Gu Huan, a man of humble origins from the Southern Qi Dynasty, was born to farming parents but showed brilliance early on—by age six or seven, he could already calculate the seasons and the sixty-year cycle of the Chinese calendar.
One autumn, the rice was ripe, and his father said to him, "You're still young and can't do adult work, so go watch the fields and keep the sparrows from eating the rice."
Gu Huan was in the fields, watching flocks of sparrows chirping and fluttering about, finding it delightful, so he sat at the edge of the field and wrote an essay titled "Ode to the Yellow Sparrow." At noon, his father called him back for lunch, only to find that the sparrows had devoured over half the rice in the field, and he stared in fury, his eyes wide with anger.
“How are you tending the fields? Don’t you know the sparrows are nearly done eating all the grain?” “I… I…” “What ‘I’!” His father raised a hand to strike him. “I was writing an essay,” Gu Huan said tremblingly. “Where’s the essay you wrote?” Gu Huan handed the essay to his father. After reading it, his father said sadly, “Alas, it’s my fault as your father for not having the money to send you to school.”
Near Gu Huan's home stood a private school, but his family was too poor to afford the tuition. Driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge, he secretly stood outside the classroom during the day, eavesdropping on lessons, and at night, he studied by the light of burning pine branches and rice husks. He pursued learning with relentless dedication, never stopping even as he grew old.
Gu Huan, a devoted follower of Laozi and Zhuangzi, embraced Daoism and refused all government posts, choosing instead to live as a hermit on Mount Tiantai.
Later, the idiom "Burning Chaff for Light" came to describe diligent study.
Source: *History of the Southern Dynasties*, "Biography of Gu Huan"
Meaning of the Idiom: Later, the Chinese idiom "燃糠自照" came to describe how diligent study.