The Daoist Idea of Life as a Dream in Two Tang Dynasty Stories

Excerpts from the Paper

The Daoist Idea of Life as a Dream in Two Tang Dynasty Stories
Introduction
This paper refers to Li Fuyan’s “The Spendthrift and the Alchemist” and to “Governor of the Southern Tributary State” by Li Gongzuo (770-850). Both stories show Daoist ideas of the material world as a plane very different from the world of dreams. They reveal Daoist reality in days when dreams were places of moral events that showed a dreamer the nature of a situation or how the material world had dominated his consciousness.
As examples of Tang Dynasty (618-906 AD) literature, the stories help us to see important features of Tang society that had internalized Daoist teachings as much as Confucian ideas of cosmology and the proper, rather insignificant place of...

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