Dreamlike Karmic Love

Jia Yucun the hypocrite

Dreamlike Karmic Love

The key phrase in the passage we read yesterday is 夢幻情緣.

I’m not sure that there’s an easy way to translate it into English.

夢 means “dream,” and is one of the main points of this book. The concept of “dreams” come up again and again in Dream of the Red Chamber. In fact, we’re going to get to chapter 5 before too long, where we’ll see the actual dream Jia Baoyu has in a “red chamber.”

幻 means “illusion,” and has shown up again and again.

情 is usually translated as something like “love” or “passion” by people who deal with this book. Actually, it probably should be translated as something more like emotion. There’s a lot of evidence of this, by the way, including a few passages we’ll get to when we work our way slowly through chapter 5.

緣 means fate, and has a lot of karmic implications.

So, when Jia Yucun sighs at the sad story of Feng Yuan and Zhen Yinglian and says “這正是夢幻情緣,” he’s basically saying that this story is a classic tale of dreams, illusions, emotions, and fate. But there’s something dismissive to his statement — and there’s also a lot of hypocrisy lurking just below the surface.