For today's Idiom Story of the Three Kingdoms, see Taiping Magnolia Volume 459. The time was roughly in the Jianxing period of Shu Han, and the protagonist was Zhuge Liang. The original text is as follows:
A gentleman's journey is quiet to cultivate one's morality, and frugal to cultivate one's morality. Not cold, not awake, not quiet, not far away. If you study quietly, you must study. If you don't study, you won't learn widely. If you have no ambition, you can't succeed. You can't work hard if you are slow, and there is no rule of law if you are in danger. Time goes by, meaning goes by, and then becomes withered, not meeting the world, and staying in a poor house sadly. What will happen?
The main idea of this record is that what a gentleman has to do is to meditate on his body and mind and cultivate his virtue by frugality. If you don't be indifferent, you can't determine your lofty ideals. If you don't concentrate, you can't realize your lofty ideals. Learning must be calm and single-minded, and talent must be learned. Without learning, talent can't grow, and without ambition, nothing can be achieved. Indulgence and frivolity are hard to cheer up, and extreme impetuousness is hard to cultivate temperament. If your age flies and your will fades with the years, you will become an old, weak and ignorant person. Most of them can't be used by society. You can only hold your poor home sadly, and it's too late to regret it!
This paper will introduce two idioms, namely "indifferent to your ambition" and "quiet and far away", which evolved from Zhuge Liang's "indifferent to your ambition" The former means that only by not pursuing fame and fortune can we make our own interests noble. The latter means that only when you are calm and absorbed can you accumulate wealth and make a difference.
The above record was named "The Book of Advice" by later generations, and it was a letter written by Zhuge Liang to his son Zhuge Zhan. In this letter, Zhuge Liang emphasized the important role of abstinence in improving moral cultivation, and also expounded the importance of learning and the relationship between ambition and academic achievement. This letter from home, which is less than 100 words, not only reflects the ardent hope for his son, but also reflects Zhuge Liang's own life and learning experience, and his noble character and diligent spirit.
Unfortunately, however, Zhuge Zhan failed to live up to his father's earnest hope. He is not only inferior to his father in knowledge, knowledge and ability, but also far from his father in mind and vision. After Zhuge Zhan entered the DPRK as an official, he even conspired with eunuch Huang Hao and others to deprive his father's military heir Jiang Wei of his power. If Zhuge Liang knows something, I wonder if he will be sad because of it.