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I also know how happy I am when my life and my soul are illuminated by the poetic way of life in Dream of the Red Chamber. It is an experience that makes one feel different even about eating, sleeping, and sightseeing, an experience that provides a moment of awareness of the poetry in life. According to Heidegger, it is now difficult for humankind to encounter its original, innocent state. Indeed, alienated by wealth, machinery, and power, humankind has lost its original innocence, just as Zhen Baoyu in Dream of the Red Chamber (a symbol of the mundane world) is unable to recognize his true self (Jia Baoyu) and can only talk nonsense when he meets his true self. When I read Dream of the Red Chamber, I feel like Zhen Baoyu meeting Jia Baoyu. Luckily, far from “failing to recognize even if they meet” (a line from Su Dongpo), I am overjoyed at my reunion with my true self.
Having gained some unusual reading experiences, I could not help but write down what occurred to me while reading. As I wrote down one note after another, I realized I was attempting a new way to read Dream of the Red Chamber or, in other words, a new approach to explore Dream of the Red Chamber. For more than two hundred years, people have used three approaches to read and explore Dream of the Red Chamber: comments, disputations, and reflections. Strictly speaking, Wang Guowei brought the first approach, comments, into being in the true sense of the word. His Critical Essay on Dream of the Red Chamber includes his own views, logical arguments, analyses, and verifications. Like an echo in an empty valley, this first attempt created a path of its own. Unfortunately, the comments produced over the past hundred years, in spite of their large number, have been severely contaminated by political and ideological elements, which have had a negative impact on their achievement. In contrast to comments, the approach of disputations has a long history as well as remarkable results. What I mean by disputation includes analysis, annotation, evidential scholarship, and collation.