The Song's Criticism Of The Monk's Poetry

The monk's poetry originated in the Eastern Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, it developed to prosperously the Tang Dynasty and Song Dynasty. Corresponding to the literature creation prosperity, the criticism of monk's poetry has also been extensively developed. Especially the people in the Song Dynasty had the highly consciously critical consciousness, so they had many poetry commentary books in which there were the many comments about the poem-monks and the monk's poetry. We need to collate and analyze these scattered notes about in a variety of the monk's poetry comments. From which we are able to know the attitude and evaluation of the people in the Song Dynasty to the poem-monks'creation; at the same time, it is beneficial to know the living conditions and the creative tendency of the ancient poem-monks.The monk's poetry can be divided into the vernacular poetry and the elegant poetry two different styles by the observation to the creation of poem-monks in the Jin, Tang and Song Dynasty. In response to this phenomenon, the people in the Song Dynasty took different critical attitudes. For the vernacular monk's poetry, the people in the Song Dynasty were more positive and affirmative; for the elegant monk's poetry, some people in the Song Dynasty were affirmative, the others were critical. Compared with the vernacular monk's poetry, the people in the Song Dynasty took harsh standard to criticize the elegant monk's poetry. There were the specific historical reasons to using the different critical standards: The tendency of the vernacular poem-monks using oral language to write poem was very new to the people in the Song Dynasty. It enlightened the scholar in the Song Dynasty greatly to establish new poetry guidelines, for example:"the common is elegant","using oral language to write poem". The elegant poem-monks simulated the scholar to write elegant poetry were hardly innovative. So the choice of the people in the Song Dynasty about the monk's poetry, it reflected their desire to seek a breakthrough about the poetry.Of course, the criticism of the monk's poetry in the Song Dynasty was not uniform; The Critic's different identity, position and knowledge backgrounds could influence poetry criticism greatly. In general, the scholars who believed in Buddhism more concerned the poetry than the Buddhism, and the people always thought that the poetry creation was the scholars' profession, so they often commented on the monk's poetry by the pride mental; The Literary Critic who did not believe in Buddhism often did not like to recommend the poem-monks, but the poem-monks who had real ability of writing poems and noble character usually could be praised by them. In addition, the difference of the monk's understanding of the relationship of language and Zen directly affected their evaluation of the monk's poetry.The Song's criticism of the monk's poetry has been followed the Tang's tradition of evaluating poem with the word "Qing" and the related words. At the same time, the people in the Song have created new critical concepts to comment on the monk's poem such as"the gas of vegetables and bamboo shoots","the gas of sour stuffing"and so on. This phenomenon is related to the cultural mentality of the Song and the developed direction of the monk's poetry. On the other hand, it represented the maturity of the ancient criticism of the monk's poetry.