……. More than a year later, he came across that novel, and immediately bought it to read it, and it was really very interesting. Any book can be a hint from the world to you, and you have to have the desire to receive them.
The willingness to get close to books is now a particularly advanced, elegant and powerful hobby. Most people only dare to flip through short videos. Because of the limitations of cost, technology, and acceptance by the common man, the scale of any video program is so much smaller than a book. Within minutes of you immersing yourself in a couple’s bickering skills on a certain sound, the book I have in my hand has seen over a hundred deaths and a change of emperors. Be brave, find a book to flip through and give yourself a chance to see the big picture.
Because you can just flip through it without any burden, and you don’t have to feel guilty if you don’t fully understand it, this gives everyone the conditions to be a reader. There used to be a book called Astrophysics for Busy People, which means that even if a person is busy all day long and has to make a living, he can learn about the latest astrophysics – and he should, because just thinking about how big the world is, black holes, and the expansion of the universe will make his life more complete.
- People who do things can read easily, which leads to the third benefit, there are ways of doing things. * The highest level of approach is creation, and creation is the connection of ideas. There are ideas to make connections, and breakthrough creations are often connections of distant ideas, and a master has to have the ability to cross boundaries. If programmers knew a little psychology, high school principals had studied sociology, and senior directors had read game theory, they would all have a brighter future.
Luo Zhenyu is probably the most resourceful person I know. You ask him a how to do, he can provide you with three ways on the spot, two of which are quite feasible. His get-company style of doing things is very innovative, with a lot of strange ideas. Luo Zhenyu shares the source of his solutions in this book, for example, one of the key points is that he can see the common ground between different things, extract it and promote it.
For example, doctors are often described as a profession that treats the sick and saves lives, but what Luo Zhenyu sees is “how to make life-and-death decisions in the face of incomplete information? Astronomers seem to be very far away from daily life, but Luo Zhenyu says their challenge is “how to draw valuable conclusions with very little information and without being able to conduct experiments? If you look at it that way, it’s that all walks of life have something to learn from us, and the more we know, the better.
The easiest thing to do if you want to have a way to do that is to read more history. There is no reader who doesn’t love to read history. History is made up of stories, easy to remember; historical events are big and small, containing all kinds of truth; and even the wrong history can inspire you, because even novels can inspire you. If you can casually quote a few historical facts when talking to someone, you will have a point even if you don’t have one.
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I’ve been a fan of Luo Zhenyu for years. I used to specialize in physics research, but I love listening to Luo’s program. Sometimes I know for a fact that Luo is wrong – especially when it comes to physics-related things – and I get all fired up, but the show is so addictive that it’s hard not to listen to it.
Because it’s so enlightening. No one can get everything right, but ‘inspiration’ is worth a lot more than ‘correctness’. Correctness is cheap and inspiration is scarce for public knowledge. To be inspired by something, you have to find a special perspective and discover its connection to something else. You need the Tao Yuanming school of reading.
When Luo Zhenyu, who did the Luo Alistair video program, was still relatively fat, he was called “Luo Fat”; now that Luo Fat has learned body management, he is no longer fat, but I have become a bit fat. Over the years I realized that I am developing towards the Tao Yuanming school. If you also want to be a Tao Yuanming school of reading, I have a piece of advice.
- The Tao Yuanming school has a near enemy, and that is the ‘show-off scholar’. *
The so-called “show-off scholar” is someone who shows off his knowledge all day long. He knows everything you ask him, and he knows it even if you don’t ask him, and he always wants to prove that his knowledge is superior. The Tao Yuanming school is easily turned into the so-called show-off scholars. The true Tao Yuanming School brings inspiration to others, while the show-off scholars are annoying. For example, the word “pedant” is pedant - you don’t need this knowledge, but if I have to tell you, just as Kong Yi Ji is proud to know that there are four ways to write the word aniseed, then I am a pedant.
This method of mind is to read books for oneself, not to prove oneself. The Tao Yuanming school looks at books for their long boards and people for their merits; the more you read the more friends you should have. If you spend all day trying to prove that you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re off track.
The Sima School doesn’t show off its scholars. In fact the Sima Qian school sometimes takes pride in not knowing a popular bit of knowledge. But Sima Qian school readers, because they must make side-by-side comparisons of various doctrines, sometimes can’t help but point out the stupidity of industry luminaries …… But regardless, humility is a virtue shared by both of our schools.
If you have a lot of time to read, you can also use the methods of both schools together. In fact, the world’s readers have far more in common than they have differences, such as the fact that we both believe that reading is the safest adventure in the world. We dare to lose ourselves in books, and we can find our unique selves in books. We all read from the so-called “Six Scriptures Note to Me” to “I Note to Six Scriptures” – of course it may not be Six Scriptures but 60,000 Scriptures to Fatty Luo.
Get to the point
Tao Yuanming school reading method is based on general reading, with the enhancement of the power you will read faster and faster; Sima Qian school is based on intensive reading, requiring you to thoroughly understand the logic of the book.
Tao Yuanming school of reading has three major benefits: the biggest benefit is that your life will become unusually rich because of reading. The second benefit is ease. The third benefit is that there is a way to do things.