Abstract:
One of the representative painting works of Muchaku Dochu, a monk of the Rinzai School in Japan, The Illustrations of the Five Scenic Mountains in the Great Song Dynasty included illustrations of many spatial arrangements and furniture shapes in temples of the South Song Dynasty, exposing the way of life of monks in the dynasty. An investigation of several functional spaces of the temples, such as acupuncture clinic, washing room and bathing hall, finds that the monks’ way of life actually squeezed steadily their own space of life and pursuit of personal desires. Through the training in this way of life, the monks developed a very strong cohesive strength in the collective life, which directly led to the historical fact that monks from different places could harmoniously live collectively in one temple under the system of public temples in the Song Dynasty. In the Buddhist temples of the day, without the assurance of strict regulations, no monk would have been trained into a proper way of temple life, nor could they have lived together peacefully without blood and Buddhist connections.
