A Study Of Taoist Aesthetic Thoughts In Dream Of Red Mansions

Dream of Red Mansions is a masterpiece of Chinese classic novel. Its theme andartistic sleight both have reached an unprecedented height, which are excellent at alltimes and in all over the world.Taoism and Confucianism constitute the two roots ofChinese traditional culture, and the natural spirit of Taoist and the practical rationality ofConfucian construct the two basic standpoint of Chinese ancient literature.Taoist thoughtcontains rich aesthetic spirit, which mainly shows respecting nature, advocating truenature, fighting alienation, breaking the boundaries between people and objects, andpursuing simple beauty, ethereal beauty, implicative beauty, transcending beauty andgreat beauty. Simple dialectics thoughts in Taoism also provides literature and art withnutrients, such as "have" and "have not","true" and "false","can do" and "inaction","empty" and "solid","form" and "spirit","language" and "meaning" and so on. Thedebate of these binary opposition has pushed the development of Chinese ancient literarytheory.The creation of Dream of Red Mansions is undoubtedly under the influence ofTaoist aesthetics spirit, so the Taoist aesthetics is reflected in the novel in differentdegrees, ranging from content to form, theme to characters depicting, and languagestructure to images and artistic conception.First of all, some contents throughout the Dream of Red Mansion were significantlyinfluenced by some basic concepts of Taoism, and these concepts also formed the basisof Taoist aesthetic thoughts and framework.Therefore, the first part based on some basicconcepts in the Taoist aesthetics, tried to generally sort out the carry-on and developmentof Taoist aesthetics spirit in Dream of Red Mansions, and the inheritance is mainly to thebasic category of true and false, when the development is mainly to the development ofTaoist aesthetic imagery.Through the guiding and pavement in the first part, the secondpart enters the core part of this paper, which focuses on the Taoist natural estheticsspirit, respectively analyzing from the natural human nature, the true meaning of thecharacters and the natural form;Then it is another important Taoist aesthetics spirit, which is, beyond the spiritembodied in the story. This is the sublimation of natural human nature and love, which isalso one of the most valued.Finally it still returns to the novel’s artistic technique, focusing on building an artistic conception of ethereal beauty and implicative beauty, andanalyzing how the novel artistic conception would be deeply marked by the aestheticimprint of Taoist aesthetics spirit.In a word, the general idea of this paper is from overall to part, and to overall. Theobject of study from the content to artistic form, is capable of embodying the Taoistaesthetics, striving to solve this issue comprehensively.