Editing Sima Guang (section)

==Early life and career==
Sima Guang was named after [[Guāng Prefecture|Guang Prefecture]], his birthplace, and where his father Sima Chi ({{lang|zh-hant|司馬池}}) served as a [[county magistrate]]. The Sima family were originally from [[Xia County]] in [[Shǎn Prefecture]], and claimed descent from the 3rd century Cao Wei official [[Sima Fu]]. A famous anecdote relates the young Sima Guang saving a playmate who had fallen into an enormous vat full of water. As other children scattered in panic, Sima calmly picked up a rock and smashed a hole in the base of the pot. Water leaked out, and his friend was saved.<ref name=ss336>{{harvnb|''Song Shi''|loc=[http://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/宋史/卷336 ch. 336.]}}</ref>

At the age of 6, Sima heard a lecture concerning the ''[[Zuo Zhuan]]'', a work of history dating to the 4th century BC. Fascinated, he was able to retell the stories to his family when he returned home. He became an avid reader, "to the point of not recognizing hunger, thirst, coldness or heat".<ref name=ss336/>

Sima obtained early success as a scholar and officer. When he was barely twenty, he passed the [[Imperial examination]] with the highest rank of {{zhp|p=jìnshì|c=進士|l=metropolitan graduate}}, and spent the next several years in official positions.

===Political ideology===
Sima believed that civilization was created when the [[Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors|sage kings]] transformed humans from their original animal state using hierarchical order, property rights, moral instruction, and penal law. He believed that the problem with government was not in its structure, but rather in the people that ran it. He wrote multiple memorials detailing how to make the government more effective and argued that his views were in accord with history (in contrast with [[Wang Anshi]]'s emphasis on the [[Four Books and Five Classics|Classics]]) and [[Tianxia|Heaven-and-Earth]]. A static and well-maintained country would, according to him, last forever.{{sfn|Chaffee|Twitchett|2015|pp=689-690}} Accordingly, he disliked commercial growth (which he believed encouraged social change) and preferred a recommendation-based [[imperial examination]] system.{{sfn|Chaffee|Twitchett|2015|pp=693-694}}

Rulers were supposed to only determine official assignments, reward achievement, punish failure, care about their servants, have good morals, and be immune to outside influence. On a wider level, a society with clear inferior-superior roles would be stable.{{sfn|Chaffee|Twitchett|2015|p=689}} His deeply anti-change perspective made him a political conservative (in contrast with Wang Anshi's reformism).{{sfn|Chaffee|Twitchett|2015|p=692}} For Sima, to be ethical was to accept one's social status, and personal cultivation meant exercising restraint; indeed Sima interpreted the "investigation of things", a fundamental tenet of the [[Cheng-Zhu school]] of [[Neo-confucianism]], as "restraining things". He also agreed with [[Xunzi (philosopher)|Xunzi's]] postulation that humans were inherently evil and wrote a work called "Doubting [[Mencius]]" that criticized Mencius' encouraging of the overthrow of hierarchy.{{sfn|Chaffee|Twitchett|2015|p=693}}