| Huang Ting-jian, being one of the representatives of the poets in Song Dynasty and the creator of the Jiang Xi Poets Society, was also a devout Buddhist. He read sutras, did meditation and affiliated with Buddhist monks of different sects, enjoying the pleasure of Zen experience and the deepest meaning of prajna wisdom. The Buddhism theory therefore deeply influenced his thoughts as well as philosophy of life, and of course, the shaping of lately so-called "Huang Ting-jian Style".Huang Ting-jian met Buddhism in his boyhood. But he did not accept Buddhism and finally became a undeviating Buddhist before a long period of thinking and learning. In this thesis, the author studies his life by dividing the same into five different phases, so as to analyze the character of development of his Buddhism belief in the different phases. From 1045 to 1071 is the phase that he met Buddhism in his boyhood and his early working years in Ye County. Then from 1072 to 1079, are his depressed years when working in the Da Ming Imperial Academy, where he further approached Buddhism and tried to disburden himself from trouble and perplexity. The years from 1080 to 1085 when he was working in Tai He turned out to be the significant milestone for him to devote himself as a complete Buddhist. In the 7th year of Yuan Feng (1084), he wrote "On Making Vows", indicating his confirming of Buddhism as his lifetime belief. The phase between 1086 and 1093, when he was in Kai Feng, the Capital of Song during the Yuan You times, he continued to penetrate into Buddhism by assimilating the Zen thought "Easy mind leads to the right way" and harmonizing his belief into daily life, so as to fuse the thoughts of Buddhism and Confucianism and form his philosophy of "beyond the earthliness without escape" and the character of "Mask my brightness with the dust of the Earth, whenas conceal clear differentiation in mind." Then comes Huang Ting-jian's time of breaking through in Zen meditation during his relegation in the Cantons of Qian and Yi from 1094 to 1105, when he gained the insight into the thought itself as illusion and experienced the real peacefulness of the substance of the nature of mind (suchness), further recognizing the connection of heart and surroundings and therefore even more easy when facing any adversity.Huang Ting-jian's Buddhism belief and Zen idea carry both the character of the Bei Song age and his individual feature. The author studies Huang Ting-jian's intercourse with several monks as well as the main surras and books that he read and the ideas assimilated by him. Based on the above materials, this thesis tries to deeply penetrate and analyse Huang Ting-jian's Buddhism thoughts and Zen understanding. The tenet of Huang's Buddhism thoughts is the nonexistence view of prajna theory, and the core of the thoughts is the theory of Nature of Mind, accompanying with vipassana observation and reflection as the method of meditation, and an unrestrained attitude of life, forming a complete and systematic theory system. His Zen thoughts also combine Confucianism and Taoism theories. In the social trend of thoughts that Neo-Confucianism trying to mingle Buddhism into Confucianism and the fusion of Buddhism and Confucianism, Huang assimilated the cultivation of Zen aiming the nature of mind to reform Confucianism, by emphasizing fulfilling moral and ethic into the cultivation of nature of mind. He also tried to explain Zhuang Tzu's theory of "Peripateticism" and "Materialization" from a Buddhism point of view so as to conform the same with the Prajna wisdom of Buddhism and therefore formed a realm of freedom and extrication of mind that one react to all things on the one hand, but not cling to any ones on the other hand, combining with Tao and with everything.The tenet of the nonexistence view of prajna, the connotation of the nature of mind and the vipassana meditation and reflection method of Zen provide a direct influence to Huang Ting-jian's poetics conception. He raised a theory of "writing from the intention of mind", figuring that a poem is actually a reflection of the mind of it writer, and that the nature of mind runs through the whole course of poems' learning, writing and reading, thus emphasizing the cultivation of nature of mind as significant precondition of literary and artistic creation. He brought forward a new identification of the relation of mind and objects as his specific method of observations: "observation of the changing" and "observation of the world". Under the Zen attitude of language, "not by words" and "not without words", as well as the Zen language ethos of the Song Dynasty, Huang Ting-jian attached importance to both the art of language by summarizing language skills, and the elucidation of subaudition by emphasizing the sentence structure as well as the meaning, by both magic skill and wonderful mind, and finally leading to the "approaching correct path by skill" merits of language.The poems of Huang Ting-jian were organized with carefully chosen images and well shaped artistic conception, so as become the sustenance of the outstanding taste and accomplishment of the poet himself. The author studies the images "moon" and "pine tree" used in Huang's poems as examples and finds that the images used in Huang Ting-jian's poems were developed from their traditional usage and added with the meaning of Zen view. Huang also learned to use the Buddhism method of "telling truth by chants" and Zen method of "indicating Zen by poems". With the combination of subjunctive scene and real images, he created different Zen style poetry moods, enduing his poems with a detached spirit of lustration and reflecting a highest character-manner. Moreover, Huang conducted tries to introduce Zen into Ci including concealing Zen chants, singing Zen stories and implying Zen intention and truth approach in Ci, etc.
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