Read The Lower-class's Life And Mind During The Tang Dynasty From Wang Fanzhi's Poems

Wang Fanzhi was a vernacular poet of early Tang Dynasty.He wrote hundreds of vernacular poems which reflected the lower-class's life and mentality,and these poems showed the lively picture of Tang dynasty.Based on Wang Fanzhi's poetry which had been arranged,I try to analyze the real life of the lower-class,to explore the Buddhism's influence on the lower-class's attitudes towards life,the impact on people's family and marriage concepts and their education and philosophy principle.I also analyze the social life of the ordinary people and mentality,in order to catch a glimpse of the lower-class's true life and mind behind the early Tang Dynasty's prosperity.This paper is divided into five parts.The first part of the study discusses the people's attitudes towards life which was under the influence of Buddhist concept.Most poems of Wang Fanzhi showed many works of Buddhism,so we can see that to the author,Buddhism had deep influences. During Sui and Tang Dynasties,Buddhism was popular in the whole society.The lower- class also worshipped Buddhism.Wang Fanzhi was a member of the lower-class,and many of his works proclaimed the Buddhism concept.This section inspects the influence of Buddhism on the lower-class and reasons,and reflects the lower-class's attitudes towards life.That is in the painful life,they hated to live and saw death as a happiness.The second part analyzes the real life of the lower-class during Tang Dynasty. Wang Fanzhi's poems observed life from the perspective of the society's lower-class. He wrote a lot of poems reflecting the laborers' life and capturing the extensive social contradictions.Also,his poems exposed profound social problems.This section inspects that during the early Tang Dynasty,under the system of renting and employing,peasants were suffering the economic exploitation and political oppression.The third part of the study analyzes in the Tang Dynasty,the lower-class's attitudes to marriage and family life which reflected in Wang Fanzhi's poems.Due to the influence of phenomenon,such as money worship,at the marriage problem, peasants emphasized on fame,money and wealth.But on family life,there was a contradiction between the defence of Confucian tradition and settlement of social fashion.On one hand,the Confucian's ethics had deep influences in the society;on the other hand,under the environment of political democracy,people broke the Confucian,pursued happiness and satisfied the need of emotion.All of these led to the marriage system's contradiction and the complexity of the family culture.The fourth part of the research discusses people's educational concept and social interaction principle in Tang Dynasty.Wang Fanzhi's poems reflected during that period,the educational principle was that people saw studying as the most important thing in order to pursue fame.The principle was influenced by the upper society's exams,through which the emperor appointed functionaries.Under the influence of Confucian,the society pursued the principle of social interactions.That is to obey the courtesy and to emphasize on the traditional ethics standard.The fifth part of the research mainly discusses the reversed state of people.One of the features of Wang Fanzhi's poems is by using the irony style,his poems showed the social various edge morbidity phenomenon to readers.In his writings,behavior of various people and attitudes towards life are thought-provoking and worthy of reading.