Dream of the Red Chamber: Commentaries by Wang Meng (Volumes 1, 2, and 3) (Revised Edition)

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—everything is included. 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 for twenty years. Reading Dream of the Red Chamber is like a dialogue with its author, an "exchange of experiences." Understand Dream of the Red Chamber with your own experience, and use Dream of the Red Chamber's experience to validate, supplement, and enlighten your own 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, riddles, myths, and unsorted information that requires your wisdom to decipher. It makes you guess, confuses you, drives you mad, and transports you to another world. Then you realize: there are 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. After experiencing everything, there is only great compassion, indifference, joy, and emptiness. There is only nothing. All that exists are illusions, 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 realize that there are still some things in the world worth living, dying, crying, laughing, and even going mad for. It makes you believe that life is worth living. Therefore, death can also be meaningful. To die for life is worthwhile. A hundred negative emotions cannot hide the infinite flavors of life! In this way, reading Dream of the Red Chamber once is like making you twenty years younger. Dream of the Red Chamber makes you sigh in wonder. 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 drive them away. It is that unseen greatness that wrote Dream of the Red Chamber. It was written by Cao Xueqin in name, and by so many people, including Wang Meng, who saw and understood something from it. Dream of the Red Chamber is a book of culture. It seems to have exhausted all possibilities of the Chinese language, characters, and literature, and has completed 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 exchange and intersection of intellect and emotion, reasoning and intuition, restlessness and tranquility. Have you ever had a play that you didn’t get to perform? Do you have intellectual and emotional energy that needs to be practiced and expressed? Do you have talents and knowledge that need to be shown off 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, it can accommodate you! Especially, Dream of the Red Chamber actually tells you nothing. You will forever debate and suffer over it. You can’t understand why it’s this way instead of that, why it’s him instead of her. You can’t understand who is better or worse, who is more lovable or unlovable. You can’t understand which part is more real or more like empty words. Add to it 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 brave spiritual quest. In that world, what will you hear and gain? Through repeated quests, I have written dialogues and debates with Cao Xueqin, Baoyu, Daiyu, Jia Zheng, and Wang Furen. Critiquing is a great idea. To live and study with Dream of the Red Chamber day and night is a fate, and 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 are also in a dream now.——Wang Meng