The Buddhism Culture And The Legend Of Song Dynasty

Buddhism culture has a deep influence on Chinese literature, art and so on since it was introduced into China. Lots of researchers pay attention to its effect on Chinese novel, however, there's no monograph concerning it till now. The reason for the situation may be as follows. Most of the researchers would like to put their emphasis on the colloquial or classical Chinese novel and relatively neglect the features of Buddhism culture and its relationship with the novels of each dynasty. Buddhism Culture of Song Dynasty (BCSD) has the character of confucianization. First, it absorbed the Confucian theory of natures of man's heart and converted the "Buddha's purified heart of defiling illusion" with ontological meaning into the real heart of human being. It considers "tens of thousand laws point to man's heart" and pays a lot of attentions to the initiative of individual mind. Thus, it laid the theoretical foundation for Song dynasty to emphasize transcendence and purified heart of defiling illusion. Second, BCSD absorbed some Confucian theories such as piety, loyalty and patriotism. It's increasingly concerned about the order of the world. From this angle, BCSD's character of confucianization can be found. Third, BCSD compared the Confucian culture with Buddhism theory, and considered that all of these three cultures actually shared the same spirit. According to this consideration, it made the Confucian and Buddhism existing harmoniously together. So we can see the obvious capability of reconcilement of BCSD.After the description of the background of the confucianization of BCSD, this paper analyzed the influences on the legend of Song dynasty affected by the Buddhism culture and its confucianization from three angles, which are role creation, story plot and scene choice. Due to the influence of BCSD and its confucianization, there are a lot of legends concerning about the descriptions of monks. Some of them had the monks as its leading role, some of them used monks as the medium of the change of story plot, and some of them focused on the description of some "mad person" exceeding three cultures. As for the aspect of story types, a lot of legends of that time concentrated on the retribution and some of them focused on the description of the x. And some of them described the revival from the hell. And still there're some of them adapted from sutra. In addition, Buddha temple was often chosen to be the place for most of the legends happening. Finally, this paper is intended to summarize the features of legends of Song dynasty under the effects of BCSD and its confucianization. Because of these influences, legends of Song dynasty shows the characters of purified heart of defiling illusion and transcendence, ethicalization and amalgamation in terms of role creation, story type, scene choice and the theme, view of time, space, life, value, and aesthetics, narrative language and mode showing in the legends.