When you read (or watch) the first pages of Dream of the Red Chamber (DRC), it makes very little sense. Something about a stone gaining a mind and seeking to experience the world.
I shall explain.
The Chinese believe that two Gods named Fuxi and Nuwa (male and female), created mankind. This myth is similar to the story of Prometheus, as the two Chinese gods fashioned man and beast out of mud/clay beside a river. Some centuries later later, a crisis engulfed the world - for unknown reasons the sky broke open and endless streams of water came down from the sky and flooded the Earth, threatening all living things. Nuwa solved this crisis by forging the five colored stones together to patch the sky (Fuxi seems to have played no role in this, for unknown reasons). By this deed, Nuwa saved humanity and then she effectively disappeared and there are no other myths about her - though she might be related to the Goddess of the West who the Yellow Emperor is thought to have learned secrets of civilization from.
The Story of the Stone
In the framing story for Dream of the Red Chamber (DCR), one of the stones Nuwa had collected for her sky-patch remained unused when she was done repairing the sky. Fashioned by the Goddess, the stone gained consciousness, and it observed the land and people around it, though it remained just a stone. Thousands of years later, a Daoist immortal and a Buddhist Bodhisattva came up to the stone and the Stone talked to these two immensely powerful men. The stone told them its wish: to see the world of mortal men. The two Demigods were amused by the Stone’s request and so they granted it. The stone was changed into a small piece of beautiful jade and it “made its way” through the mortal world for many lifetimes. It’s most recent incarnation is in the form of a young man of the Jia family, named Baoyu, the main character for the first half of the novel.
A European equivalent might be claiming your main character was a grandson of Hercules, or related to Theseus - a mythological figure connected to the earliest time of mankind. It is really an extraordinary claim to make! One reason why the author could make this claim is that the Chinese of his time believed in reincarnation and believed that everyone alive had the soul of person who had been alive many times in the past. {I argue that most Chinese still believe this.} Another reason why this made sense to the readers of the 1700s is that the Stone is not human, and it’s observing human life from a distance, almost like an alien intelligence attempting to understand human life by taking on the form of a human but retaining its non-human mentality.
The Stone is present in the DRC as a physical object but it seems to me that the character, Baoyu, was not written as a normal person. In the novel, everyone who meets him thinks he is extremely odd. His grandmother (who often appears to be the author’s mouthpiece) says “Baoyu is strangely comfortable around women. At one time I thought he was attracted to women like most men are, but that’s not correct. I believe he must have been a girl in a previous life and was given a man’s body by mistake.”
In China a sex change from one life to the next was thought possible but rare. It was believed that most of the time men were reborn as men & women were reborn as women in life after life, though obviously, no one knew.
I have little doubt that the the author felt odd as he was growing up. Many great writers have said they felt detached from normal people, that is one of the reasons why they turned to writing.
Personally, I find it fascinating that the author choose to begin his story with this defiant claim that his main character’s life had ultimate meaning - although Baoyu was strange, his soul was touched by a God. The author, Cao Xue Qin likely felt that he was a failure in his own life. We know that he wrote about Baoyu as a man with no accomplishments. And yet… Cao Xue Qin felt there was something important about his life, something that was worth spending a decade of his life describing. The author is effectively telling his readers My life mattered. I may seem like a failure by the standards of Qing Dynasty society but my life had a transcendent meaning and I’m going to write about it!
I think this was brave of the author and we owe him some respect because he is one of the only Chinese men to have done this.
**** Nuwa & Fuxi read the Sonoma Sage newsletter. Should you? ****
Would anyone reading this story have though the author was serious? No, I don’t believe so. The Goddess Nuwa had not been worshipped in China for at least 1,500 years before Cao Xue Qin started writing his novel. This mythological framing was being used to tell his readers The story I’m going to relate is not true.
A late Ming Dynasty book which Cao Xue Qin might have read is called Fengshen Yanyi (translated as The Investiture of the Gods or The Creation of the Gods). So far as we know, the author of that book invented most of the stories he included about the gods of China. Since people didn’t believe in these early Chinese gods, anyone could make up stories about them without fear of being attacked by true believers. And yet… the story of Nuwa patching the sky really is old, and it seems connected to the myth of the great flood which is found in Ancient Greek mythology, in the Bible, and in the epic of Gilgamesh - which I believe means that the story about Nuwa is true - as a metaphor.
The Myth of the Great Flood
It is a fact that 20,000 years ago the Earth was going through it’s fifth major ice age of the last million years. Back then, massive sheets of ice a mile high and taller covered all of Canada and parts of Siberia, north of China. With so much water locked up in ice, resting on the land, the sea level dropped by some 300 feet; vast expanses of land were above this low sea level which persisted for ~15,000 years. Two examples: England was not an island 20,000 years ago, it was connected to Europe and some of the North Sea was grassland. In east Asia, much of the present-day Yellow Sea was land, not covered by the ocean.
For reasons that are still unclear, the ice age ended and the glaciers melted over a period of ~8,000 years leading directly to a rise in sea level to what we see today. This rise in the sea was certainly observed with fear by people living in coastal communities who were forced inland 50 or even 100 miles by the rising ocean. It is quite likely that the melting of the ice sheets also resulted in greatly increased rainfall and the people at the time, would rationally - though incorrectly - have concluded the rainfall was producing the sea’s flooding. Eventually the seas stopped rising and a myth was born in China about a goddess who patched the sky, stopped the rain, and saved humanity.