Lotus Literary Image Of The Song Dynasty Poetry

In the long history of Chinese literature, the lotus flower renowned as one of the most rare and beautiful flowers. Its rich interpretations are incomparable with other kind of flowers. Choosing this specific kind of flowers with deep cultural connotations and rich symbolic meanings, as the subject, this paper is going to make an analysis and comparison of the meanings of the louts flowers as a literary image in the literature before the Song Dynasty, and tries to find out the source, the emergence, the development and the evolvement of the lotus as a literary image, as well as its relationship with the contemporary politics, history, culture and philosophy from different perspectives and different levels.This paper is going to propose that the original soul of lotus flowers first because of its usability but is the ancients' attention, also becomes the totem and the reproduction worship object as a result of its unique contour. It's literary image began with the appearance of the "Cantos" and "Chu Elegies", after which came a state of two parallel clues developing together. One of the clues is lotus flowers as a literary image in the folk poetry, in the system of "Yuefu", this system most has the representation is picks the lotus poetry, the performance content mainly is the male and female love, in addition, picks the lotus poem also frequently to use for to express connotation homesickness, leaves, and so on lovesickness; While the other is in the system of scholars, in this system, the lotus flower frequently took noble and pure, happy, fresh, refined symbol, then has flees the world with from the suitable pursue, politics expected with frustrated, the personality unfolds and so on a series of implications and the function. The introduction of Buddhism into China further enriched the image of lotus flowers, of Chinese ancient images, and formed another source of the image. The collective functions of cultures both in and abroad finally promoted the lotus flower to be the symbol of the most virtuous and noblest character of China--gentlemen.This paper is going to discuss the evolution of the manifestation of the lotus flower as a symbol of literal image from pre-qin to Song Dynasty.