The Narration Of The Greater Religion:the Infiltration And Blend Of Buddhism,Taoism And Christianity In Xu Xu’s Works

Different from neoteric litterateurs like Zhang Taiyan and Liang Qichao, Xu Xu and other modern litterateurs in his time had a lot more collisions and integrations when accepting western culture. Most neoteric litterateurs experienced the trend of learning from the west after perfecting their cultural characters. Their inner cultural roots were still traditional; and to them, western culture was just a tool deserved to be used. But modern litterateurs were different:they received traditional education in their childhood and then went abroad to study in their youth. The different culture brought them great shock. The gap between eastern and western culture brought them heavy anxiety, so they tried finding some power inside Chinese traditional culture to compete with western culture; and they also wanted to make up the gap formed in the growth of their cultural characters. Then Buddhism and Taoism, both of which have a history of several thousand of years and seek for inner self-conversations, came into their sight, becoming the pillar to support their cultural characters.The features of a nation are congenital with individual lives. Xu Xu’s novels were absorbed with tragic aesthetics of the Buddhist conceptions of emptiness, pain, impermanence, return and predestination. And Taoist philosophy of returning to the nature, joyride and ease helped Xu Xu find a support of spirit and cultural character in the time of unrest. For Xu Xu, Buddhism was not only a kind of religion, but also a kind of philosophy: a philosophic field that contains of life and death, form and emptiness, perseverance and nihility, occasion and predestination, impermanence and return. Any extreme fields of religion, art, philosophy, science could enter this field. The conception of nature advocated by Xu Xu did not refer to the nature which stands against industrialized civilization described in western romantic literatures; in fact it referred to the life philosophy of nature as such advocated by Chinese traditional Taoists.Xu Xu’s Christian thoughts were combined with neoteric humanist thoughts and Christian belief; or we can also say his Christian thoughts had been humanized and even localized in the background of a special time and culture, In his view, God was not primitively a creator, saver, or the highest dominator of nature and history which was related with the souls and lives of human beings. However, God was only a field of harmony, a spiritual symbol of human morality, a summary of justice and innocence, and the final destination of self-perfecting of characters. The basic aim of religious belief was not the redemption of crimes, but the overleaping and perfecting of individual lives. Although the emotional feelings of religious belief contained of respect, sincerity, enthusiasm, they did not cover that kind of ardor when traditional followers devoted their bodies. The God in Xu Xu’s novels was a God for humanists, a God who demonstrated morality and love in human eyes. He was quite different from the stern, philanthropic and supreme one which was described in Bible or by theologians in history.The religious elements in Xu Xu’s novels were not unique. That was a kind of Greater Religion, mixed with Buddhism, Taoism and Christian. This kind of Greater Religion has been free from its form of belief, becoming a field which contains of ultimate care of lives and the meaning of the existence of lives. This kind of narration combined with Chinese and western religious culture, added with the elements which did not exist in western romanticism, greatly widened the filed of Chinese romanticism, making it more open and tolerant.