It was quiet all around.
Ying Zheng did not speak again.
He just put his hands behind his hands and stared at Ji Heng closely.
How could he not know that Ji Heng deliberately revealed the existence of Dayu and Emperor Zhuanxu in order to stimulate himself so that he could choose the second option.
In the past, he boasted that his virtues were equal to those of the Three Emperors and his merits were equal to those of the Five Emperors.
What the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors can do now, can't he do it?
If he couldn't do it, wouldn't it mean that he was inferior to the Five Emperors?
And Ji Heng was right.
He is the Lord of the world. If he chooses to 'believe' that there are gods in the world, no matter whether he really believes it or not, in the eyes of the people in the world, he has believed it. Under this subtle influence, the world will only know the gods. I am even more in awe because he is the emperor and his words and deeds will have a great impact on the world.
If you choose not to believe it.
Now a horrifying celestial phenomenon has occurred in the world. Once the Qin Dynasty handles it properly, it will not only prevent disasters from the sky, but also allow the Qin Dynasty to prosper. In addition, it deliberately promotes the idea that man can conquer the sky. The world's subconscious awe of the gods will go from bad to worse. Although superstition still exists, It will be difficult to return to the madness of the past.
The final results of these two choices are completely opposite.
This is why Ji Heng insists on letting himself make the choice.
Ji Heng did not speak.
He stood quietly aside, waiting for Ying Zheng to make the final decision.
Ying Zheng was the emperor of Qin.
His appeal to the world is extremely terrifying.
His words and deeds will have a great impact on future generations, at least for now, they will have a great impact on the people of Qin. Now in the eyes of the people of Qin, Ying Zheng is a god. Once Qin starts to surpass the gods, he will even be superior to the gods. On the other hand, that also means that since ancient times, the "monarchy" and "theocracy" that have been constantly intertwined through the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties have completely become divided.
Under this consciousness that man can conquer heaven, new ideas will naturally emerge in the world.
A materialistic thought that is divorced from divine authority.
Heaven does not change, and so does the Tao!
Nature does nothing.
a long time.
Ying Zheng moved his eyes away from Ji Heng, looked at the falling snow outside the house, and said in a deep voice: "Is this what you have always advocated in prison to transform the people and the country?"
Ji Heng nodded.
He said calmly: "That's true."
"However, the so-called transformation of the people and the country is too ambitious after all. Maybe I may not be able to realize it in my lifetime. I still have more respect for Da Qin. In the age of hundreds of years of great struggle, After experiencing the baptism of hundreds of schools of thought, if it is not limited to wars, the past hundreds of years have actually been a magnificent era."
"fruitful."
"However, if you, the First Emperor, still choose to believe in heaven and gods, you are actually going back to the old path of the Shang Dynasty. As for the results of the Shang Dynasty, you, the First Emperor, are actually clear about it and are doomed to fail. Even if the God of History Xin is affected by It was influenced by many aspects, but the fall of the Shang Dynasty was actually inevitable, because no matter how much the emperor was deified, the final power to interpret the gods did not actually lie with the emperor."
"And among those wizards and wizards."
"And once the emperor is deified, the emperor cannot make mistakes and cannot look back. This also destined that the path an empire can take will become narrower and narrower, and eventually it will be completely blocked, and then it will be allowed to be more relaxed. 'Instead."
“Isn’t this a replay of the Shang and Zhou wars?!”
Ji Heng's eyes were clear.
He could actually see that Ying Zheng was more willing to deify himself, because this was a great temptation for rulers. However, this method was actually done by the last two generations of emperors in the Shang Dynasty.
That is Emperor Yi and Emperor Xin!
Think of this.
Ji Heng raised his head and looked far into the sky, as if his eyes had traveled through the long river of time and fell to the era at the turn of the Shang and Zhou dynasties. In that relatively distant era, due to the lack of knowledge and technology, and the serious lack of productivity, people could only Some unexplained natural phenomena are considered to be warnings from gods to humans.
This concept has been profoundly influencing mankind since the beginning of mankind.
At that time, in order to propagate and inherit the race, the ancients began to try to interpret this "divine will", which gave birth to the group of "witches". The so-called "witches" refer to communicating with heaven and earth and conveying the oracles of heaven to people. .
Over time, the shamans have figured out two ways to establish contact with the gods.
The first is called yarrow divination.
The second type is called tortoise shell divination.
Compared with yarrow divination, the complex rituals of tortoise shell divination, the sound of fire burning the tortoise shell, and the unexplained cracks can better reflect the mystery of communication with the gods. Therefore, in the Shang Dynasty, tortoise shell divination gradually replaced Yarrow fortune telling.
However, what may surprise many people is that in the era of Yao, Shun and Yu, people did not rely much on the 'oracle'.
This is actually very easy to understand.
The more a civilization relies on heaven for food, the more reverent it is to gods.
In the era of Yao, Shun and Yu, due to the small population and considerable improvement in productivity, the tribes were relatively stable and did not completely rely on the sky for food. People at that time were not highly dependent on the oracles, and they relied more on the leaders of the tribes. .
It's just that this kind of 'ruling the world' is destined to be short-lived. With the development of the times, humans have gradually developed a relatively standard and more systematic method of tortoise shell divination, whether it is the steps to clean the tortoise shell, the method of burning the tortoise shell, how to interpret the cracks, and how to distinguish. There are quite strict regulations on sound and so on.
It also started from the Shang Dynasty.
Even if the people at the bottom know about tortoise shell divination, they cannot explain the will of the "god". This is how the Shang Dynasty monarchs ruled the world.
Have the final say on the 'oracle'.
Since then, he has completely transformed into a true messenger of God.
Xia Dao respects orders, respects ghosts and gods and keeps them at a distance, stays close to people but is loyal, first earns money and then wins power.
Reward first and then punish, be affectionate but not respect. The people of the country are ignorant, ignorant, wild, simple and uncultured.
The Yin people respected the gods and led the people to serve the gods. They put ghosts first and then rituals, punished first and then rewarded. They respected but not loved.
The people's state of mind is chaotic but not peaceful, and they are victorious but shameless.
Businessmen believe that there is a supreme god "Emperor" in the sky. This supreme god will not directly interfere with human affairs. What really plays a role is the ancestor gods. The so-called "ancestor gods" refer to the incarnations of members of the royal family and nobles of the Shang Dynasty after their death. A kind of god.
In the concept set up by merchants for the world, even if other princes and kingdoms can learn this method of communicating with gods, there will still be a situation of "no gods to ask", because the gods who can intervene in the human world are all the ancestors of merchants. Incarnation.
Also during the Shang Dynasty, merchants' reverence for gods reached an almost crazy state.
I ask God’s opinion on almost everything.
As the saying goes, everything must be reversed at the extreme. After the merchants' awe of the gods reached the extreme, the monarchs of the Shang Dynasty noticed something strange. They were keenly aware that their power had been stolen by wizards. The status of wizards had shown signs of surpassing the power of the king. Starting from Emperor Yi, the Shang Dynasty carried out a series of reforms aimed at divine power.
Replacing divine power with royal power weakened the influence of noble wizards on the royal power of the Shang Dynasty.
This is why the Shang Dynasty clearly respected "human sacrifice" very much, but during the eras of Emperor Yi and Emperor Xin, it greatly reduced the number of "human sacrifices". The purpose was actually to weaken Wu Jin's strength and increase the king's power.
It was also from this time that the Shang Dynasty officially abolished the worship of gods in other regions and only allowed sacrifices to ancestor gods. It also compared the current monarch of the Shang Dynasty to becoming an 'emperor'.
At this time, King Shang was no longer the messenger of the gods.
Instead, he became a god directly.
However, neither Emperor Yi nor Emperor Xin thought about directly denying the divine power. They just wanted to use this method to deliberately weaken the influence of the gods and improve the rule and rationality of the Shang Dynasty's royal power.
Internal changes, the rebellion of the Yi side, and the rise of the Zhou State eventually led to the failure of the Shang Dynasty's reform and the collapse of the Zhou State.
However, although the Zhou Dynasty later overthrew the Shang Dynasty, it still inherited the right to interpret the gods. King Wen of Zhou Jichang also reformed the divination method in the Fuxi era, overlapping the original eight trigrams and interpreting them into sixty-four hexagrams. At that time, In the Zhouyi system of Zhouyi, there are only hexagrams but no line words. This also means that no one else except Ji Chang can explain the meaning of these sixty-four hexagrams.
From then on the Zhou 'sages' completely replaced the Shang Emperor.
To deify oneself, the ultimate extreme is only King Wen of Zhou. However, if the Zhou Dynasty can destroy the Shang Dynasty with a "sage", a new "sage" will also appear in the future to destroy the Qin Dynasty. Moreover, the Zhou people can do this because only the Zhou royal family can However, Qin did not have this condition to explain the Zhouyi. Qin did not create a divination method like the "Zhouyi", which also means that the right to interpret will once again fall into the hands of wizards.
There have always been only two ways for wizards to solve the world's disasters, one is to pray to gods, and the other is to offer sacrifices.
They will never allow people to save themselves.
This is a bloody lesson learned from ancient times, and this lesson is still the same even in the Eastern Han Dynasty. During the period of Emperor Zhang of the Eastern Han Dynasty, there was a severe drought. Some people thought that wells should be dug to solve certain drought situations, while some people thought that it would be a serious drought. Drought is a strange sign from the sky, so sacrifices should be made to pray for rain, in order to confirm the dominance of the king.
In the end, Emperor Zhang of the Han Dynasty chose to offer sacrifices to pray for rain.
However, Emperor Zhang of the Han Dynasty did not pray for rain at all, which directly led to countless starvation deaths in the local area.
even so.
Emperor Zhang of Han still did not change his mind.
And this situation will continue in China.
Lasted for nearly two thousand years.
Many people in the world know the solution, but in order to maintain the so-called royal power and the so-called divine power, they regard human life as nothing, and allow lives to be ruined and people's livelihood to wither. This is a great sadness for Ji Heng.
He reincarnated for nine lives.
I've seen too many scenes like this.
He really didn't want to let ridiculous theocratic ideas cause trouble in the world anymore.
I don't want the world to continue to maintain that "everyone knows that beauty is beautiful, but this is evil." We all know that good is good, but this is not good enough. This is irresponsible to the world, and it is also a trampling on human life.
He thought he should turn this around.
However, in the past nine lives, he had tried and failed without exception.
After Dong Zhongshu's "Heaven-Man Sensation" in the Han Dynasty, the idea of theocracy was deeply rooted in the bones of the world. It was so deep-rooted that it could not be changed by ordinary reforms. He had no way to convince the ministers and monarchs of the Manchu Dynasty. In addition, he was in troubled times and really had no energy to do it. Turning around, we are now in the Qin Dynasty, a new era that is in the ascendant and everything is in its infancy.
It’s still not too late!
"If I listen to your advice, there is no guarantee that I will not become Emperor Xin." Ying Zheng said indifferently.
Ji Heng chuckled and said lightly: "Di Xin's Shang Dynasty was different from Qin. The Shang Dynasty relied on belief in gods to make a fortune. So in the end, Emperor Yi and Emperor Xin tried to weaken the influence of divine power on royal power and centralize power, which was criticized a lot. Great resistance, while Da Qin is based on the law, and the law talks about seeking truth from facts, there is an essential difference between the two."
"Indeed."
"The deification of emperors has a strong temptation for most monarchs."
"However, Da Qin followed the path of destruction and then establishment. What it destroyed was the long-standing malpractice of the Zhou Dynasty. What it destroyed was the shackles of the aristocratic system. What it destroyed was the destiny of the past. What Da Qin wanted to establish was 'those who win the hearts of the people will conquer the world.' , what is established is 'the capable are superior and the mediocre are inferior', what is established is 'all are equal under the law', what is established is 'man can conquer heaven'."
"If Da Qin does not establish its own ideological system, it means that Da Qin will gradually be cannibalized by the remaining thoughts of the Zhou Dynasty, and will eventually be usurped step by step by the remaining thoughts of the Zhou Dynasty. When that happens, Da Qin will exist in name only."
"and"
Ji Heng paused and said in a solemn voice: "Da Qin will not survive until then."
"Confusion of thought means collapse of will."
"The thoughts of the people of Qin are different from those of the six lands of Guandong. Once the mainstream thoughts of Qin become the thoughts of Guandong, the ideas that the Qin people have adhered to in the past will collapse in an instant. The Qin people at that time will not have any fighting power. He will no longer be the master of tiger and wolf."
"The empire collapsed at that moment."
"First Emperor, you have disappointed me." For the first time, Ji Heng felt a little disappointed with this majestic emperor. He said coldly: "As an emperor, you must take into account the interests of the world. You cannot have Ordinary people are indecisive. How majestic and arrogant you were in the past? Even if you will bear eternal infamy, you are willing to do something that you don’t know the future of. However, as your body ages, you become more and more hesitant and care more and more about the imperial power. Passed on.”
"This shouldn't be you!"
Ying Zheng was silent.
His eyes were fixed on Ji Heng, filled with murderous intent.
But eventually.
Ying Zheng still held back.
He also realized that he had indeed changed his temperament, from a majestic emperor to the intolerant and stubborn person he is now, even a little hesitant.
He knows why.
Because I have it, I am more afraid of losing it.
Ying Zheng was stunned for a while, and finally turned around and walked out of Ji Heng's lobby. He stood in the courtyard, his voice was a bit cold, and he said lightly: "It's not that I don't dare to try, but I have a lot to consider. If I were like you Ordinarily, how can you be so hesitant when you are alone?"
"But you're right."
"I am indeed old."
"Without the ambition of the past, I have gradually become conservative. This is not me, nor should I be, nor should I be."
"I am the emperor."
"The emperor who has the virtues of the Three Emperors and the merits of the Five Emperors!!!"
Finished.
Ying Zheng left resolutely.
(End of chapter)
