Modern Social Science Research

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.

Bai Juyi; Poems about illness; Vimalakirti imagery; Life's dilemmas