Declassified: whether the late Qing Dynasty literati Wang Guowei suicide and "Dream of Red Mansions" related

Wang Guowei's name has long been on our ears. In a hundred years of literature, he has an unshakeable academic position; and is a generation of historians, the peach and plum all over the world, Zhao Wanli, Wu Qichang, Dai Jiaxiang, and so on are his students; private in the disciples of Wang Guowei is countless, the famous historian Guo Moruo, Hou Wai Lu inherited Wang Guowei's academic path. Mr. Wang Xiaoqing in the "scholars of the teacher and the family school" book said: "Wang Guowei as the academic patriarch of the specialization of the school, constitutes the 20th century half of the Chinese historical research."

Because Mr. Wang Guowei's "A Dream of Red Mansions" Review is still regarded as a classic masterpiece, so I read it carefully early on, but the understanding of Wang Guowei is limited to his research on "red science". Some time ago, in the library inadvertently turned to Wang Guowei's "Jing'an Anthology", read me a lot of feelings!

On June 2, 1927, Wang Guowei jumped into Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace. In that year of political turmoil, Wang Guowei let his life be firmly fixed in a wave of water.

I have always wondered: such a great scholar, such a deep study of the "Dream of Red Mansions" spirit of the people, in the "Red Mansion" in the bitter search for the "way of liberation" of a generation of masters of Chinese culture, how to go to suicide? Mr. Wang Guowei in the "Dream of Red Mansions" in the "Review" has clearly expressed that suicide is not the real liberation. The way of liberation in Dream of Red Mansions is "to exist in the world, not in suicide". In Mr. Wang Guowei's view, in Dream of Red Mansions, there are only three people who are truly liberated in the end-Jia Baoyu, Jia Shichun, and Zijuan. They all eventually converted to Buddhism. Among these three people, the "liberation" of Jia Shichun and Zijuan is a natural awakening, a realization of life gained after "observing the suffering of others": the level of this liberation is actually not profound. According to Wang Guowei, Jia Baoyu is the only person in the book who is able to extricate himself from the pain of life: this is the highest level of "the way of liberation".

But the question arises! The way of liberation "exists in the world, not in suicide"! Mr. Wang, why did you end up sinking to the bottom of the lake in a shocking "arc"? What is so extraordinary about this kind of suicide?

After reading Jing'an Anthology, I gradually got some answers. Wang Guowei had a difficult childhood, losing his mother at the age of three, his father dying at the age of 29, and his stepmother and wife leaving the earth one after another at the age of 30. The changes in his life made him an introvert. In the collection of his writings, he said that he was "physically weak and melancholic in nature" and that "the problems of life are repeated in front of me day after day". He was once such a physically weak young man, thinking and worrying about the ultimate questions of life day in and day out. Later he came into contact with Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophical thinking. This philosophical concept and his life experience and feelings coincide, so he began to indulge in Schopenhauer's thinking.

Schopenhauer believed that life is a kind of pain, and the pain one feels is directly proportional to the depth of one's will to live. The will is the desire to live. So pessimistic philosophy believes that life exists because of the will, and the ultimate understanding of life is to seek a kind of liberation. According to Wang Guowei, the sufferings of life are manifold, but the tragedy caused by the lust between man and woman has infinite and permanent significance. The lust of man and woman, once plunged into and not easily extricated, is harmful and not beneficial. For man, the flesh itself is a kind of lustful suffering. This kind of thinking, in fact, not only Wang Guowei all, Laozi also said: "the great danger of man, in my body."

Wang Guowei finally committed suicide in the lake, because he did not get Schopenhauer's way of liberation, or did not really realize the spirit of liberation of the Dream of the Red Chamber? Many scholars have concluded that Wang Guowei was negative, but as far as literary criticism is concerned, it is not true that positive is good and negative is bad. Literary criticism can only represent the values held by the critics. Different philosophers have different interpretations of the definition of positive and negative. For example, Confucianism believes that tapping one's own potential, devoting oneself to work, cultivating one's body, aligning one's family, ruling the country, and leveling the world - this is positive; while Taoist culture believes that looking beyond life and death, looking beyond fame, cultivating one's body and mind, and transcending oneself - this is positive; while Buddhist culture believes that the positive is the transcendence of the mortal world, but the positive is the transcendence of the mortal world. The Buddhist culture believes that the positive is the transcendence of the mortal world, the purity of the six roots, and the transcendence of suffering and difficulties. So which is the real positive? I'm afraid it's just a matter of saying "Confucianism" and "Buddhism".

I remember that Mr. Ye Jiaying, in his study of Wang Guowei, made two comments on his character: first, the beauty of both reason and feeling; second, melancholy and pessimism. These two points are also the main cause of Wang Guowei's final suicide.

The question still comes back to suicide: why did a man who "looked askance" at suicide in the Commentary on the Dream of Red Mansions choose such a path in the end?

With this question in mind, I re-read The Dream of the Red Chamber Review. This time I found a tiny piece of information about Wang Guowei's comments on the death of Yuanyang. Yuanyang was unwilling to go to be his concubine because she rebelled against Jia Pardon. In the last forty episodes, when the mother of Jia died, Yuanyang realized that her fate was in the hands of Jia Pardon, and finally hanged herself. According to Wang Guowei, Yuanyang's death is different from the suicides of Jinushi and Siqi. Wang Guowei said, "The death of the Mandarin Ducks was due to a situation of necessity." When I read this sentence, I was enlightened - Wang Guowei's suicide, whether there is also a "situation of last resort"?

Looking at Wang Guowei's life text, although he did not convert to Buddhism, but already had the realization of the world. He believed that there are three types of tragedies in the world: the first is tragedy caused by sinister and malicious people; the second is tragedy caused by accidental mistakes; and the third is "existential tragedy" caused by the interrelationships of the characters and the differences in their status. Among these three kinds, the third kind of tragedy is the most terrible, also exists around us at any time but silent and bloodless tragedy.

But as history unfolds on the eve of the Northern Expedition, there is a rumor in Beijing that when the Northern Expeditionary Army enters the city, the stubborn, conservative, and old-fashioned remnants of the Qing Dynasty will be punished. Was Wang Guowei an old man of the Manchurian Qing Dynasty? In his heart, he did not want to see Puyi relying on the Japanese to establish the pseudo-Manchukuo. But we must not forget that Wang Guowei was Puyi's master. When Puyi was young, he taught him how to read and write. Wang Guowei was a man of both emotion and reason. He also once lamented that the decline of the Qing Dynasty is not Puyi's fault - he was just a dead king at the time of the death of the country. So in Wang Guowei's heart, and Puyi's friendship between teacher and student can not be easily resolved. If the Northern Expeditionary Army to Manchu old man to punish him, he may also be difficult to defend.

In this way, we can understand his "situation of last resort in" and suicide. But was Wang Guowei's combination of emotion and reason a strength or a weakness? In terms of academic research, this is a rare "beauty of merger". Literary research itself needs emotion to realize, and at the same time needs reason to analyze. It is because of the combination of both that Wang Guowei became a master of his generation. But precisely because of the contradiction and friction between emotion and reason, he finally went to the bottom of Kunming Lake.