Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber By Liu Zaifu

He also wrote marvelous works of literary criticism, such as Talks on Ci Poetry in the Human World and Critical Essay on Dream of the Red Chamber. The former group is the achievement of intellect, whereas the latter group is the achievement of intuition. (Dream of the Red Chamber itself is an achievement of intuition.) The evidential research in the former group has its own area of expertise and hence it is easy for people to know the difficulty involved. The intuition required by the latter group does not have its own domain and people often do not know it is more difficult to achieve. Take Talks on Ci Poetry in the Human World as an example. It is very hard for such a short book to contain so much accurate, insightful knowledge about ci poetry; to establish the concept of the “objectified realm” (jingjie); to reveal the best qualities of Chinese poetry; and to understand the Christ-like, Buddha-like willingness to suffer for humanity and the mercifulness and broad-mindedness of Li Yu, the last emperor of the Southern Tang. In addition, his Critical Essay on Dream of the Red Chamber reveals that the most deep-rooted tragedies in the human world are caused not by a few people evil as snakes and scorpions but by human beings, including good people, collectively. His discovery of the inevitability of tragedies in the human world is also very hard to achieve, since this discovery requires knowledge as well as discernment, genius, and profound understanding of life. At first glance it seems to be the result of a casual action, but in fact it is a natural product of a genius’ all-inclusive soul and a result of spiritual cultivation.

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Dream of the Red Chamber has created a “United States of Poetry” for us. As a Chinese person, I feel most lucky that I can live in a spiritual world with characters like Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, characters whose lives are full of poetry. “One might set up a banquet tent a thousand miles long, but a party will inevitably come to an end.” This poetic truth comes out of the mouth of Crimson, a young maidservant. In Dream of the Red Chamber even young maidservants can talk like Zen poets, not to mention the laureate Lin Daiyu.