Struggling For Salvation And Enjoyment For The Life

ZHONG Changtong was a special thinker at the end of East Han Dynasty in China history. What is the specialty lies in a dilemma where he actively sought for the way to save the world at that time when he was strapped in at conflicting ideas between Salvation and Enjoyment facing the complicatedly social situation. He made eventual decision in the spite of the conflicts between the two ideas, which is exactly what the paper is trying to explore.This paper aims to explore ZHONG Changtong’s complex emotions when facing the conflicts of the two ideas. In addition, it states that he still wanted to be ambitious to make difference in the current context due to being influenced by an idea of salvage, which was regarded as the fist thing that cultural elites should do, although he expressed a kind of enjoyment for the life and even put it in to practice. Hence, ZHONG Changtong didn’t get rid of the influence of Confucianism while focusing on himself. This was a contradiction of what to want and what to do, which typically represented current elites ’universally mental condition. Moreover, this essay will highlight the extremely dissenting characteristics in ZHONG Changtong’s ideology which was reflected in what he was struggling for getting himself into pessimistic historical recycling view while his skepticism was proved to be hard to find an answer helplessly, by comparing and analyzing thoughts about how to live and how to save the world. In the meantime, he had a new rethinking of the history advancement is what another value lied in following his struggles for historical pessimism.This paper will discuss in form of independent topics and will include five chapters. Chapter1, it mainly introduce profile of ZHONG Changtong and some historical heritage on which it is based to figure out who he was despite the time. Chapter2, it will focus on ZHONG Changtong’s idea of salvage to analyze his theory about how to live and how to save the world. Chapter3, it will explore the change of his thoughts from which so called "ZHONG Changyuan " phenomenon had been derived on which it will study the contradiction of the two ideas between salvage and enjoyment for the life. Chapter4, it will analyze different reaction of currently cultural elites like by-standing WANG Fu, reformative-supporter CUI Shi, recorder XUN Yue, struggler ZHONG Changtong and middle road advocator QU Gan when facing the ever-emerging wars and broken society by putting ZHONG Changtong into the environments of his times. It also needs to dig up the reasons for the different opinions as they are among similarly social criticism. At last but not least, in the summary it will put ZHONG Changtong into the history of civilization and explore the values of his historical pessimism. Seemingly, the five chapters are not closely connected to each other but deap down they are mutually linked. The very key is to figure out the real historical image of ZHONG Changtong by examining ZHONG Changtong’s ideas and proceeding to unveil the historical mists.