King Zhou repeatedly stressed the greatness of their ancestors, emphasizing that people should revere their ancestors rather than offer sacrifices to heavenly gods.
He had even made outrageous declarations that ordinary people considered utterly heretical: "Control the mandate of heaven," "Divine authority granted by humanity," and "Shang's mandate stands above August Heaven Shangdi."
The common people and Feudal Lords found these ideas difficult to accept, but his ministers could accept them.
Why?
Because they knew more about the world and possessed more knowledge.
And the greatest thing about their ancestors lay in their wisdom, in their knowledge!
The emergence of paper, something so convenient and inexpensive, undoubtedly made the widespread dissemination of knowledge possible.
Everyone could learn about their ancestors' knowledge and wisdom and understand that the Human Race needed to rely on its own hands to grow, rather than pray to Heaven. Such a world was probably the world King Zhou hoped for.
Many years later, people would praise a learned person by saying his learning could fill five cartloads.
The knowledge he had acquired amounted to enough books to fill five horse-drawn carts. But just how many characters did five cartloads of books contain?
Question: a volume of bamboo slips measures twenty-five centimeters long, two centimeters wide, and five centimeters high, and contains thirty characters. A cart measures two meters long, two meters wide, and half a meter deep. How many characters could five carts carry?
This was a simple math problem. The answer should be several hundred thousand characters.
In that case, everyone present had learning enough to fill five cartloads.
But if bamboo slips were replaced with paper, the number of characters they could carry would increase geometrically. That was the enormous difference between paper and bamboo slips.
The ministers all realized that paper could greatly