适性与白俗:论白居易闲适诗及其诗史意义

适性是白居易藉以安顿人生的方式,其依据在于人之"天性"。白氏把心理上的禀性和生理上的本能需求视为天性,进而把天性之满足称为"适性"。这种适性思想导源《老子》、《庄子》、郭象《庄子注》以及《列子·杨朱篇》。闲适诗就是记录诗人对适性生活的追求、体验和思考。白居易在此观念下的适性诗写作,将题材拓展到日常生活乃至身体感受等领域。这是对此前适性诗以田园山水为核心之写作传统的变革。但它也难以避免地导致诗歌在内容层面的世俗化。这是"白俗"的深层根源。但白居易闲适诗中还彰显出对宇宙万物"皆遂性"的社会理想和天地情怀,这种俗常趣味中的理性元素应是宋人接受白居易的重要原因之一。 

Bai Juyi ( 白居易) viewed psychological disposition and physiological instinctive needs as ”human nature”, and further considered the satisfaction of human nature as“leisureliness”, based on which Bai settled his life. The thought of leisureliness was mainly originated from Laozi (《老子》) , Zhuangzi ( 《庄子》) , Guo Xiang’s ( 郭象) Annotation of Zhuangzi( 《庄子注》) and Yang Zhu inLiezi (《列子·杨朱篇》) . Bai’s leisure poems were records of his pursuit, experience and reflection of leisurely life. In this view, Bai wrote leisure poems, extending his subject matters to such fields as everydaylife and even physical perception. This was a change of the tradition of leisure poem writing with the representation of pastoral lives and landscapes as the core. But it inevitably led Bai’s poems to being worldly at the level of contents, which was the deep root of the so-called “BaiJuyi’s worldliness” (白俗). However, Bai's leisure poems also revealed his social ideal and broad feeling with “full conformity to the nature” (皆遂性) of all creatures in the world. This rational element of worldly interest should be one of the most important reasons why Bai was widely accepted by the poets in the Song Dynasty.