12. The Dream of the Red Chamber

Religion in the Classic Chinese Novel

(Baoyu tells his chief maid to get rid of all his frivolous books. One of the last things he does before he abandons his wife and family. From the 2010 TV series)

There were a number of religions in China in the 1700s, when Cao Xue Qin and Gao E wrote The Dream of the Red Chamber (DRC). The religion of the main character of the novel Baoyu is… unusual and not well understood today, even by Chinese [Due in part because of the CCP’s sustained attack on religion in China over the last 70 years, with the result that relatively few Chinese understand what their ancestors believed 300 years ago].

The religion in the DRC is a mix of Buddhism, Daoism (AKA Taoism), and the Folk Religion of China. The main version of Buddhism which existed in China up until the 1800s was what I call Sino-Buddhism. See my essay on What is Sino-Buddhism for details. However, the religion which Cao Xue Qin & Gao E describes for the main character is unusual and interesting.

Here are the characters in the novel who can be identified as having a religion:

• Baoyu, at the end of the novel, abandons his wife, his family and gives up all his worldly possessions. He is seen traveling in the company of two older men, one is clearly a Buddhist monk with a shaved head and robe, the other is a wandering Daoist. Baoyu clearly believes in reincarnation and he says he wants to never be reborn, which the Buddhists say can only be accomplished if you attain enlightenment. Yet, he is clearly not a Buddhist: he eats meat, he enjoys sex, he loves other women and he wants to be free - like a Daoist immortal, enjoying life and seeing the natural world. To be quite honest, Baoyu doesn’t fit in any known religion, which I think is part of the reason why none of the other characters in the novel understands him.

• Baoyu’s aunt, Xifeng spends most of the novel as an atheist but she encounters several ghosts near the end of her life and is forced to admit that at least some elements of Chinese folk religion are real. There is a clear implication that most of Xifeng’s problems stem from her lack of belief in any of the major religions of China, which is why she felt free to behave immorally, to her great cost.

• Baoyu’s father’s second wife believes in Chinese folk religion. She hires a woman to cast a curse upon Baoyu and Xifeng (which almost kills them both). However, at the end of the novel she dies - convinced that the servants of King Yama are torturing her soul for her earlier crimes. So, while she believed in the Chinese folk religion, she thought some short term gains were worth the risk of later punishment. In the end, this also proves to be a grave mistake.

• Baoyu’s father is a staunch Confucian so he has little respect for Buddhist ideas. He thinks Daoists are only occasionally useful (he lets a Daoist priest perform some magic on his son’s jade stone). He himself carries out the rituals honoring the spirits of his ancestors which is something that Confucius emphasized in his writings. However, it appears that he doesn’t really believe that his ancestors spirits (shen) are watching out for him and his family. He seems to be an atheistic Confucian scholar, which was common in the 1700 and 1800s.

• Skybright (the #2 maid of Baoyu) is a vegetarian and she pays the family cooks a monthly fee to prepare her food separately from the normal meat-tainted food. This behavior strongly suggests that Skybright is a Buddhist. However, she never once mentions her belief in the Buddha, even when Baoyu goes to see her and she says she is dying (I actually think she isn’t dying but there is only one subtle hint that she isn’t dead in the middle of chapter 78).

• Grandma Jia is a perfect exemplar of a Sino-Buddhist. She prays to several Bodhisattva; she donates money to multiple Buddhist temples to gain merit, and around her 80th birthday she has 100 copies of the Diamond Sutra printed and distributed.

• Granny Liu is a follower of the folk religion of China but also prays to the Amitaba, so she is also a Sino-Buddhist (Pure Land Buddhism).

The authors depict spirits or demi-gods on several occasions in the novel, most often just before a character dies.

• Baoyu and one of the servants named Faithful, both meet the Goddess of Love, translated from the Chinese as the Goddess of Disillusionment (Chapter 5 and then in Chapter 111). Baoyu meets the Goddess of Desire and he has sex with her (Chapter 6). Baoyu meets two of the servants of King Yama who are tasked with escorting the souls of the dead to the Halls of the King Yama where they will be judged (Chapter 99).

• Baoyu’s young friend Qin has an end-of-life experience where he meets the servants of King Yama and he begs them for a one more hour of life - a request they grant (end of Chapter 16).

• Xifeng meets the ghost of Qin-shi on the night of Qin-shi’s death and again, just before Xifeng herself dies.

• Yu Er-jie meets the ghost of her dead sister, Yu San-jie just before she decides to follow her sister’s example and kill herself.

Both author’s depict Miao-yu, the chief nun of the Green Bower Nunnery as beautiful, but haughty and rather unpleasant. In Chapter 41, she intended to smash a tea cup used by Old Granny Liu, because she felt the old woman had defiled the cup by drinking from it. A few minutes later she upbraids Daiyu for suggesting that she used mere rainwater to make tea. She says to Daiyu:

Rainwater? Are you so lacking in discernment? This is water from snow which I collected off of plum-blossoms five years ago at the Fragrant Nunnery in the mountains. I filled a blue china bottle with the snow water, then kept it buried in the earth until this summer. Surely you can tell the difference? How could you think this pure light water is the same as mere rain water?”

{Actually I think you might be able to taste the difference between snow water collected from distant mountains, compared to rainwater from clouds above Beijing. There were a million people living in Beijing in 1750 and all the houses were burning coal/charcoal/wood for cooking or heat every day. Air pollution in Beijing has been a problem for centuries, just like London & Paris.

Clearly, Miao-yu is ridiculous and almost everyone who meets her thinks so.

What Do We Have Here?

That some of women believe in Pure Land Buddhism makes sense. The Buddhists in China were pretty open about the fact that women couldn’t attain enlightenment. The only female Bodhistavva, Guanyin, was actually a man. To be sure, few people knew this in China in 1700 but the experts who had learned the ancient sutras in Sanskrit knew it. A woman can only look forward to being reincarnated in the Pure Land and then - possibly - attaining enlightenment there.

As for the folk religion, Chinese have been praying to the various gods since the dawn of their civilization. Some gods were efficacious, others not. Shrines to gods who don’t answer prayers fall into disuse and eventually disappear.

It appears that many Chinese men in the 1700s believed in no religion at all. All the educated men studied the Confucian classics but that did not constitute a religion.

To recap: Both authors depict spirits of the dead appearing and talking to people, often those who are near death themselves. Both authors describe Daoist immortals and Bodhisattvas wandering around China, largely unrecognized amidst the tens of thousands of wanna-be Daoist immortals and wandering Buddhist monks. Both authors show Chinese folk gods who appear (Goddess of Love & Goddess of Desire). Everyone in the story seems to believe in reincarnation, and there is even talk about Confucian masters becoming Saints (which for the Chinese means their spirit will remain alive for thousands of years).

What Did the Religions of China Say About the Purpose of Life?

This is an extremely large and difficult topic and I am far from being an expert. Yet I will offer the following:

• The serious Daoists were attempting to gain immortality.

• The serious Buddhists were attempting to attain enlightenment and so gain the power to end the cycle of rebirth for themselves.

• The serious Confucians were attempting to master all relevant knowledge so they could pass the Imperial exam, and serve the government, thus benefiting the people of China.

• The people who believed in the Chinese folk religion prayed to the Gods for help with their day-to-day lives: curing of their ailments, success in business, wealth, and for healthy children.

In daily life in the 1700s you would see the following religions in action:

• The Daoists worked like faith healers in America in the 1800s, claiming they could cure diseases by meaning of talismans and by performing exorcisms.

• The Buddhist monks would pray for the dead and they claimed their prayers would ensure the deceased would spend less time being punished by the Yama Kings and they would be reborn swiftly.

• The Confucians really did study the classics. They also performed the yearly rituals. Why they were doing all this was unclear. By 1700, Confucians seem to have lost faith that the rituals they performed had any transcendent meaning. They were just going through the motions but no longer believed the rituals had any effect on the world.

• The vast majority of Chinese - farmers and simple tradesmen - prayed to the Folk Gods of China, promising donations to the temple if the gods granted their prayers.

It seems relatively few Chinese were firm believers in just one of these religions. Most people believed in all four of these religions, to varying degrees.

Final Comments

This concludes my essays on The Dream of the Red Chamber. I’ve changed my mind about the novel as a result of watching the TV series and thinking about it for the last four months. Despite all the problems with pacing of the novel and the shift in focus away from the main character and the fact that two different men wrote the novel - I think it is good.

Gao E has gone up a great deal in my estimation. He skillfully directed the plot of the novel from chapter 81 to chapter 120. He came up with a fairly satisfying conclusion and he added some worthwhile elements of his own invention to the story.

I think the 2010 TV series did a very good job with the novel - not perfect, but good.

Reading The Dream of the Red Chamber is a project, to be sure. The four volume translation by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang is more than 2500 pages long. I would guess that for most non-Chinese, the TV show is easier & more understandable.