Research On Figures Of The Buddhist Monks And Nuns In San Yan And Er Pai

San Yan and Er Pai were two different collections of short stories in the last of Ming Dynasty. It had created a lot of lively and vivid figures such as businessmen, scholars, prostitutes, matchmakers, monks and nuns and so on, especially among which their roles of the monks and nuns were enriched and no longer ascetics simply. They began to set foot in the secular world, which was contrary to the previous characters. Through classifying the types of monks and nuns, my paper tried to explore the forming reasons of evil monks and nuns, which was different with the cultural connotations traditionally before, and tried to make a more comprehensive discussion about monks and nuns in texts.My paper divided monks and nuns’ figures into three categories:holy characters, general characters and evil characters. According to their capabilities in Buddhism, holy characters contained two types: helping victim of an injustice, virtue advanced, being tempted and breaking the concepts but achieve the aims; general characters contained two types: the longing for love and self-concern; evil characters contained two types: dissoluteness type and murdering for money. The author held a positive attitude to holy characters, and general characters were mostly common. Author denounced the evil characters for that the evil characters were more prominent and different from people’s impressions in minds, my paper tried to do the analysis from the social background and the author’s thinking effecting, and to explore the characters of monks and nuns’ ideological contents. Hope that the "cause and effect cycle" thought in the book has some enlightenment to today’s society.My paper classified summaries of monks and nuns in the image, exploring the reasons of the formation of evil monks and nuns characters, which related to the development of commodity economy with the carnalism popular. This was embodiment of the author’s thought. It embodied the ideas of karma, the breaking through of the feudal ideology and female consciousness awakening. The monks and nuns characters broke through the stereotyped images in traditional narrative literature, suggesting people to do something good, which still had warning significance to nowadays society.