Research On Tao Yuanming And His Works From A Cultural Perspective

Tao Yuanming is a famous poet and outstanding writer in ancient China, and his personality and his works had a profound impact in classical Chinese poetry. The researches about Tao Yuanming also have a long history which date from the northern and southern dynasties. Althought the studies about Tao Yuanming are always standing in the center of ancient Chinese literature research, many aspects of them still need to be enhanced in view of Tao’s unique achievement and his status. For example, Tao’s aesthetic thoughts, his influence on modern culture, laws of researches of Tao in difference historical period, as well as the perspective and method of our study, and so on, all of these need further development and more thorough understanding. While most studies about Tao Yuanming put emphasis on perspectives of sociology, ethics, and philology, this article tries to comprehensively focus on Tao’s personality and his works of poem, prose and fu(赋) from a cultural vision.This article is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is about Tao’s personality traits, for his great artistic achievement is well connected with his experience of life and his unique personality. In order to be more precise, this paper adopted Lu QinLi’s study on Tao’s life experience in his "Tao Yuanming’s collected works","upright and outspoken"(刚直),"sincere and straightforward"(真率),"honest and frank"(耿介),"free and easy"(æ´'脱) and other qualities constituted important parts of Tao’s personality traits, and these unique personality trairs must be as a result of some particular reasons. Different from previous studies, after analysing the forming reasons of Tao’s personality traits from a cultural perspective and according to Danner, a famous french critic who asserted that era, the environment and ethnic are three most important factors to form human personality, we conclude that Tao’s family, social politics, philosophy and religion at that time all contributed to Tao’s thoughts and personality traits.Our second chapter is to analyse Tao’s works in detail. Tao’s works has rich ideological content and artistic achievement. As for ideological content, subjects such as people’s livelihood, farming, life and death, even love can be found in Tao’s poems; As far as artistic achievement, Tao’s poems have some features such as natural style and energetically vigorous side, and his language also manifests characteristics of succinct quality and reiterative. Our innovation in second chapter concentrates upon the perspective of cultural connotation of Tao’s works. We decribe such cultural connotation mainly from the aesthetic culture, the reclusive culture and drinking culture of Tao’s works. The personality beauty, social beauty and natural beauty revealed make his works full of profound connotation of aesthetic culture and universal values of humanistic care.The third chapter wrote about the influence of Tao Yuanming and his works and our emphasis is the propagation of Tao as a kind of cultural symbol. From the five dynasties, northern and southern dynasties to tang dynasty Tao’s artistic achievement actually gained no acceptance, he just appeared as an image of hermit until the song dynasty, however, no matter in which dynasty, Tao’s lofty character is esteemed by literati of later generation. As a kind of spiritual and cultural symbol, Tao Yuanming is not far from us, and we can still get inspiration from him in our modern life. For example, Tao’s aesthetic ideal of advocating nature can be widely used in our consumer society, and his pursuit of poetic habitation can also find resonance in our noisy society and touches our hearts.