His real name is Tang, a minister of the Northern Song Dynasty, Xinping (now Binxian County, Shaanxi Province). Gu Tao was an official in the later Jin, Han and Zhou Dynasties. He used to be a judge in Shanzhou, a book assistant, a censor, an imperial edict, a doctor in Cangzhong, a bachelor in Chinese calligraphy, an assistant minister in the Ministry of Finance, an assistant minister in the Ministry of War, an assistant minister in the official department, and a bachelor in Hanlin. & gt After the establishment of the Northern Song Dynasty, Gu Tao became the minister of rites, and later served as the minister of punishments and the minister of households. In the third year of Kaibao (970), he died of illness and was posthumously awarded the right servant. Where does the idiom "imitate the gourd" come from?
Song Weitai's "Dong Xuanlu" Volume 1: Mao smiled and said:' I am quite familiar with the Hanlin grass system. I checked the old books of my predecessors and changed my words. This is the so-called' painting a gourd as it is'. "Why does he have it in Li Xuan?" The historical allusions of Tong Hulu.
Gu Tao is a learned man. He found that he didn't pay attention to some courtiers who made proclamations and wrote articles, including his bachelor's degree in Hanlin, so he asked Mao to be transferred from the Hanlin Academy. Hearing this, Mao smiled and said, "This kind of official is very difficult to do, so you can only draw a gourd according to the appearance; I see, you'd better stick to it! " I was very uncomfortable to hear Mao say this, so I wrote a poem on the wall of imperial academy to express my dissatisfaction. The original sentence of the poem is like this: "The official position must be done before it can be used without worry; I can laugh at Academician Hanlin Tao and paint a gourd all my life. " Later, when Song Taizu saw this poem, he disliked him even more. He was refrigerated and never used again. Since then, this phrase "following the old rules" has been used to mean that when dealing with things, you will only imitate others and have no new ideas for reform. Enlightenment of gourd imitation
Although new things need to learn from the old, the main thing is to transform the old and create the new, so that it is easy to make progress and better. What's the point if we just follow the old ones completely? Just as we engage in scientific research, we can only refer to the achievements of others, mainly to create new things; If you just do what others do without improvement, it will be a "gourd"!