re-reading 2ha (lol what’s new) and I gotta say - I love not so secretly jealous Chu Wanning. He out here getting bothered because a few girls are flirting with Mo Ran. Meanwhile, Mo Ran is like “many thoughts head full but only of Shizun”
“No matter which lifetime, Chu Wanning’s scent always seemed to calm him down; in the past life, whenever he returned from a bloodbath, he always had to bury his face into the crook of Shizun’s neck just to breathe again.”
After reading 2ha chapter 279, I can’t stop thinking about its similarity to the ending of Dream of the Red Chamber in terms of imageries and themes, and not least because the latter novel is a great classic that influenced the aesthetics, tones, and motifs of generations of modern Chinese literature. Both chapter 279 and Dream of the Red Chamber end with the death of a main character’s lover, and both end in a great snow. In both stories, snow evokes a sense of finality, emptiness, and tragic loss; it’s the silence that smothers all and buries everything under the heavy blanket of cold oblivion.
Meatbun compares the slipping away of Mo Ran’s life to the passing of the swirling wind and snow:
“he leaned over the bed and looked at the drifting snow outside, and all he could hear was the howling wind; he suddenly felt that his own life was like the wind that roared past at the moment, where everything from the past was flowing away.”
And when the wind dies down, the snow that settles and covers everything foreshadows Mo Ran’s death, and symbolizes the sense of serenity and purity he felt when all his debts were finally paid and he could accept Chu Wanning’s love without guilt:
最后的最后，墨燃抬起眼眸，望着窗棂上覆着的一层莹莹积雪。天地一片浩然洁白。
“At the very end of it all, Mo Ran raised his eyes and watched the layer of bright snow that covered the window lattice. Between heaven and earth, all was a vast immaculate white.”
Dream of the Red Chamber also ends with a great snow that envelops everything in a boundless white nothingness, where “all that’s left is emptiness and a great void.” The world becomes a great void because your beloved is gone and there’s nothing left to tether you to this life. The protagonist of Dream of the Red Chamber ended up leaving the memory of his deceased lover behind and forfeited everything to become a monk. But unlike him, Chu Wanning couldn’t and refused to let go of Mo Ran’s memory. That’s why in chapter 294, the vision of a snowy plain that Chu Wanning sees isn’t completely empty; Mo Ran is still there, standing in the swirling snow and holding an umbrella.
The ending of Dream of the Red Chamber and the imagery of the vast snowy emptiness is encapsulated in a poem, I’ll put an excerpt of the poem below. While there’re a great many differences between the messages of the two novels, you could still see some of the same philosophies and sentiments in this poem that can also be found in 2ha:
Those who took a life have paid with their own lives,
The tears one owed have all been requited in kind.
Not light the retribution for sins against others;
All are predestined, partings and reunions.
Seek the cause of untimely death in a past existence,
Lucky she who enjoys rank and riches in old age;
Those who see through the world escape from the world,
While foolish lovers forfeit their lives for nothing.
When the food is gone the birds return to the wood;
It took me so long to realize that Chu Wanning’s period of imprisonment by Taxian-Jun is eight years because the flower planted in Mo Ran’s heart is called “the flower of eight sufferings and everlasting hatred”. Chu Wanning’s eight years of suffering corresponds to the “eight sufferings” in Buddhism that Mo Ran’s flower is named after. Of those eight sufferings, the three that’re arguably most well-known are 怨憎会, 爱别离, 求不得 – “association with the unloved” (in other words, having to meet and spend time with someone you hate), “separation from the loved”, and “not getting what is wanted”. Under normal circumstances, those three kinds of sufferings would be found separately in very different situations and relationships in life, but the interesting thing is that all three of them apply to Taxian-Jun’s relationship with Chu Wanning.
Another important number in 2ha is five: the haitang flower has five petals => the flower Mo Ran picked for Chu Wanning and got punished for took Madam Wang five years to grow => Mo Ran waited for five years for Chu Wanning to wake up after they returned from the underworld
