Significance of Intellectual History in Tao Yuanming' s Creation

Tao Yuanming is a great culture symbol following Qu Yuan in Chinese history that has been showing so brilliant light that he has had profound impact on the later hundreds of generations. He experienced his suffering life in the last years in the countryside and gained the thought of ultimate values about society and human, such as ideal social pattern, the relation between nature and man, the ultimate end of life, how to survive after breaking away from the chief society and the problem of life and death and so on. It has turned out to be that those thoughts have been everlasting not only in the history of literature and aesthetics, but also in the intellectual history. Tao Yuanming shows his own distinct characteristic in the literary creation of intellectual history. He never uses dull and abstract interpretation, but uses the writing style from real life to theory, then from theory to the real life, then the mixture of the both. The abstract theory has been elaborated vividly by the means of his personal living practice.