There are different opinions about Bafen's calligraphy style. One is that Wang Cizhong, a native of Shanggu in the Eastern Han Dynasty, changed the official script into regular script, and then changed the regular script into eight points. This is what Cai said. Another way of saying it is that the official script takes two points for eight points and the seal script takes eight points for two points, so it is called eight points. This is Cai Yan's explanation to his father Cai Yong. Most people who had good calligraphy in the previous generation could explain the book clearly, but it took thousands of years from the Han Dynasty to the Tang Dynasty. The calligraphy styles recorded in the inscriptions are only complex, correct, line and cursive. Why did the so-called octahedron ever exist? It was not until eight minutes in the Tang Dynasty that it became popular. The characters became like official script, and the strokes were mostly wavy, and the brushwork was neither ancient nor rigorous. Didn't it just appear in the Tang Dynasty? Du Fu once wrote Song at Eight o'clock, praising calligraphers, Han Zemu, Cai and others in the Tang Dynasty. The remaining eight words were written by people in the Tang Dynasty.
So how do you explain what Cai Xi Zhong and Cai Yan said? "There is a difference between the ancient eight and today's eight. The current official script was called official script in ancient times: the current official script was called eight points in ancient times. Eight-part essay different from official script appeared in Tang Dynasty. But the eight points mentioned in the Tang Dynasty are not the eight points mentioned in ancient times. At present, the eight-point book collected by the imperial government consists of four authors: Zhang Yanyuan, Bei Lenggai, Yu Sanghan and Shi Linggai. These four authors are all from the Tang Dynasty, so it can be seen that the modern eight-point file really came from the Tang Dynasty. Therefore, to make future generations understand this point, we have to demonstrate it.
I still want to say a few more words about Wang Cizhong. Wang Cizhong was a famous calligrapher in Qin Dynasty, who was from Shanggu (now southeast of Huailai County, Hebei Province). When I was a child, I was smart, well-read and good at independent thinking. I became famous when I was a teenager. At that time, people generally used Qin Zhuan font, which was slender and the stroke spacing was very uniform. However, this font is complicated and difficult to write, which not only brings inconvenience to ordinary people, but also makes the government and civil servants worry about mountains of official documents every day. Wang Cizhong, who loves reading, is no exception. He suffers from the difficulty of writing this kind of article and deeply understands the necessity of reforming this kind of article. So, he tried to collect a wide range of Zhong Ding utensils and imperial edicts, sorted them together according to the same word and different forms, compared them with each other and pondered them over and over again. He studied hard for a long time and finally created a brand-new stereotyped writing, which is the embryonic form of today's regular script. (Of course, we still want it.