At the end of the Shang Dynasty, the king of the Shang Dynasty was mediocre, and there were three old ministers in the court, Weizi, Bigan, and Jizi (the uncle of the king of Zhou). The three virtuous ministers have different personal final outcomes due to their different ways of admonishing.
Weizi told the king of Zhou because he saw that the Shang Dynasty was about to die, but the king did not listen, and Weizi left. Bigan repeatedly admonished the king to no avail, but was dissected and died. And Jizi is different from the two of them, although he has also been admonished to the king several times but has not been accepted, but he thinks that it is the evil of Zhangjun to disobey the advice of the ministers, so he refuses to leave like Weizi, and does not want to be killed like Bigan, so he pretends to be crazy with his hair and is imprisoned as a slave. After Zhou destroyed Shang, King Wu of Zhou released him.
In the feudal era, these three virtuous ministers were highly regarded by scholars, especially the Mizi, who was considered loyal and wise, and was a model for those who were courtiers. Liu Zongyuan also held this view, so in the article "Jizi Tablet", he expressed his loyalty and wisdom in enduring the humiliation and then assisting Wu Geng, the son of the king of Jizi, to revive the Shang Dynasty, and was unwilling to become a subject of the Zhou Dynasty and fled to Korea to Yiyan"Yin Worship"behavior, made a high praise.
The article on the Jizi Tablet was written after the failure of Yongzhen's reform, when Liu Zongyuan was demoted as a member of Wang Shuwen's group, the article used Confucius's evaluation of Jizi in "Yi" that "Jizi can do Tao Hui", which was actually secretly encouraging himself to accept the current opportunity of being degraded, and Tao Guang was obscure to wait for the opportunity to serve the imperial court.