Cao With "a Dream Of Red Mansions" Buddhist Thinking And Forty Back

This dissertation aims at making a comprehensive study on the influence of Buddhism conception to the former eighty chapters of A Dream of Red Mansions and its status in the novel, as well as how the later forty chapters changed the Buddhism conception into the Chinese Confucianism. The study involves the Buddhism conception of Cao Xueqin, and why the author of the later chapters changed it. The dissertation includes four chapters. and have an introduction, concluding remarks and an appendix.The introduction explains the scope, the purpose and the significance of the study, briefly criticizes the previous articles and works about this subject, and shows the research method and the writing principle used by the dissertation. The main part focuses on the theme of change of the Buddhism conception.Chapter One discusses the leitmotiv of the former eighty chapters. This chapter mainly talks about the exhibition, status, and the influence to the collectivity conception of the "万境归空", and the attitude of Cao Xueqin about the secular Buddhism.Chapter Two discusses the experience of the "enlightenment" of the main character "Jia Baoyu", his end-result, and the relation between "万境归空" and the work.Chapter Three briefly discusses the relation between the extraction of Cao Xueqin and the Buddhism, and the relation between his experience and his ideas.Chapter Four discusses how the author of the later forty chapters changed the original intention of Cao Xueqin and added the conception of Confucianism into the former eighty chapters by changing the main character Jia Baoyu, the moral of 太虚幻境" and Zhen Shiying and Jia Yucun , as well as the attitude to the religion of the author of the later forty chapters.The concluding remark sums up the main points of the dissertation. The appendix is a list of reference books and themes which are relevant to the dissertation.