A Study Of Tang Chang'an Buddhist Temple Poems From The Perspective Of Time And Space

Poems of Buddhist temples in Chang'an during the Tang dynasty are the poems written by Tang poets in Chang'an city's Buddhist temples.Chang'an,the city of buddha,had many Buddhist temples and monks,especially those generally acknowledged birthplaces and founders of China's Buddhist sects.In this kind of atmosphere,poems with characteristics of urban features and secular themes created in Chang'an's Buddhist temples usually written by a variety of writers.Through making textual criticism on writing time and place,those poems became orderly in both horizontal and vertical modes.In spatial perspective,after dividing Chang'an into the south part and the north part,there were more Buddhist temples while there were less poems of Buddhist temples in the north than south.The contradiction lies in differences between Buddhist temples in the south of the city and the others in the north,for example,Buddhist temples in the south of the city were predominate in scale and they were closer to the ZhongNan mountains than the orther ones.Those differences leads to diversities of both amount and theme of the pomes of Buddhist temples in Chang'an between the north and the south.More Under-ordered poems were created in southern Buddhist temples in Chang'an rather than the northern ones.Monk-visiting poems written in nouthern Buddhist temples in Chang'an were inclined to compliment the monks on their high social status,while others created in the south were usually constituted of verses in praise of the monks'state of inner detachment.In time perspective,poems of Buddhist temples in Chang'an during the Tang dynasty changed over time in two aspects.Firstly,as the purpose of poets when they entered the Buddhist temples diversified,the birthplaces of those poems of Buddhist temples in Chang'an changed from concentrated to scattered.Secondly,the amount of those poems fluctuated in different period of the Tang dynasty.Poems written in Chang'an's Buddhist temples under the time of Zhongzong,Daizong,and Xianzong were much more than those written in orther periods of the Tang dynasty.In the reign of Wuzong,who had devoted himself to Persecution of Buddhism,there were not few poems of Buddhist temples in Chang'an,but these poems with great value of historical materials and low value of literature were relatively concentrated in writer,writing time,theme,and genre.The subsequent effect of Huichang Persecution of Buddhism can not be ignored.Under the influence of the imperial edicts on the demolition of Buddhist temples,poems of Buddhist temples in Chang'an after Huichang period of the Tang Dynasty were generally written in the Chang'an's Buddhist temples which had endured.