Сон в красном тереме. Том 2

I am not sure if it can be called a presence or message, but there were a lot of religious themes going on. I am not quite familiar with Buddhist notions, but while reading i drew a lot of connections between Taoism and some things happening. For example, Vanitas’ void vs form (or truth vs illusion), and ‘truth becoming fiction when fiction becomes truth and vice versa’ is similar to the main theme of dao de jing, where the eternal world is the truth that cannot be described, and once described(which is the samsara we are living in) is not an eternal world anymore, but is a place of illusion. Thus maybe the author is implying that the world the stone is living now is just an illusion and he has to get beyond sunk in the world of illusion, so that he will later better understand his purpose and reach enlightenment? But then again i couldn’t wrap my head around why he is still a stone at the end, when he is asking Vanitas to publish his story. Or maybe I am just thinking too much into it. Apart from religious notions, there were a lot of different strange stylizations as well. For example, you are reading a novel and then suddenly the author incorporates some poetry verses. They were fun to read because they give a change of pace in the novel. also they are mostly kinda symbolic, as poetry can often convey the author’s ideas in a short and concise way, rather than long strings of words, which is beneficial for both the author and the reader. I understand that this is just the beginning of the novel, but I really hope that Baoyu will have a character growth, because I cannot stand his personality right now. The author also seemed to have incorporated a lot of Chinese myths and fairytales. For example, daiyu is a plant fairy, which is a common character in Chinese legends, where when given the morning dew, the plant will take the form of a beautiful girl. However, the ending was not written by Cao Xueqin himself, so I will try to gaslight myself into believing there was a happy end for Bapyu and Daiyu, and that both reached nirvana together