Autobiographies Of Ming Dynasty And Spiritual Life Of Scholars In Ming Dynasty

Autobiographies of Ming dynasty, as an important stage of Chinese ancient autobiographies, not only possess strong traditional elements but also distinctive dynasty colors, which are plentiful in amount and variety. Those autobiographies provide real, vivid and trivial literature information to study spiritual life of scholars in Ming dynasty. The paper takes over one hundred autobiographies of Ming dynasty from "The anthology of autobiographies of Ming dynasty" compiled by Du Lianzhe as literature base to display fully spiritual life of scholars in Ming dynasty from the perspective of officials and hermits and excavate the great significance in autobiographies of Ming dynasty to spiritual life of scholars in Ming dynasty.The introduction firstly serves as an overview of autobiography's characteristics in style and discusses the great significance of autobiographies to spiritual life of scholars. Secondly it briefly reviews the basic situation of autobiographies of Ming dynasty and current studying situation, in addition shows situations of part biographies of officials and hermits in tabular form.The first chapter, "officials' autobiographies and officials' survival state", mainly shows bad political environment of Ming dynasty through the records in officials' autobiographies about tyranny and faction wars and officials' spirit state in the environment.The second chapter, "officials' autobiographies and officials'spiritual life", mainly shows officials' moral values to be the model of the common people and the sense of mission to take the world as responsibility. The former displays the ethics of hard studying, virtue and filial piety, integrity, honest, diligent and caring people, while the latter displays how to make people rich, teach people and govern people.The third chapter, "hermits' autobiographies and hermits' spiritual life", bases mainly on hermits' autobiographies to show their inheritance for hermits' tradition and focus on highlighting hermits'distinctive spirit in Ming dynasty which reflected by publicizing independent personality and showing the true nature and the secular concept of emphasizing reputation and pleasure.The first and second chapter study from the perspective of officials' autobiographies while the third chapter studies from the perspective of hermits' autobiographies. They complement and explain each other, even transform between them sometimes, to demonstrate the scene of spiritual life of scholars in Ming dynasty.