The Study On The Buddhist Literature Of The Seven Monks In Two Jin Dynasty

Sun Chuo,a government official and litterateur in ancient China,in his work A Study of Seven Persons of Virtue and Seven Well-known Monks,compares seven prestigious monks in Jin Dynasty(266-420AD)to seven sages of the bamboo grove in Wei-Jin Dynasty(220-420AD)for the former boast similar experiences,morality and,most importantly,literary achievements as the latter.The Seven Monks,particularly Zhu Fahu and his apprentice and Bo Yuan,made staggering achievements mainly in foreign sutra translation and literary creation.Zhu Fahu and his apprentice translated numerous Buddhist texts whose contents cover nearly all the sutras works coming to China then.In his translation works,the translation is simple,exquisite and close to the intention of the original text.The language presents the characteristics of “literal translation without much modification”.In Bo Yuan's translation works,the “Qi” style,a literary form,and “quotation prose”,a narrative mode,are highlighted.In literary creation,the Seven Monks inherited five-character poetry and developed it.As a representative of them,Zhi Daolin,used massive reduplicated words in his five-character poems,making the rhythm quite vivid.Meanwhile,impacted by ideological trend of the era,his poems are full of metaphysics which blend with Buddhist thoughts.Besides five-character poetry,Zhi Daolin also achieved greatsuccess in other literary genres,among which include Buddhist-praising poetry and unprecedented portrait-praising remarks.However,there are some demerits in their literary works.For instance,frequent and substantial literary quotation in works makes it hard for readers to fathom.In addition,omissions,bias and metaphysical argument as well as Buddhist terms are easily found in this book.The Seven Monks exerted great influence on the literary circles in China at that time for the fact that they injected new blood and vitality into the literary world and influenced later generations profoundly.