The Name of the Game is Self-Cultivation

Dreams of Daoist transcendence go through the online looking glass. It's time to level up. Climbing Mount Emei, Part VI

Now, as for transcendents, there are some who ascend bodily into the clouds, flying without wings; there are some who ride cloud-chariots hitched to dragons, and arrive thus at the steps of heaven; there are some who transform into birds and beasts, and wander about in the azure clouds; and there are some who travel the rivers and seas underwater, or fly among noted mountains. Some eat primal pneumas, others roots, mushrooms, and herbs; some come and go among humans, unrecognized [as transcendents] by them, others conceal themselves and are seen by no one.

Ge Hong (283-343 A.D.), Traditions of Divine Transcendents, (Peng Zu) translated by Robert Campany

Read Part V.

In the Chinese video game Amazing Cultivation Simulator a player “wins” by successfully engaging in practices modeled on ancient Daoist techniques of self-cultivation. Players accumulate “cultivation points” that graduate them from novice to transcendent via five stages: “qi shaping”, “core shaping”, “golden core”, “primordial spirit”, and “demi god.”

Traditionally, Chinese transcendence seekers forged their path to immortality via diet modification, alchemical elixirs, meditation, breathing exercises and/or sexual techniques. For Ge Hong, the fourth century writer who did more to document and critique transcendence strategies than any other medieval Chinese writer, no single path could be relied on for success. A judicious mix of methods was necessary.

Ge Hong was both a skeptic and a believer, quick to label as frauds those he believed misrepresented their amazing longevity or miraculous healing powers, but at the same time the author of multiple hagiographies of Daoist masters whose achievements in transcendent self-cultivation he accepted as real. In his Traditions of Divine Transcendents he recounts dozens of stories of xian (仙) – the Chinese word variously translated as “immortal” or “transcendent” -- capable of all kinds of marvels.

What he might have thought of 21^st century videogame-assisted transcendence, or more broadly, the incredible popularity of Daoist “self-cultivation” themes in games and novels and video in contemporary China, is hard to imagine. The world of fourth century transcendents that Ge Hong described, replete with subterranean “grotto-heavens” and magic herbs and alchemical deliverance from all bodily constraints, seems impossibly distant from our own technologically-determined lives. It seems like fantasy.

And yet.

(Screen shot from Amazing Cultivation Simulator)

According to one of the developers of Amazing Cultivation Simulator, the “world” of the game is partially “based on the… classic martial-arts novel Legend of Shushan Swordsman 蜀山劍俠 (Shushan Jianxia.)”

Legend of Shushan Swordsman, a.k.a. The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains, a.k.a. The Sword-Warriors of the Shu Mountains, is the 1930s Chinese wuxia fantasy novel I’ve been reading for the last year. In The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains, all the major characters, both heroes and villains, are engaged in various forms of Daoist and Buddhist self-cultivation in the pursuit of transcendence. And as I have come to realize over the last few months, Li Shoumin, the author of The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains, drew heavily on Ge Hong’s writings for his own world-building. Just as J. R. R. Tolkien modeled aspects of Middle Earth on the myths and legends encoded in the Finnish epic poem Kalevala, so too did Li reach back to ancient tales of wonderment to construct his fantasy.

I knew nothing of this when I made the impulsive decision to start reading Li’s 5000-page, untranslated-into-English epic. My ostensible reason for taking the plunge was that the bulk of its action takes place in in the mountains of Sichuan, so I could justify reading it as “research.” But I was also, as has been my fancy since I first picked up a copy of C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader at a third-grade book fair more than fifty years ago, seeking escape. When I am buried in Li Shoumin’s tales of chivalry and magic, I am not thinking about nurses being murdered in Minnesota or culture wars between Bad Bunny and Kid Rock or the inexorable decline of my physical health. I am not online, not doom-scrolling, not wondering if there is something more socially relevant I could or should be doing with my time. I am, blissfully, somewhere else, traversing a land where warrior women ride giant vultures, sentient orangutans wield magic swords, and evil is relentlessly punished.

But after discovering just how much of the world of The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains was rooted in medieval Daoist practice and belief, I started looking around to see whether there was any recent scholarship on the novel. I soon discovered an article published a few years ago by Zhange Ni, a professor of religion at Virginia Tech, titled “Xiuzhen (Immortality Cultivation) Fantasy: Science, Religion, and the Novels of Magic/Superstition in Contemporary China.”

In the course of arguing that the enormous popularity of “cultivation novels” in China is at least partially a critique of (or response to) capitalist-market-inflicted inequity in “post-secular” contemporary Chinese society, Ni devotes considerable attention to what she describes as a breakthrough novel in a now-thriving subcategory of Chinese fantasy fiction labeled xiuzhen – “immortality cultivation.” Published online in serial doses on a pay-to-read publishing platform in 2006 and 2007, The Buddha Belongs to the Dao: The Rise of the Demonic Dao, by Mengru Shenji (夢入神機), was a huge success and inspired countless imitations.

Cultivation novels, I was intrigued to learn, are the fastest-growing segment of a vibrant commercial market for online literature in China. In 2024, a total of 42.1 million novels were accessible online in China, serving a market of 638 million readers, and raking in total annual revenue of 6.9 billion dollars.

Of equal interest, at least to me: The Demonic Dao is also, according to Ni, in large part a rewrite of The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains set in the present day.

I am always seeking unexpected interconnectivity, but this was just crazy. The ninety-year-old fantasy novel I have been reading, partially as a way to avoid the constant overstimulation of online life and any kind of meaningful reckoning with the current state of the planet, turns out to be a key inspirational wellspring for a present-day Chinese pop-cultural phenomenon that is intimately shaped by digital technology.

There was no escape to be found in this hideaway! Quite the contrary: The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains turned out to be my own private grotto heaven tunnelling through space and time, leading me irresistibly from Ge Hong’s fourth century parlor to a website called Qidian, the nexus of China’s online publishing industry.

Qidian, in English, means “Starting Point.”

The cover page of Volume I of The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains

Qidian was founded in 2003 by a group of Chinese fantasy (xuanhuan) fans who wanted to publish their own work. It has since evolved into what Zhange Ni calls “the literary version of Netflix or Spotify… [readers] pay a subscription fee to access their favorite novels and participate in online discussions.” To become a successful author, one has to be exquisitely attuned to those discussions. As new chapters are published and downloaded each day or week, readers comment profusely on each individual line or paragraph, frequently demanding changes in plot direction and character development. The result: China’s online publishing market is a massively-scaled experimental laboratory designed to figure out exactly what today’s readers want.

And what is that? Overwhelmingly, Chinese readers are embracing genre escapism: romance, science fiction, fantasy. Whether the goal is true love, wealth, or transcendence, the through-line is consistent: the protagonist starts out powerless and ends up rich, or happily married, or mighty, or all of the above. This is nowhere more obvious than in the genre variously referred to as xiuzhen (修真) “immortality cultivation,” xianxia, (仙俠), “transcendent warrior,” or xiuxian (修仙), “cultivate transcendence”).

Since the turn of the century xiuzhen cultivation fantasy novels represent the fastest growing segment of China’s overall online publishing industry. On what may well be the world’s biggest online literature publishing platform, millions of readers are addicted to daily doses of serially produced fiction in which protagonists engage in pseudo-Daoist practices of self-cultivation designed to transform themselves into all-powerful beings.

This is fascinating if only from a historical standpoint. Li Shoumin was unable to complete The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains because the Chinese Communists banned the entire genre of fantasy – feudal superstition -- after taking power in 1949. It was only after Deng Xiaoping (a big fan of Jin Yong’s wuxia novels) consolidated control after the death of Chairman Mao that restrictions were eased. Today, more Chinese are reading fantasy than ever before.

But it gets even more interesting when one takes a closer look at the content of these novels. Xiuzhen protagonists tend to act in ways that seem at odds with the uplifting qualities traditionally associated with Daoist self-cultivation. As Zhange Ni observes, “more often than not, amoral competition is preferred over moral edification in xiuzhen novels.”

The Demonic Dao offers a case study. Consider Zhange Ni’s summary:

In the first several chapters of the novel, the protagonist, a college graduate by the name of Zhou Qing 周清, instead of starting a real job in contemporary China, becomes obsessed with practicing inner alchemy. He starts his own cultivation lineage, Tiandao zong 天道宗 (the sect of Heavenly Dao), taking human and nonhuman disciples and reaching out to the cultivation sects scattered across China.

Although an ordinary human at the beginning of the novel, the protagonist eventually cultivates himself into the most powerful being in this multiverse. He leads his cultivation sect to fight in the second cosmic battle, the new canonization of the gods, and triumphs over the Jade Emperor, the Three Purities of Daoism, and the Shakyamuni Buddha of Buddhism to reorganize the heavenly court. In the end, he merges with the Dao to become the supreme deity of a new cosmic cycle that will last for those fifty-six billion years.

Another expression that appears throughout the text is sharen yuehuo 殺人越 貨 (murder and plunder). It is the title of the first chapter and captures the gist of the entire novel, whose narrator makes no attempt to whitewash the protagonist’s inglorious path toward immorality, along which he continually murders his competitors and plunders their magical tools in the human, earthly, and heavenly realms. Likewise, other immortality seekers and accomplished cultivators are completely unconstrained by moral strictures and driven only by the accumulation of qi.

Laozi would be appalled. Zhuangzi would probably be amused. Zhange Ni argues that the brutality of these novels is a satirical critique of Chinese society. The ferocious competitive pressures associated with the very creation of these novels, she suggests, in which writers live inside perpetually spinning hamster wheels desperately churning out content for fickle audiences, is fuel enough for bleak fiction.

But before we dig deeper into that morass, there’s one more piece of the puzzle to consider: in China, cultivation novels are joined at the hip with cultivation games.

It’s not just that popular cultivation novels are frequently adapted into games. The vast majority of online publishing sites in China are owned by a single massive media conglomerate, and any intellectual property that gets traction with the general public is swiftly plucked for cross-fertilization into other formats. This is standard operating procedure in our contemporary “transmedia universe” – a world that can turn fake bands into real bands at the drop of a hat if the streaming numbers are good enough.

No, what makes the synergy between cultivation novels and cultivation games fascinatingly intimate is the peculiarity that cultivation novels are quite frequently constructed around plots that hinge on the playing of games. The heroes of many cultivation novels spend a great deal of time living inside of game worlds.

A typical cultivation novel might begin in the “real world” with a protagonist who suddenly notices a mysterious game has appeared on his or her phone. The webnovel referenced in the photograph that introduces this newsletter -- “The Immortal Cultivation Game Has Come True” – introduces us to a Daoist priest who gets sucked into a game on his phone that ends up physically transporting him into another world that is structured according to the rules of a game. To stay alive he must boost his qi so as to be able to craft magic talismans and gain new powers. The twist comes when he returns to the mundane world and discovers that he still retains those powers. The Immortal Cultivation Game Has Come True!

The transformation at play – book structured as a game becomes an actual game -- works both ways. One recent cultivation game, “Immortal Way of Life,” was marketed in China as a “playable cultivation novel”!

Part of what we are seeing here reflects a literary chestnut: you write what you know. According to the gaming research outfit Newzoo, there are 723 million video gamers in China (almost three times as many as in the U.S.) The overlap between that number and the 638 million readers of online literature must be significant, and the delivery vehicle for both media formats is predominantly the phone (about 70 percent of China’s videogames are played on mobile devices.)

It is, I guess, unsurprising that a generation of gamers is obsessed with novels about gaming. Or that the device most essential to functioning in the world today — the smartphone — is fancifully imagined as a portal into other, better, more rewarding worlds.

But the intersection with Daoist self-cultivation adds another layer. The seduction of transcendental self-cultivation is the promise of escape from the limits of the “real world.” Instead of the inevitability of sore knees and blurry eyesight and death – you can live forever! You can fly! You can transform into your favorite animal! You can turn coal into gold!

The seduction of a role-playing video game is fundamentally similar. The longer you play the more powerful you become. And every minute spent in a game is a minute not spent trapped in the disappointments that beset us in the real world.

As I pondered the intersection of Daoist self-cultivation and videogames I recalled a feeling I experienced when I first started reading The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains. While following the adventures of Brave Jade, a hapless lass who blossoms into a superhero after acquiring a legendary sword and consuming some magic peaches, I noted to myself that her storyline echoed the experience of playing a role-playing video game.

I wasn’t alone in seeing this resemblance. In the 1990s, notes Zhange Ni, videogame developers in China created a Shushan “cultivation sect” inspired by The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains that started appearing as a common feature in multiple games made by different publishers. It may be overstating the case to suggest that The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains exerted the same influence over the development of videogaming in China as The Lord of the Rings did in the West, but the vibes are real. Video-gaming is virtual self-cultivation.

In his essay Video Games and the Novel, Eric Hayot, a professor of comparative literature and Asian studies at Penn State, suggests that a key explanation for the popularity of video games is their adherence to what he describes as “a fundamentally libertarian worldview. In a world in which everyone has the same chance at complete success, and access to absolutely the same computational and diegetic resources, any failure can only be the result of an individual lack, of ‘user error.’ The moral outcomes of the vast majority of video game universes thus express – and allow players to practice and play with – a version of personal equality that exists nowhere in real life…. As with most modern fantasy fiction, powerlessness in video games exists only as a prelude to its transformation into diegetic omnipotence, weakness only as a prelude to strength.”

The pieces of the puzzle snap into place: Correctly cook your alchemical elixir, harvest the right herbs, channel your qi, and you will be on the path to transcendence. Get the sequence of key presses in a video game correct, matching the right spell or perfect weapon to the appropriate monsters, and you will level up. In a game, just like the immortality seekers in the Shu Mountains, who Zhange Ni describes a “stateless subjects” living outside of governmental control, we are all masters of our own destiny. Who is not transported by such dreams of liberty?

It is at this point in the narrative that I realized my travels through the grotto heavens had broken out of the Shu Mountains and returned me into my own living room. Because The Knight-Errants of the Shu Mountains isn’t the only fantasy epic currently in progress on my Kindle.

There is also a series recounting the adventures of Dungeon Crawler Carl. And while I would not call Dungeon Crawler Carl a Daoist, he does have a talent for alchemy, and he is very, very much into self-cultivation.

He’s also a prisoner in a game.

End of Part VI. Next: The conclusion of Climbing Mount Emei.