Buddhism And The Rise Of The Six Landscape Paintings Aesthetic

The period of the Six Dynasties is not only the initial stage of Chinese traditional aesthetic thoughts on mountains-and-waters painting, but also the important epoch in which Buddhism had been deep into the structure of Chinese native culture and the main current ideology in those days. The thesis intends to prove that the traditional Chinese painting of mountains and waters could set up the methods and the ideal of painting on the initial stage that even been used today, which is greatly related to the development of Buddhism, so that Buddhism should be the important factor not to be ignored when we study the Chinese traditional aesthetical thoughts on mountains -and-waters painting.The aesthetic thoughts on mountains-and-waters painting handed down from the Six Dynasties is mainly reflected in Zong Bing's Preface to Mountains-and-waters Painting and Wang Wei's On Painting. ON the basis of their works, the author develops this thesis on the background of the esteem for Buddhism and the scholars' cultural life at the turn of the Eastern Jin and Song Dynasties. From the investigation and analysis on the development of Buddhism in those days, this paper tries to make a full presentation on the construction of the aesthetic thoughts on mountains-and-waters painting guided by the argumentation and the mode of mind of Buddhism.The thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter briefly introduces the real cultural situation when the aesthetic thoughts on landscape painting was built, and analyses the unique position and major influence of Buddhism on ideology at the turn of Eastern Jin and Song dynasties. The second chapter elaborates on the alterations of scholar's consciousness of mountains and rivers under the influence of Buddhism, following a simple review ofpredecessors' sense of mountains and rivers. The third, the fourth and the fifth chapter penetrate on artists' understanding and interpretation of the beauty of landscape, their theoretical exploration by which painters produce good works of mountains-and-waters and their expression of the ideal state of landscape painting in the Six Dynasties respectively, influencing by the new aesthetic consciousness of mountains and waters.It is the nutriment of Buddhism that aesthetic thoughts of mountains-and-waters painting in the Six Dynasties have the unique visual angle, that is to say, painting of landscape painting can produce artistic conception beyond a certain particular figure and can lay one's true feeling or ease one's own mind. As a result, the aesthetical consciousness came to be systematic during this period.