Tao Yuanming’s Philosophy Of Life

Tao Yuanming (about365-427), who is the first pastoral poet in china.In the first chapter, we state the main point and present that not all poems of Tao Yuanming are purely pastoral. His most poems contained inspiration and thinking of philosophy of life. We sketch the research from modern writers on Tao’s poems and thinking, and our research method of this paper at the same time. In the second chapter, the social and political situation of the Eastern Jin Dynasty is simply introduced, and the activated class contradiction. In the field of ideology, people believed in nature and idle talk metaphysics, and Buddhism was widely spread, so the Confucian classics declined temporarily. The scholars at that age pursued hopes from Doctrine of the zhuang. And some another scholar-bureaucrat that dissatisfied with reality gave up the government and lived by themselves to seek the right answer of life, and Tao was one of them. His poems reflected this pursue. In the third chapter, Tao’s philosophical thinking is analyzed in detail by means of his poems. We think that Tao’s thinking is not simply inherited from Buddhism, Taoism and Xuanxue, but a new natural point from them. In the end of this paper, we point out that Tao’s philosophy of life was the unity of heaven and humanity after the failure of Buddhism practice. And we think the essence of his point had limits.Our research is a new understands of Tao’s poems. And we propose a new view to understand the Buddhism and Taoism thinking in the end of the Eastern Jin Dynasty, which suggests how to inherit and develop Chinese culture.