Illusion and Reality: Daoist Conceptions of Illusion in Hongloumeng and Their Distinction from Buddhist Emptiness

Abstract

This article argues that “illusion” in Hongloumeng should not be reduced to Buddhist emptiness. Although Buddhist notions of emptiness, karmic retribution, and salvation are indispensable to the novel, they fail to fully account for the novel’s underlying narrative logic. Combining conceptual comparison, intellectual history, and close reading, this study distinguishes Daoist “illusion” from Buddhist “emptiness” not merely at the level of doctrine but in terms of ontological instability, epistemic orientation, and textual function. In Daoist thought, especially in the Zhuangzi, illusion is bound up with transformation, perspectival instability, and the fluidity of truth and falsity; in Buddhist thought, emptiness centers on dependent origination, non-self-nature, and the removal of attachment, ultimately pointing toward liberation. Read from this perspective, the mythic prologue, Zhen Shiyin’s dream, the Land of Illusion, the system of prophecies, the line “when false is taken for true, true becomes false,” and the relation between Jia Baoyu and the jade all suggest that “illusion” in Hongloumeng functions primarily as a structural narrative principle and an epistemological device rather than as a straightforward doctrinal statement. At the same time, Buddhism remains crucial to the novel’s moral and eschatological horizon, especially in its language of disenchantment, karmic consequence, and ultimate withdrawal. Even so, a predominantly Buddhist model leaves several major textual phenomena insufficiently explained, including the novel’s investment in perspectival shifts, symbolic differentiation, and unstable modes of being. Hongloumeng should therefore be understood not as an undifferentiated synthesis of Buddhism and Daoism, but as a composite text marked by a form of relative Daoist structural dominance and Buddhist permeation.