Joseph Campbell believes that the pedagogical function of myth is to serve as a guide for individuals during an introspective journey on which they derive insight into life. Cao Xueqin, with a somewhat similar intent, writes “The Story of the Stone” to create a new awakening myth for his posterity. In this paper, the Grand View Garden is treated as the dramatic venue where the myth of life is performed. Section 1, the symbols and function of the Grand View Garden are discussed. Section 2 discusses what the main character learns when growing up in the garden. The factors leading up to and the meaning of the ruin of the garden are explored in section 3. Section 4 explains how to overcome conflicts between inflexible affection in one’s mind and impermanence in life and how to resolve the contradictions between the real and the unreal, the eremitic impulse and attachment to society. This book clarifies that affection, rather than the opposite of social decencies, should be the basis of ethics. Besides, the saddest thing in life lies in the confrontation between long-lasting love and the ephemerality of life; that results in the biggest contradiction when the value of life goes against the truth of it. Buddhist prajña appears as the solution -- the key to growing is to have “full awareness of Dao through affection.” When there is no longer conflict between affection and ephemerality, to live means being in here and now and to be who one is, going along with the nature of synchronicity. That’s the teaching Caoconveys in “The Story of the Stone”. The Grand View Garden is destroyed eventually, but for readers, the novel, though being a work of fiction in which ”Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true/ The real becomes not-real where the unreal’s real,” is itself immortal and holds mythological significance.