A study of the Vimalakirti imagery in Bai Juyi's poems on illness
白居易疾病诗中的维摩诘意象研究

摘要

白居易的疾病诗是其晚年诗歌创作的重要类型，亦是观照其生命态度与精神建构的关键文本。本文聚焦于白居易疾病诗中维摩诘意象的运用，探讨诗人如何借助这一带有佛教超越色彩的意象，实现对疾病体验的诗学转化与精神超越。白居易将维摩诘“示疾说法”的宗教叙事转化为个人病痛书写中的身份自觉、空间重构与意义升华，从而在诗歌中完成从生理痛苦到心灵修为、从个体困境到普遍哲思的审美提升。研究表明，白居易对维摩诘意象的创造性吸纳与内化，不仅体现其融摄佛理、疗愈自身的智慧，也彰显了中唐文人以诗为媒、整合外来思想资源并赋予其个人化表达的文学能力。

Abstract

Bai Juyi's poems on illness are an important type of his late-life poetry and key texts for understanding his attitude towards life and spiritual construction. This paper focuses on the use of the Vimalakirti imagery in Bai Juyi's poems on illness, exploring how the poet used this imagery, imbued with Buddhist transcendence, to achieve a poetic transformation and spiritual transcendence of his experience of illness. Bai Juyi transformed Vimalakirti's religious narrative of "preaching through illness" into a sense of identity, spatial reconstruction, and sublimation of meaning in his writing about personal suffering, thus achieving an aesthetic elevation in his poetry from physical pain to spiritual cultivation, from individual predicament to universal philosophical thought. Research shows that Bai Juyi's creative absorption and internalization of the Vimalakirti imagery not only reflects his wisdom in integrating Buddhist principles and healing himself, but also demonstrates the literary ability of mid-Tang literati to use poetry as a medium to integrate external intellectual resources and endow them with personalized expression.