Ascension · 飛昇 · fei sheng
Level 71: The Last Step
Everything is complete except the leaving.
Description
Reconstructed. In the hsien literature the final rung before ascension is characteristically described as a waiting rather than a doing — the work is finished, and what remains is the moment of departure.
Practice
- Reconstructed, and mythological in register. The hagiographies describe this rung as a waiting: the work is complete, nothing further is prescribed, and what remains is the departure itself. The nine years facing the wall have been sat.
- The classical accounts of what follows are catalogued rather than explained — ascension in daylight, or shi jie, liberation by means of a corpse, in which what is left behind proves to be a staff, a sword or a garment.
Signs and effects
- None available to an observer. The literature reports the departure, never the waiting.
How it is tested
Not applicable.
Obstacles
- The last attachment, which the texts say is to the completion itself — and for which they offer no technique, only the waiting.
Sources for this entry
- Chinese numerological and literary tradition — The 36/72 pairing, the seventy-two transformations, the seventy-two disciples — the cultural source of the number.
- 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.
- Editorial reconstruction — Written by this archive from the classical material, where the lineage sources do not publish a curriculum.