Overseas New Studies’ Perspectives On Tao Yuanming

Tao yuanming’s poetry is popular with readers at home and abroad and his work is one of their favorite ancient Chinese literatures. In most readers’views, Tao yuanming’s poetry is characterized as being nature, fresh, plain and pedestrian. For these readers, Tao yuanming is a perfect personality idol, such as he loves natural pastoral life as a hermit, noble and unsullied, as well as he won’t make curtsies for the salary of five bushels of rices. However, such long-standing image of Tao yuanming is produced deliberately and cannot represent the whole of the writer. Combined with the "secular" and "manuscript" research perspective from Okamura Shigeru and Tian xiaofei respectively, this paper centers on the "feelings integrated in the fiction" concept from Japanese scholar Hajime Kawakami, which contribute to drawing the real complex image of Tao yuanming. Though the pure and detached side of his personality, Tao yuanming is not a true hermit. He is unable to forget to seek fame and fortune and leave living or death behind. Tao yuanming’s complexity is well explained by this new and comprehensive idea "feelings integrated in the fiction" of Hajime Kawakami. In contrast, Okamura Shigeru and Tian xiaofei’s arguments are more arbitrary in some parts, even to obtain a total secular and shadow poet image.In the specific discourse process, this paper analyzes the book Tao yuanming-Lu fangwen-He Shangzhao written by Hajime Kawakami in detail at first, and make some appropriate amendments for a small portion of being debatable and do some supplements at the end of Chapter Two. In order to further strengthen the correct repositioning and to be more closer to the real Tao’s image objectively, this paper also apply the leading academic results from Okamura Shigeru, Tian xiaofei, Robert Ashmore and the others to get an overall analysis, whose researches make progress from anti-idol to getting-off-idol. Therefore, the idol image of Tao yuanming is a misreading. Meanwhile, he has been entangled in fame and fortune, peaceful in appearance, bitter in heart. Tao is very good at hiding complex emotions in his poems. What’s more, Tao yuanming inherits and innovates the fiction of the Songs of Chu and Tao’s fiction skill go beyond his contemporaries in Jin Dynasty. Tao yuanming’s aloof personality and Confucian "Three Immortality" cause almost his pains and struggles directly or indirectly.Different from domestic Tao yuanming’s research, overseas sinologists prove their conclusions from muti-dimensional perspectives, using novel demonstration methods carefully and boldly, focusing on the original texts. All these above help to a complete understanding of real Tao yuanming, broaden the research approaches, and leads to the new academic findings and achievements finally.