The Last Saint Wang Shouren

In the eighteenth year of Hongzhi's reign, sixteen-year-old Wang Shouren picked up a handful of water at Juyongguan - the smell of rust mixed with urine, and poured it on the cracked loess without leaving even a mark. That was the first time he saw what the "system" looked like. Later, when he was 20 years old, he made a public statement at the Sutra Banquet and said, "If you only study bamboos, even if you die of old age, you won't be able to cure the hunger and cold of a military household." The whole hall was in an uproar. Later, he offended Liu Jin and was demoted to Longchang with the rank of forty. Digging terraces in the miasma, exhorting feuds, and carving the four words "unity of knowledge and action". Still later, he conquered Nangan, captured King Ning, and had late-night talks with the Emperor Wu who "didn't want to be a memorial tablet" in the Leopard Room, pressing the private seal of "continuous self-improvement" into the last remaining flames of change in the Zhengde Dynasty. But when Wu Zong died, Yang Tinghe wrote a posthumous edict that cleared up all the "irregularities". When the war over the great ceremony was raging, he was in Jiangxi and wrote to Zhang Cong thousands of miles away: "The dispute over etiquette will be decided sooner or later. The final decision is fundamental." In the seventh year of Jiajing reign, in the boat at Qinglongpu, the fifty-seven-year-old Wang Shouren burned all the secret letters with Li Dongyang, Wuzong, and Zhang Cong, leaving only one "Chuanxi Lu". His last words, "What else can I say if my heart is so bright?" Were his final reply to this world. This is not the growth history of a saint, this is the whole process of a scholar who wanted to "let the people who can't live live" be crushed inch by inch by the imperial power, the civil officials, and the "reasons" he believed in.