Ascension · 飛昇 · fei sheng
Level 72: Ascension — the Hsien
飛昇成仙 · fei sheng cheng xian
The stated terminus of the entire system: immortality.
Description
Level 72 is the one number above 4 that the sources state without hedging. It is the end of the ladder, and what waits there is hsien-hood: physical immortality, ascension, departure from the ordinary human condition. The practitioner does not die; they leave.
The literature is equally clear that nobody has done it recently. Chang is reported to have said that no living person had reached level 72, that his own teacher had not approached it, and that he himself did not expect to. The summit of the system is, by its own testimony, unoccupied.
This matters for how the whole structure should be read. A ladder whose bottom four rungs produce filmable effects, whose middle is unpublished, and whose top is admitted to be untenanted is not a curriculum in the ordinary sense. It is a cosmology with an entrance ramp. That is not automatically a mark against it — most religious traditions look exactly like this — but it does mean the seventy-two rungs should be read as an account of what the tradition believes is possible, not as a syllabus anyone has ever completed.
Practice
- Not applicable.
Signs and effects
- In the classical literature: the body becomes light; there is no corpse, or the corpse is found to be a garment, a staff, or a sword (shi jie, "liberation by means of a corpse").
How it is tested
Not applicable.
Obstacles
- Seventy-one levels.
Notes
- Why seventy-two and not seventy or a hundred? Because seventy-two is one of the most heavily loaded numbers in Chinese culture: the seventy-two disciples of Confucius, the seventy-two transformations of Sun Wukong, the seventy-two Earthly Fiends paired with the thirty-six Heavenly Stars, the seventy-two pentads of the agricultural year. The number is a cultural signature, not a measurement. See Why Seventy-Two?.
Sources for this entry
- The Magus of Java — Kosta Danaos, Inner Traditions, 2000. The founding Western text.
- Nei Kung: The Secret Teachings of the Warrior Sages — Kosta Danaos, Inner Traditions, 2002.
- Chinese numerological and literary tradition — The 36/72 pairing, the seventy-two transformations, the seventy-two disciples — the cultural source of the number.