Legacy
After the fall of the Western Jin Dynasty, the belief began to shift from the popular ideal that Wei was the rightful successor to the Han toward a sympathetic view of Shu Han. Before this change, Sima Yi was seen as a righteous figure in the Book of Jin and was practically deified. Afterwards, Sima Yi began to be vilified; a view which was epitomized in the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In the novel, Sima Yi was portrayed as the dedicated servant of Cao Cao, obsessed with his ideals even to the point of honing his example of usurping power against a weak ruler and using it to bring down Cao Cao's own descendants. In terms of history, many of the accounts are either contradicted or simply do not exist and were most likely borrowed from either the elements of Luo Guanzhong's imagination or from folk tales that had been passed down through the ages.
As Sima Yi's contributions toward Cao Wei are substantial, the debate of his legacy lies within what motivated his actions. A debate, that has continued to this day and will most likely never be resolved, as to whether Sima Yi was acting in a benevolent way, such as Huo Guang did during the Han Dynasty, or whether he was acting out of pure ambition, comparable to Wang Mang's short-lived Xin Dynasty. However, he died only a few years after forcibly regaining his power from Cao Shuang, leaving no definitive answer to his intentions for future generations.
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)