白居易放生诗略论

A Brief Discussion on Bai Juyi’s Poetry on Freeing Captive Animals

放生是唐代佛教诗歌新兴题材之一,白居易则是有放生情结的士大夫代表。其放生诗的题材类型有二:一是实写具体放生行为者,二是以放生池相关意象进行观想念佛者。相对说来,后者更能体现白乐天的佛教生活面相和思想境界。若究后者之来源,可追溯至庐山慧远教团的净土观想和谢灵运的佛教山水诗。此外,白居易创作的放生戒杀诗及相关偈颂,在后世也产生了较大的影响。

Freeing captive animals is one of the emerging themes of Buddhist poetry in the Tang Dynasty,and Bai Juyi is a representative of the scholar bureaucrats with the complex of freeing captive animals.Bai Juyi’s poems on freeing captive animals can be mainly divided into two types:the first type is poems that actually write about the specific behavior of freeing captive animals,and the second type is poems in which the author uses images related to the captive animal freeing pool to contemplate and pray to Buddha.Relatively speaking,the latter can better reflect Bai Juyi’s Buddhist life and ideological realm.The origin of the latter can be traced back to the pure land contemplation of Lushan Huiyuan cult and Xie Lingyun’s Buddhist landscape poetry.In addition,Bai Juyi’s poems on freeing captive animals and abstaining from killing and related Buddhist verses also had a great influence on later generations.