Research On The Metaphorical Stories In Chinese Buddhist Scriptures

One of the important topics in the research is the metaphorical stories,an essential part in Buddhist scriptures and an effective tool to help people understand Buddhist thoughts.Those stories,which have been beneficial to the spread of Buddhism,have also played other roles such as assisting people distinguishing between the true and false scriptures,being familiar with the Indian culture,appreciating the Chinese literature,etc..The dissertation focuses on their value from the five perspectives.To begin with,metaphoric stories contribute to the spread of Buddhism,which is analyzed from narratology and structuralism.The first perspective is a story within a story.In narrative Buddhist texts,metaphoric stories are within those stories told by A^nanda or Upa^li.In those texts,narrative in two different layers is connected with the analogy of the theme.The second perspective is binary opposition and connection.As an essential part in Buddhist narrative texts,those stories can be viewed as a state of affairs in Buddhist scriptures,which consists of stories and Buddhist thoughts.On surface,they are opposite in terms of the contrast between the concreteness and vividness of stories and abstractness of Buddhist thoughts.They,however,are connected with the analogy of the theme.Secondly,One is concerned with the Buddhism's view on beauty and ugliness on the basis of ugly characters in those stories.The majority of metaphoric stories in Buddhist scriptures are either derived or adapted from folk stories which belong to popular literature rather than high art and thus feature many ugly and vulgar characters.Intentionally uglifying characters is driven by the teaching of Buddhism texts rather than appreciation of the beautiful.Buddhism holds that people are ugly because of the sins in their previous life.Thus uglifying characters is used to introduce the Buddhist thoughts like karma.Thirdly,One is the inheritance of wealth in the ancient India.Those metaphoric stories reveal the following phenomena.Firstly,women are deprived of the right to inherit wealth because of their inferiority.Secondly,men are granted the equal right toinherit wealth.Thirdly,the wealth of some families without sons belongs to the king.Fourthly,under the law of wealth belonging to the king in case of no sons,people desire to have sons out of the concern for the inheritance of their wealth.Fourthly,those stories are valuable in the study of Buddhist Scriptures.Buddhist scriptures,an important component of Chinese ancient literature,are beneficial to the study of traditional Chinese culture.Those scriptures,however,are with some problems such as their identity,transcription,collation,collection of scattered texts,etc..it is an important perspective to analyze those stories because they are abundant in Buddhist scriptures and have been complied into books.Thus,the same stories in different Buddhist scriptures can help researchers deal with those mentioned problems.Fively,The first aspect focuses on the influence of those stories on Chinese stories.Those similar stories in Chinese and Indian literature have been confusing for a long time for many reasons.An important reason is the existence of many stories in Chinese literature before the introduction of Buddhism,so this phenomenon is attributed to the concurrent development of different cultures.From the perspective of the cognitive theory,the concurrent development is only applicable to simple stories and less applicable to complicated ones.Besides,the majority of them have appeared after the introduction of Buddhism.Many Chinese stories are probably derived from Buddhist ones.The other aspect is concerned with the influence of the metaphoric stories on the narrative of the dialogue between humans and animals.the Pre-Qin period is classified into objective narrative and personification narrative,a more distinctive form of narrative.In the Pre-Qin animal stories,however,the narrative of the dialogue between humans and animals was rare.But since the Wei and Jin dynasties,many stories of the dialogue between humans and animals have emerged in Chinese literature.The phenomenon is not caused by the development of China's animal stories but by the influence of the stories of the dialogue between humans and animals in the Buddhist metaphoric stories.