溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
If the Worthy Are Cast Off and Fools Rise, What Decides Success?
If the lives of two who strove equally diverge, is it a difference of effort or virtue, or merely the chance of meeting or missing the right time and place?
Conduct may be constantly worthy, but office is not constantly met.
This question split ancient China over "what is success the wage of?" The Confucian mainstream leaned on the belief that virtue and effort return at last as blessing, while Mozi denounced fatalism outright and staked all on effort. Between the two Wang Chong pushed a cool blade — treating the notion that Heaven metes reward and punishment as superstition, he ascribed much of success and failure not to virtue or effort but to fortuitous encounter and inborn fate. This was an attempt to explain honestly why the good die young and the wicked live long. Yet later Neo-Confucianism again stressed Heaven's order and human resonance, long pushing Wang Chong's cool naturalism to the margins. Is success the price of virtue or the portion of chance — Wang Chong answered earliest in East Asia: much of it is chance.
Between the promise that effort is always rewarded and the reality of those who fade for never meeting their time, Wang Chong's question — can success and failure be charged wholly to me — lightens a weary shoulder a little.
Wang Chong coolly stripped away the comfort of Heaven's reward and punishment.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Wang Chong coolly stripped away the comfort of Heaven's reward and punishment. However worthy one's conduct, office does not always come — success hangs less on the wages of virtue than on the chance of meeting the right time and place. The saying looks cruel yet in fact loosens the self-blaming heart. I sense this question is a scale that reweighs regret, for to bear all of a failure as my own fault makes regret an unbearable load. I stand before it too, honestly reckoning the portion of "a time not met" mixed into my failures.
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