Tang And The Five Zen Non-verbal Behavior

Since Huineng in Mid-Tang Dynasty,Zen experienced great change in cultivating methods that is from traditional meditation to cultivating oneself in living activities.Based on Zen's theory,Chan masters were inclined to teach monk-students without speaking and writing,and use many creative non-speakingbehaviors,suchas beating,roaring,silence,drawing circle,gestures,feet-pose,body-pose which were recorded in chan's quotations. This paper studies Zen's non-speaking behaviors in educating process from four dimensions:paralaguage, body posture,body contacting and images,and tries to conclude types,mechanism,religious ideas and mode of thinking which could afford new perspectives and ideas for classical Chinese literary research.The paper is of six chapters:The first chapter discusses non-speaking behaviors of Zen from the perspetive of philosophical and practical. Non-speaking behaviors of Zen could be special, intuitive and romantic statements of Buddhadhrama,reflet basic theme of Zen.The second chapter discusses Zen's paralanguage from three aspects of voice-qualities,vocalization and silence in the course of communication. Zen's paralanguage could stress words,add words and instead of words.The third chapter discusses Zen's body-posture from three aspects of gestures,feet-pose and body-pose, analyzes its Original beginning and developping trend based on chan's quotations.The fourth chapter discusses Zen's body-contacting from two aspects of body-touching and object-touching,and makes a conclusion that beating,roaring and silence are most popular teaching methods because of fidelity, fecundity and longevity.The fifth chapter discusses Zen's images,mainly"drawing Circle",tries to find out the origin of drawing circle in chan masters,and analyzes circle system of Piao Shun zhi and practical use.The sixth chapter discusses the value of Zen's non-speaking mode of thinking to "Cang Lang Shi Hua",its poetic evaluation system and structure is influenced by the ideas of ZongGao who is important monks of LinJi Zong in Song Dynasty.