The Han culture is spreading strongly in Southeast Asia

Chapter 876 King Zheng Respects Buddha

Rasa, the Golden Light Temple.

The compassionate Buddha Zheng Xin suddenly awoke from a nightmare, his gaunt face filled with terror, large beads of sweat rolling down his bald head.

This dream was so strange, so real, so terrifyingly real.

Boom boom boom!
Heavy footsteps echoed through the spacious palace. Zheng Xin felt a sense of familiarity, somewhat like his royal palace in Thonburi, yet many of the furnishings seemed unfamiliar.

“Your Majesty, I didn’t want this to happen either. You forced me to this. I gave you my daughter, and you still don’t trust me.”

"Tong!" Zheng Xin exclaimed in surprise as he recognized the person who had arrived. Then, as if his soul had left his body, he flew directly into the sky to observe the main hall from an overhead perspective.

He saw a version of himself; a younger version, slightly fatter, with hair; a version of himself that was already bound and unable to move.

"This is Siam, not the Qing Dynasty! Why are you doing this, Your Majesty?" someone cried, but still held a sack in their hand.

"Chuzhi!" Zheng Xin exclaimed in surprise when he saw the face of the crying man. He began to struggle, but he could not move no matter what he did.

Zheng Xin knew he was dreaming, but the dream felt so real that he couldn't help but feel anxious, as if his life was about to be lost along with it.

“King, don’t blame me. You can be the king of all of us, but you cannot be the god of all of us.”

As he spoke, Chu Zhi put the sack over Zheng Xin's head, then picked up a large sandalwood stick, raised it high, and smashed it down.

"The hatred of a gentleman can be avenged even after ten generations."

"Those who seize my kingdom will perish within ten generations!"

Zheng Xin screamed in terror and woke up from his nightmare again, his body drenched in sweat as if he had been pulled out of the water.

"Venerable Buddha, you have finally woken up."

"Venerable Buddha, is there anything that is bothering you?"

Zheng Xin felt a gray-white light before his eyes, and it took a long time for the colors to slowly return. He was shocked to discover that this was not night at all, but a winter morning.

Looking out the window, the distant snow-capped mountains were clearly visible, and a small amount of cold air was seeping in through the tiny gaps in the windowpane.

Zheng Xin remembered that he wasn't sleeping, but had fallen into a coma. He could even recall the gasps of surprise from those around him before he lost consciousness.

Before long, upon hearing that the Buddha Cihang Pudu had awakened, all the high-ranking monks and officials of Rasa, the heads of the major local clans in Rasa, and the most important figure—Zhang Jingbang, the Resident Minister in Tibet from Minxian County, Fuzhou, Fujian—rushed over.

"I've been unconscious for several days?" Zheng Xin asked calmly, as he could feel his life force rapidly draining away.

“The Venerable Buddha has been in a coma for a long time, and today is exactly the tenth day.” The monk official closest to Zheng Xin answered, but suddenly pointed at Zheng Xin’s forehead and began to tremble.

"Your Majesty, what's wrong with your forehead? I just came in a quarter of an hour ago and there was nothing wrong with it!"

Zheng Xin also felt something on his head. He ordered someone to bring him a bronze mirror and saw that a large bruise had appeared on his head at some point, with some parts raised and tinged with purplish-red. It looked as if someone had hit him hard on the head with a big stick.

In a flash, Zheng Xin felt as if a flood of information had rushed into his mind, and the pain and weakness in his body vanished instantly. He thought to himself, 'So what I just saw was my past and present lives!'

"When I was in a deep sleep, my soul left my body and went to the place where the Buddha was meditating in the Vulture Peak Palace on Mount Ling. There I encountered the Buddha who had descended to earth, who was sitting high in the clouds, preaching to all the gods and Buddhas."

When the King of Light saw me arrive, he smiled and said to me, "It seems you have come too early for the Compassionate Salvation. You still have worldly matters to resolve. Come and listen to the lecture after you have settled them."

Having said that, he gently tapped my head with his vajra pestle, and when I awoke, I was back here.

The resident minister in Tibet thought Zheng Xin was up to some kind of supernatural trick again, but seeing the monks and officials around him and the novices serving Cihang Pudu all prostrating themselves in shock, without the slightest hint of pretense, he couldn't help but feel puzzled.

Is it true?
Surely no one would dare to wield a large wooden stick and strike the head of the Compassionate Salvation Buddha, who had been in a coma for ten days!
How dare they attack the ailing revered Buddha and father-in-law of the Qiangtang people? Don't they care about their lives?

"The Venerable Buddha has traveled to Mount Ling. The Buddha of Wisdom said that there are still matters to be resolved in the mortal world. He should recover soon. I am taking this opportunity to report the good news to His Majesty and the Empress."

"Announce the death." Zheng Xin shook his head after hearing Zhang Jingbang's words. "My days are numbered. After settling things here, I will return to Mount Ling to listen to the Dharma under the seat of the Buddha of the World-Descending King."

Without paying any attention to Zhang Jingbang, Zheng Xin addressed the monks around him, saying, “My sect was injured by Langdarma, but later recovered. However, due to its unstable foundation, it was invaded by evil spirits and developed inner demons.”

Therefore, for hundreds of years they have acted cruelly and madly, and some of their actions have gone wrong and violated human morality.

This is neither the great compassion of Buddha nor in accordance with the benevolence of His Majesty.

After I pass away, I will burn all the harmful ritual implements in the temples, large and small, including the Golden Light Temple, the Golden Lotus Temple, the Jokhang Temple, the Great Enlightenment Temple, and the Tabulun Temple.

The Rasa White Palace and Red Palace have been completely demolished. They were built on mountains of corpses and seas of blood by the people; they were the Lion Camel Ridge of the Qiangtang region, and should not remain in this world.

At this moment, Zheng Xin, looking emaciated, sat upright on the bed, yet he appeared more dignified and solemn than ever before.

Zhang Jingbang, the resident minister in Tibet, was shocked to discover that there seemed to be a radiant light flowing around this compassionate Buddha, just like a deity descending to earth.

“Lord Zhang, there are a large number of cultural relics in the White Palace and the Red Palace. These should not be damaged. Please send officials to register them and put them in the inventory. When His Majesty the Emperor orders the reconstruction of the Red Palace and the White Palace, they can be placed in them.”

“Monastic officials at all levels, convey my decree: At this critical moment, the whole country is working hard for the sake of future generations, and we cannot just stand by and watch.”

"I have already requested a decree from the Buddha, ordering half of the 110,000 monks of Qiangtang to return to secular life and dedicate themselves to the construction of Anxi and Beihezhou."

"I came from the south, ordered to cleanse the evil spirits of the plateau. Today, my merits are complete. Let these old demons fall into the Avici Hell and be refined by the Samadhi Fire so that they will no longer harm people."

For thousands of years, those wronged souls who died because of this, come with me, and ascend to the Pure Land with me to enjoy eternal bliss.

"Namo Amitabha Buddha! Namo Amitabha Buddha!"

Zheng Xin lowered his head, clasped his hands together, chanted two Buddhist mantras, and then sat down on the bed with a smile and passed away.

. . . .

Nanjing Yingtianfu, Tangshan Hot Spring Palace.

Just as Mo Zibu was about to go to sleep, Empress Zheng Shishi and Consort Zheng Susu, the two sisters, came to plead with him, their eyes filled with tears.

Their father, Zheng Xin, the Buddha of Universal Salvation, passed away at the age of seventy-four at the Rasa Golden Light Temple.

Upon hearing this, Mo Zibu suddenly stood up from the bed and remained silent for a long time.

Zheng Xin has been competing with Mo Zibu for years because his greatest achievement—leading a group of Teochew people to restore Siam and subsequently being elected as the King of Siam—has been portrayed as being entirely due to Mo Zibu.

This is inaccurate. Although Mo Zibu did make great contributions to the war to restore Siam, without Zheng Xin and the many Teochew people who had settled in Siam and provided them with all their support, Mo Zibu would not have been able to even procure enough food and gunpowder for his army. Naturally, it would have been impossible for him to help restore Siam on his own.

Most importantly, Mo Zibu knew that he did not exist in history, and that Zheng Xin had successfully helped Siam restore its kingdom, although the process was more tortuous.

Therefore, after learning about this, Mo Zibu quickly issued an edict ordering historians to be truthful and factual when writing the history of Siam.

However, while official historical records show that Mo Zibu could issue edicts to control the people, he could not do so among the common folk.

The printing and publishing technology of Dayu had long been developed, and writing history was no longer the official monopoly. There were countless people writing history, novels, and storybooks among the common people.

Furthermore, the Dayu Kingdom also needed to mythologize Mo Zibu. Only by mythologizing the emperor to a certain extent could they provide the best justification for sending people out to expand the territory.

Since the emperor had fought his way back from Southeast Asia, his colonization efforts certainly weren't in remote, undeveloped areas.

This can be described as a collective need, not something that can be solved by a single decree or even by human effort.

At this point, most people would accept their fate and might even go around telling everyone that the facts are exactly as you say, offering a firsthand account from the person involved.

But Zheng Xin is different. This guy is a typical Chaoshan person. He is stubborn, resilient, and daring to fight, but he is too meticulous and seems to be petty. He values ​​profit over righteousness, has a small vision, and has a bit of the neuroticism of the Hai Xiang ethnic group.

However, Zheng Xin also knew that he could not confront Mo Zibu on this matter. If he dared to undermine him, even his wife, children, and relatives would not support him.

But precisely because of this, Zheng Xin found it even harder to get past this hurdle.

Since then, he has been unable to let go of his resentment, and he has even stopped staying at home, abandoning his wife and children, wandering the world, and becoming mentally unstable.

Zheng Xin claimed to be the reincarnation of Buddha, saying that the blood on his body was not red but golden.

He wore a cotton-padded coat on the hottest days of summer and stood in front of a stove in the streets of Guangzhou, cooking Chaozhou rice noodles to feed the poor.

In the dead of winter, he went to Shuntian Prefecture in Beijing wearing only a silk robe, walking barefoot and chanting Buddhist scriptures. Even Mo Zibu thought Zheng Xin was going to go mad like in history, but unexpectedly he bumped into the White Lotus Sect, which Mo Zibu had secretly supported in Shuntian Prefecture, and then had an epiphany at Jinfo Mountain in Nanchuan County, Chongqing Prefecture.

He stopped being crazy, and even developed some Buddhist qualities, eventually becoming the Compassionate Buddha who saves all beings.

Seeing Mo Zibu standing there speechless, the Zheng sisters assumed he was overwhelmed with grief. Zheng Shishi, worried about the emperor's health, forced herself to suppress her own sorrow and comforted him:
"Your father has accomplished his great task and achieved perfect merit. He will go to the Western Paradise to enjoy eternal bliss before the Buddha. Your Majesty need not be so sad."

Mo Zibu sighed and immediately ordered, "Let your younger brother, Ashui, set off to preside over your father-in-law's funeral as an imperial envoy and a dutiful son."

"Susu, send someone to summon Azhan back from Fuzhou, and have him discuss with the Hanlin scholars the posthumous title for the Buddha."

The Great Yu Dynasty controlled the Five Great Buddhas even more strictly than the Manchu Qing Dynasty. In addition to the Treasure Vase Divination and the reincarnation system of the Spirit Pearl, it also added the typical Han Chinese posthumous title system.

As an evaluation of the Buddha's life achievements, the posthumous title not only constrains the Buddha himself, but also those around him.

If this Buddha does not receive a good posthumous title, then his close confidants, officials, relatives, and friends will be held accountable, at the very least dismissed from their posts and stripped of all benefits.

After finishing all that, Mo Zibu sat alone for a while, feeling a mix of emotions he couldn't quite describe.

Zheng Xin actually has a very strong symbolic meaning for Mo Zibu, because he is one of the historical figures whose fate was definitely changed by Mo Zibu.

Mo Zibu knew that among those whose fates were completely altered, there were only a handful, such as Emperor Qianlong, Emperor Jiaqing, and Heshen.

Zheng Xin was the closest person to him among these people, so his passing inevitably caused a lot of emotional turmoil.

At the same time, Zheng Xin and his experience are a very representative example in the history of all Chinese people.

The fact that Zheng Xin was killed in history can be seen as a concrete manifestation of how precocious Chinese culture failed to take root in Southeast Asia and kept up with the times.

In the original timeline, after becoming the King of Siam, Taksin actually wanted to establish a stable and centralized government in a country where the borders changed constantly with the rainy and dry seasons, centered around important towns. He even wanted to implement a county system.

With the entire population practicing a form of slavery like the Sakdina system, he didn't even need the recommendation system, and went straight to the imperial examination system of the Sui and Tang dynasties.

Faced with the profound influence of religion on Siam for thousands of years, Taksin refused to accept it. He insisted that religion completely submit to royal power, so he claimed to be the incarnation of Buddha and forced the monks to acknowledge it.

Aside from the support he received from his fellow Chaoshan compatriots on the mainland, most people within Siam opposed him, including a large number of second, third, and fourth-generation Chaoshan Chinese.

It's fair to say that if Taksin had been a third or fourth-generation Siamese of Chinese descent, his dynasty could have been passed down; he would simply have continued to rule by following the old Siamese system with minor modifications.

Given his great achievements in expelling the Burmese and saving Siam, if he hadn't gone to such extremes and offended most of the Siamese nobles, Thong would have had neither the opportunity nor the right to rebel.

However, Zheng Xin was a second-generation Chinese, and he didn't want to be a Siamese king, but a Chinese king, which ultimately led to his tragic end.

With Zheng Xin's departure, Mo Zibu seemed to feel that the connection between himself and his pre-transmigration self had been completely severed.

As this feeling intensified, the future of this world finally began to become unpredictable, and even Mo Zibu was unsure how things would develop.

A month later, the North Sea Fleet set sail to support Kitagawa Island, and the Shinden Left and Right Imperial Guards and the Yulin Left and Right Imperial Guards also set off for Anzai to prepare for the great battle.

Crown Prince Da Laosen's understanding of the current situation in the Great Yu Divine Continent and its surrounding areas has officially concluded. Holding a thick stack of reports, he said to Mo Zibu:

"Your Majesty, I have been visiting parts of the four provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Jiangxi in the past month. I have found that what Your Majesty said about merchants becoming capitalists and forming a new class seems to be showing some signs, but it is far from the point where they can influence the politics of the country."

"Furthermore, looking at European countries as a whole, parliaments are merely tools for power struggles between domestic magnates and monarchs, and often when parliaments are strong and monarchs are weak, great chaos is imminent in the country."

For thousands of years, China has been a country where civil officials and scholars have been engaged in a tug-of-war with the emperor over the highest power. From the recommendation system to local powerful families, from the imperial examination system to the political parties of the literati, all these are concrete manifestations of this tug-of-war.

The merchant class in China is also completely different from that in the West.

Many members of the Western merchant class were unable to rise to the top because of their bloodline, so after they became wealthy, they needed a channel to fight for their rights.

Therefore, they transformed the old tribal collective decision-making model, similar to the Eight Princes' Council of the Qing Dynasty, into a parliamentary system, using the parliamentary process to intervene in national affairs and safeguard their own power.

But in China, it's completely different. We no longer have the system where nobles can monopolize all upward mobility based on bloodline. The logic here is that one can rise from a peasant in the morning to a high-ranking official in the evening.

Therefore, China had almost no need for a parliament to decentralize power and serve as a vehicle for the merchant class to strive for power.

More importantly, in China, wealthy merchants and scholars have always been interchangeable.

They could easily achieve their profit goals through the Shihlin Group behind them, without having to rush to the front lines themselves.

Therefore, I believe that China's civil service governance model is currently the most stable in the world.

The imperial examination system was not without its problems, but it remains the fairest selection mechanism that can be found today.

England, France, and other countries are all imitating us; it's them, not us, that need to change.

Mo Zibu beckoned for Asen to sit down and have breakfast with him. "I'm glad you trust your own judgment and have a deep understanding of issues."

However, there are also problems. The premise of trusting your own judgment is that you should be able to roughly distinguish between loyalty and treachery, good and bad, right and wrong.

If you lack the ability to distinguish these things, trusting your own judgment will turn into stubbornness and ignoring good advice.

Throughout history, wise rulers have only needed two things: extraordinary energy, which you don't lack, and exceptional discernment.

Mo Zibu pointed to his nose and said to Asen, "Your dad's most amazing thing is these eyes."

No matter who it is, I can roughly tell what kind of person they are just by meeting them once, exchanging a few words, and observing their demeanor and expressions.

Therefore, he has made virtually no mistakes over the years and can be called a wise and virtuous ruler.

You're probably not bad at that either, but you haven't read enough books, haven't learned much from history, and lack a forward-looking perspective.

Mo Zibu was actually being a bit unfair. Given his status as a transmigrator, who the hell could have a better perspective than him, with his X-ray vision?

Even if we take history as a guide, most people in this era are not as good as those in later generations.

In this era, to receive instruction from a great scholar, even an emperor could only summon the person to consult in person, and it was impossible to keep them by his side for an extended period.

But in later generations, you can simply open a short video and access the knowledge compiled by all the great scholars from ancient times to the present anytime, anywhere, for a small fee.

As long as you are willing to learn, there is always more knowledge to be learned.

“Look at the business model of these wealthy merchants, Jia Shilin, doesn’t it resemble the Ming Dynasty?”

Doesn't it resemble the Shanxi merchants and the northern literati, or the wealthy merchants of Jiangnan and the Donglin Party?

"Hiss!" Asen nodded. "They do look somewhat similar."

Mo Zibu continued, "It is precisely because the models of the literati and the wealthy merchants are interdependent and mutually transformative that we need to single out the wealthy merchants and make them a separate class."

Firstly, it was to separate wealthy merchants from the literati to a certain extent; secondly, we needed the wealth held by these wealthy merchants to serve the imperial family.

"Without a parliament to keep them in check, how can you control these wealthy merchants? If they really collude closely with the literati, what role will you, the monarch, play?"

This is actually an experience that Mo Zibu learned from the Republic of the future: either become a big entrepreneur or become an official; if you want both, then you have to get rid of them!
If it were to become like the revolving door between politics and business in the United States, the country would be doomed.

"It turns out that Father Emperor did not want to change the operating model of Da Yu, but rather to prevent the scholar-official class from controlling the emerging wealthy merchant class."

Asen understood somewhat, and this Republican parliamentary model, which was also used in early China, was the best tool for controlling wealthy merchants.

"This is the main reason. In addition, as you can see, in many places, besides the wealthy merchants who are already connected with Shilin, there are also many talented people who have risen from the bottom."

Some of these people were not good at studying or martial arts, but they were good at money and goods. Merchants were their own form of literary and martial arts examination.

Therefore, establishing a local council would help protect their interests and give them some bargaining power when dealing with government officials.

By granting them status and benefits, the imperial court could be bypassed, and these people could be placed under the control of the royal family.

Moreover, with this guarantee, these people can fully utilize their intelligence and talents to contribute to local development.

Mo Zibu patiently explained, "However, even Father Emperor can't see where all of this will ultimately lead. Besides, I'm getting old. The future is yours, and you'll have to explore these things yourself."

"Once the war in Europe is over, hurry back. It's time for you to familiarize yourself with the operating logic of the Empire's core."

(End of this chapter)