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Perhaps because I just read the novel and thought about it without any serious scholarly intention, I often overlooked Cao Xueqin’s family history as I, following my own intellectual inclination, focused my attention on the ethereal, expansive, and mysterious aspect of Dream of the Red Chamber. As I think about it now, I realize that it is precisely this aspect that makes history vast and human life rich. Literature would be too bland without the mysteries of history or the mysteries of fate.
In 1869, Jiang Shunyi published his Miscellaneous Notes on Dream of the Red Chamber in Hangzhou. Yu Pingbo expressed his great admiration for this book in the fourteenth section of Disputations on Dream of the Red Chamber and mentioned that the author’s name and native place were first verified by Gu Jiegang. In Miscellaneous Notes Jiang made the following remarks: “Dream of the Red Chamber is a book of reflections. All the characters in it are people [the author] has encountered and all the stories in it are events [the author] has experienced.” What an apt statement! Indeed, Dream of the Red Chamber was the result of Cao Xueqin’s life experience and his reflections on life. This great novel was not mechanically composed. Rather, it was crystallized through ruminations. It is pervaded by the flavor of Zen. Without Zen there would be no Dream of the Red Chamber. Since it is undeniably a novel of profound intuitive reflections, just to analyze it cerebrally would not be adequate. We should probably try to feel it with our hearts, or to grasp its import with our hearts and intuition, in other words. In this regard the approach of Zen is useful. So, I have decided to title this collection Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber. Perhaps because I have opened myself up to intuit the novel, I realize Wang Guowei’s weaknesses. A hundred years ago he brilliantly revealed the tragic connotations of Dream of the Red Chamber, yet he failed to discover that Dream of the Red Chamber is, at the same time, also a novel about absurdity. The profound implication of absurdity in this novel marks exactly the beginning of modern consciousness in China. I believe that, in addition to treating the novel as a tragedy (with the destruction of “being” as the gist of tragedy), we should also interpret it from an existential perspective (with “nothingness” as the essence of existence).