Served As Poetry, Of Confucian Perspective

Dandang (1593-1673BC) whose former name was Tai or Dalai in compound with his family name Tang when he was in the worldly life was Puhe or Tonghe after when he became a monk. He was an outstanding calligrapher, painter and poet in that period. Dandang lived between the late Ming and then the beginning of Qing. He saw the decay of Ming Dynasty with his own eyes, and devoted his life to resave the country's fate. Then he went through the growth up of Qing Dynasty, and he still missed the old country though he had become a monk. Those were written in his poems obviously.The dissertation started with Dandang's lifetime and his works of poems, then set forth Dandang's theory of returning to the ancients and viewpoint of relationship between poems and Zen from Confucianism and Buddhism angles. Concerning his theory of returning to the ancients, I will talk about three reflection of Confucianism in his poems as follows: wise emperor and sage ministers, love knot to Ming, love and sympathy to the people, and recognition to the friends. All of these are souls of Confucianism. On the other hand, viewpoint of relationship between poems and Zen is a continuity of"cite Zen to poems". Also I will illustrate this part from three aspects as: bourn of Zen, vulgar language, and savvy in Jisong.Dandang is both a scholar-bureaucrat and a monk. He is both a monk and a knight-errant. Although the dissertation separates them into two parts, his minds of Confucianism and Buddhism in his heart alternated all the time.