Two major events took place at the Commandery Academy that day.
First, a young man of the Langya Wang clan had enrolled to attend lectures. Dressed in a white, unlined robe, young and in the bloom of youth, he answered questions with an air of effortless composure.
Second, he had brought a beautiful bodyguard. With cool eyes, blue robes, and long legs set slightly apart, she stood outside the classroom with a sword in her arms, silent, aloof, and self-possessed.
The pair drew so much attention that, for nearly the first half of the lesson, many students let their minds scamper like monkeys and their thoughts gallop like horses. They kept glancing back and earned strokes from Liu Zhao's ruler.
Liu Zhao wanted to reclaim his students' attention, and with Wang Yang present, he dared not take the lesson lightly. Thus, he brought all his expertise to bear in explaining the essential meaning of the Book of Documents.
Only then did the students gather their wandering thoughts and gradually immerse themselves in their studies.
Wang Yang listened intently as well, feeling as though he were back at school.
Liu Zhao had devoted decades to studying the Book of Documents, and his scholarship offered insights all his own. Although Wang Yang had read widely among the lofty theories of great scholars from later ages, Liu Zhao's interpretations still felt refreshingly new.
"So, without understanding the divisions of passages and sentences, without mastering textual glosses, one cannot understand the Book of Documents. If you cannot even correctly interpret its basic wording, how can you speak of anything else? Yet the greatest pitfall in reading the Book of Documents is to 'die beneath the sentences.' Excessively rigid divisions and excessive textual exegesis are equally undesirable. The Han Confucians wrote more than thirty thousand