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After the phase in which efforts were made in a rather strained manner to solve the historical puzzles in Dream of the Red Chamber, scholars from Hu Shi to Yu Pingbo and Zhou Ruchang took great pains to do evidential research and achieved remarkable successes in this area. Since I am not trained to do evidential research, I cannot follow this direction. As for “comments,” twenty years ago I wrote a chapter to discuss the characterization in Dream of the Red Chamber for my book Combinations of Characters. In recent years I also worked with Lin Gang to discuss the sense of repentance in Dream of the Red Chamber. However, I have always felt that comments are too logical to fully convey the variety of reactions I have had to this masterpiece. As a result, I chose the direction of reflection. In the past, people in fact wrote down their reflections as they read and explored Dream of the Red Chamber. In the notes by Red Inkstone, for example, one can find the embryos of comments, disputations, and reflections. Over the years commentators have also produced their reflections. However, it seems that no one has so far taken up reflection as his/her main approach for reading, exploring, and writing about the novel. To fill the gap, I decided to try to use reflection as the third approach and to name my book Reflections on Dream of the Red Chamber, a title that stands in distinction to Yu Pingbo’s Disputations on Dream of the Red Chamber. The difference between reflection and disputation is self-evident, whereas the difference between reflection and comment lies in the difference between intuition and theory. Evidential proof and logical argumentation, the main tools for comment, are passed over in reflection. Even if they do appear, they are only used very infrequently. The method for reflection is the method of Zen, an intuitive method that grasps the essence of the text by following the clues in the text. It can also be called an aesthetic approach that transcends conceptuality. As a result, the resultant reading is not conducted by the head but by life and the soul. In fact it is somewhat similar to the method a traditional Chinese doctor uses to find an acupuncture point. One reflection tries to hit one point and snatch the nucleus of a message. As for detailed arguments, I will leave them for other scholars to pursue or as a future project for myself.