Ascension · 飛昇 · fei sheng
Level 67: Beyond Body
The physical form is retained by choice alone.
Description
The physical form is retained by choice alone. Departure becomes available.
This entry is a reconstruction. Mo Pai publishes no curriculum for level 67, so what appears above is drawn from the classical stage this band corresponds to — lian shen huan xu (煉神還虛), refining spirit and returning it to emptiness — and from the shape the Mo Pai literature implies for the "Ascension" band. It is a map of the territory that tradition describes, written by this archive and not taken from the lineage.
Practice
- Reconstructed. The classical accounts of departure are catalogued rather than explained: ascension in daylight, and shi jie — "liberation by means of a corpse", in which what is left behind proves to be a staff, a sword or a garment. The hagiographies are specific about the objects and silent about the method.
Signs and effects
- Departure becomes available.
How it is tested
Not published. Teacher-verified, as at every level below — and unverifiable here in a second sense, since the classical account below is not Mo Pai's.
Obstacles
- Attachment to attainment. The subtlest form of the same error that ends the work at every lower level, and the one the texts treat as the last to go.
- The imitation of emptiness. Sitting blankly resembles this stage closely enough that the literature distinguishes them repeatedly and never quite manages to say how.
- The final self. What remains at the top of the ladder is described as the thing that most wants to remain, and the tradition has no technique for it — only the nine years.
Sources for this entry
- The classical neidan corpus — Zhong-Lü texts, Wuzhen pian, Longmen commentaries, and the wider internal alchemy literature — the actual technical parent of Mo Pai's methods.
- The Wuzhen pian — Zhang Boduan's verse classic of 1075, the central text of the Southern lineage — and the sharpest classical source on the difference between the yin shen and the yang shen.
- The Zhong-Lü corpus — The Tang–Song material attributed to Zhongli Quan and Lü Dongbin: the first systematic step-by-step internal method, and the source of the ten months, the three years and the nine years.
- Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.