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Abstract

Wang Guowei's Comments on A Dream of Red Mansions is far from a simple reproduction of Schopenhauer's philosophy and aesthetics. Wang incorporated his knowledge of Buddhism into the general structure of world academics, in which the individual's humanistic impulses to question the essence of life functioned as the local structures to push its smooth motion and modulate the dominant direction. Different aspects in life such as the attitude toward desire, the cognition of sufferings and the state of deliverance mirrored the mind-nature tradition of Chinese Buddhist thought, and "Buddhist taste" became both the background and intermediary of the fusion of horizons among the ancient, the present, China and the West. The complexityof the double structures functioning in the process in which the individual impulses turned into academic research entailed the ambiguity of Buddhist taste in Wang's aesthetic thought, and this symptom in Wang's aesthetic thought brought about a breakthrough in Chinese modern aesthetics on the one hand and was perplexed on the other hand by the conditioning of the religious function. Buddhist taste did not go further to religious thought of Buddhism, and did not imbibe other elements for religious deliverance or subject construction. Therefore, the deliverance through aesthetics remained to have ideal value without initiating and substantiating an independent modern aesthetics.

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