Dream of the Red Chamber: Commentaries by Wang Meng (Revised Edition, 3 Volumes)

Author: Cao Xueqin (Qing Dynasty), written by Gao E
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-01
Features: I love reading Dream of the Red Chamber. Dream of the Red Chamber is a book that can withstand reading, analysis, and trials. It is the crystallization of experience. Life experience, social experience, emotional experience, political experience, artistic experience—all are encompassed. Dream of the Red Chamber is life. It helps you experience life. Reading one Dream of the Red Chamber is like living once, at least twenty years of life. Reading Dream of the Red Chamber is a dialogue with its author, an "exchange of experiences." Understand Dream of the Red Chamber with your own experience, and let the experience of Dream of the Red Chamber validate, supplement, and enlighten your experience. Your experience and your life become infinitely richer and more vivid. Dream of the Red Chamber is also a book full of imagination. It leaves behind too many ancient, strange, profound ideas, riddles, myths, and unsorted information that require your wisdom to decipher. It makes you guess, confuse you, drive you mad, and transport you to another world. Then you realize: there is more than one world, and you have so many worlds waiting to be explored and discovered. After reading Dream of the Red Chamber, can you be the same as before? Dream of the Red Chamber is a book that liberates you. Having experienced everything, there remains only great compassion, indifference, joy, and emptiness. There remains only nothing. All that exists seems like delusion, even deception, while only nothing is real. You no longer care or those small, trivial matters of the mortal world. You live a little more freely—but of course, a little sadder too. After reading Dream of the Red Chamber, you will understand that freedom is intertwined with sorrow, and sorrow is intertwined with freedom. Dream of the Red Chamber is a book of perseverance. It makes you feel that there are still some things in the world worth living, dying, crying, laughing, and even going mad for. It makes you feel that life is worth living. Therefore, death can also be worthwhile. To die for life is worthwhile. No amount of negative emotions can cover the infinite flavors of life! Thus, reading Dream of the Red Chamber once is like making you twenty years younger. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you sigh. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you melancholic. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you wise. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you confused. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you heartbroken. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you appreciate the unparalleled beauty of the Chinese language and characters. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you feel mysterious, as if there is an inexplicable greatness in the unseen. You will feel: no single individual could have written Dream of the Red Chamber. The characters in Dream of the Red Chamber have already become spirits. The events in Dream of the Red Chamber have already become fate. They have entered your life, and you cannot even drive them away. It is that unseen greatness that wrote Dream of the Red Chamber. Through the hands of Cao Xueqin, it was written, and through the eyes of so many people, including Wang Meng, some insights and gains were gleaned. Dream of the Red Chamber is a book of culture. It seems to have exhausted all the possibilities of the Chinese language, characters, and literature, completing our culture. Dream of the Red Chamber is an encyclopedia, not just of the feudal society. Almost, you can find references, explanations, support, and resonant connections for all your experiences, emotions, joys, and sorrows in Dream of the Red Chamber. Dream of the Red Chamber is also an intersection of intellect and emotion, reasoning and intuition, restlessness and tranquility. Have you ever had a play that you haven’t fully performed? Do you have intellectual and emotional energy that needs to be practiced and expressed? Do you have talents and knowledge that need to be showcased or shared? Do you have tears that haven’t been shed yet? Come to Dream of the Red Chamber! No matter how many times you come, there is always room for you! Especially, Dream of the Red Chamber actually tells you nothing. You will forever debate and suffer over it, unable to understand why it is this way rather than that, why it is him rather than her. You will even find it impossible to understand who is better or worse, who is more lovable or less lovable, which part is more real or more like empty talk. Add to this the study of Dream of the Red Chamber, and you will forever be in a struggle with it. Yet, it is powerful enough to occupy your entire life. Dream of the Red Chamber will always be a newly published book. Reading Dream of the Red Chamber is a courageous spiritual quest. In that world, what will you hear and gain? Through countless explorations, I have written dialogues and debates with Cao Xueqin, Baoyu, Daiyu, Jia Zheng, and Wang Furen. Critiquing Dream of the Red Chamber is a wonderful idea. To live and study with Dream of the Red Chamber day and night is a fate, and also a blessing. I should thank Lijiang Publishing House and Mr. Nie Zhenning for this idea. I should also thank you, the reader, for entering this fate and blessing. You too are in a dream now. —Wang Meng