Love in Dreams and Illusions: Fate and Prognostication in Hongloumeng

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fate is denoted as an explicit theme in the classical Chinese novel Hongloumeng 紅樓夢 [A Dream of the Red Mansion, a.k.a. The Story of the Stone]. The crucial ideas of love, fate and prognostication are entangled with and deliberately interrelated with the narrative techniques of Hongloumeng. Hinted in the dreams and hallucinations, almost all female characters are unable to refrain from falling into the wheels of prognosticated fate. The effects of fate and prognostication also fall upon Jia Baoyu 賈寶玉, amidst a group of charismatic females, who is depicted as being obsessed in feminine passion and desire. In the final chapters, his ultimate release from worldly attachments, believed to be fulfilled by the identity of a Buddhist monk, displays such metamorphosis accompanied by the transmigrated nature of the stone-jade that penetrates the whole story. Love, dreams, illusions and fate work closely in successfully rendering the plot of the novel, under which dreadful predictions disclose themselves in a subconscious sense. The Buddhist ideas that everything is never permanent, which must gradually return to their original void, and people’s attachments to worldly riches and cravings are strongly fated to be hindrances to final enlightenment.