Teaching Zen Poetry Selected In Middle School Textbooks

Zen is a Buddhist School with most Chinese characteristics, having a unique thinking pattern and wisdom. Zen thoughts unite with the Chinese traditional poetry organically, forming the Zen poetry of a distinctive style. Zen poetry, one of the brilliant wonderful works produced in ancient China, containing a wealth of Zen thoughts and literary aesthetic meanings, which as well as have certain values of thoughts and aesthetic in the contemporary society. There are many research on Zen and Zen poem while scanty on Zen poetry, and even so far there is no generally accepted definition for Zen poetry.Some Zen poetry have been collected in middle school Chinese textbooks, yet neither the teaching of the teachers, nor the learning of the students hardly involves the contents of Zen, rather than absorbing its essence. The contemporary middle school students are in a period of great social change, and also a critical phase of the formation of the world view, the outlook on life and the overview of value, if they can accept some Zen concepts at this time, it should be of great advantage for them in dealing with the relationship with the society, the other persons and especially with themselves in the future life.This paper attempts to upset the status quo by analying the teaching of Zen poetry in the middle school by taking WangWei and SuShi's poetry for example. It is divided into five parts:The first part is the introduction, describing the reality and the theory significances of this thesis's topic, listing some related literature and drawing up the research methods.The second part is the overview of Zen poetry, which formed during the Tang and Song Dynasties with the emergence of Zen. They have distinctive characteristics, which are firstly of natural beauty of scenery, taking advantage of natural images to reveal Zen thoughts. Secondly they are of subtle beauty of mood, a mood which is ethereal distant and sophisticated. They also have the implicit beauty of words, in which the wisdom hiding in the illocutionary force.In the third part, in combination with Zen thoughts contained in the Zen poetry, it explains five contemporary values of Zen poetry, i.e., the practice mode of independence and self-help, the spiritual liberation to shake off the yoke, the soul realm full of vitality, the natural and indifferent attitude to lives and active attitude towards life.The fourth part is the teaching practice of Zen poetry, which is the main focus of this paper. This part firstly analyzes the situation of which the teaching of Zen poetry is not paid much attention to in middle school, and then puts forward systematically the relevant teaching strategies which focus on seven segments of classroom teaching: arousing the students' interest, getting to know the poets' backgrounds, reading the poetry repeatedly, looking for the images, tasting the mood, experiencing the emotions, extending the content of this class. On such basis, it forms two kinds of teaching modes, which are " reading—thinking " and " reading—tasting ", with the illustration of SuShi's " Write on the Wall of XiLin Temple"(《题西林壁》) and WangWei's " Hall in the Bamboos"(《竹里馆》).The last part is the conclusion, it narrates the problems that should be paid heed to and other conception might not refer to in this paper.