hi! i hope this isnât an ignorant question; i saw your reply on an older post where you said:
"I imagine when Wen Ning finally settles and is ready to move on, the same thing [that happened to the Wen Remnants' bloody corpses] will happen to him, and he'll go to wherever spirits go to after liberation."
so, where do (resentful) spirits go after liberation? is their afterlife different from that of a living person who died normally?
i'm asking because "Wei Wuxian's cultivation method breaks the cycle of reincarnation (either for every soul he summons or just Wen Ning)" is often brought up in fandom discussions; but, to me, neither the narrative nor any of the characters in-universe treat it as an appropriately big of a deal. i'd be grateful if you could share your thoughts on that!
Ok, important to note here, Iâve only ever read the novel. So I canât speak for any headcanons or metas spawned from The Untamed or donghua, but well, the reason I said âto wherever spirits go to after liberation," is because, within the MDZS canon, we donât actually know where souls go after passing on/being liberated; we only see the result of spirits lingering in the mortal realm. The one person who could potentially give a firsthand account of what the afterlife is like has never once mentioned where the hell he was during his 13 year stint as a ghost; we donât have any kind of confirmation (and tbh, WWX might not have even made it to the afterlife and was lingering somewhere on Earth. We the audience havenât the faintest clue where he went after he died.). Presumably, the dead go through the Chinese afterlife in this setting, but many cultures rarely agree on what happens to a person after they die, and China is hardly different in that respect.
In the belief of reincarnation, itâs thought that the soul goes through Diyu, an afterlife where souls would work off the bad karma they accumulated through life through trial and punishment until they can knock back a bit of Meng Poâs five-flavored soup and be reincarnated. Itâs an afterlife that was inspired by Naraka from Buddhism when the religion came to the country via the Silk Road, but as that statement implies, there were other beliefs of what happens to the soul after death before Buddhism became mainstream. That is where ancestral veneration and soul dualism comes into play, which itself is complicated and messy.
There are a few different models of what the multiple souls look like and what theyâre called, and of how many parts of the soul there are, whether thereâs 2, maybe 3, possibly 10. For the sake of not making this post even longer than it will be, Iâm mostly gonna focus on the terms of hĂșn (é) and pĂČ (é) as theyâre probably more relevant to discussing the novel. The hĂșn as a component of the soul is something like the psyche, or ego, the identity of the person. This is the part of the soul thatâs associated with yĂĄng (éœ) and with shĂ©n (ç„). The pĂČ is the yÄ«n (é°) of the soul and is something like the soul of the body. Itâs associated with the grave and with guÇ (éŹŒ).
Supposedly, the hĂșn and pĂČ separate upon death, and the hĂșn either ascends to the heavens or resides in the ancestral tablet (which it is depends on the belief) to be worshipped as a shĂ©n, a divine being or a god. Meanwhile, the pĂČ resides with the body to eventually return to the earth (whatever that means for it), but if there are lingering regrets, it becomes a guÇ. Though, there are some studies that this was more of a scholastic theory than actual religious belief, as there are steles that mark the resting place of the hĂșnpĂČ (éé) as one soul with no distinction between hĂșn and pĂČ, while the shĂ©n resides in the family shrine. In this case, the names of the two soul parts are hĂșnpĂČ and shĂ©n, but the principle is largely the same, just with different terminology. One part of the soul remains with the body, while the other part becomes a spirit to be venerated.
As you can imagine, there was a bit of contention between ancestral worship and reincarnation, because if the spirit of your ancestors have reincarnated, how can they sticking around in the ancestral shrine to be worshipped? Well, the answer to that is that Buddhism did what religion and culture does best, and that is subsume other religions and cultures and mutate into fifty hundred different branches of practice.
So in some beliefs of Buddhism, the ancestors are still venerated as they go through the process of preparing to be reborn, and there are other beliefs that take advantage of the dual soul theory and only a part of the soul gets reborn. I think one of the many examples is where the pĂČ remains with the body, the hĂșn would get reincarnated, and the shĂ©n is its own thing that becomes the deified spirit to be honored.
As for what belief system is in the novel, the existence of a Guanyin temple means that Buddhism has already been firmly established in this setting, and with it, the belief in reincarnation. Though, and if a native speaker wants to weigh in, please do, but from what I understand, in the single-soul model, the word âsoulâ thatâs typically used is éé (lĂnghĂșn). However, the Chinese text of the novel uses éé (hĂșnpĂČ) as the word for soul. (Though, the word lĂng hĂșn can also be used in the dual-soul model as lĂnghĂșn and shĂ©n, but if Iâm not mistaken, the term hĂșnpĂł seems pretty exclusively for the dual soul theory). Between the terminology used and the scene of Wei Wuxian asking Jiang Fengmian and Yu Ziyuan for approval and help locking Lan Wangji down in ancestral hall, and how he moments later had a bit of a freakout over fighting Jiang Cheng in front of his parents shows that they believe the spirits of the ancestors dwell in the tablets of the ancestral hall.
(Interestingly, the Soul-Soothing Ceremony in Chinese is ćźé犟 Än hĂșn lÇ. Read into that what you will.)
If MDZS works under multiple soul rules, it means that reincarnation was never in the cards for the Wen Ning we know in the present, guidao or no, because that Wen Ning is the part of the soul that stays with the body to eventually return to the earth (and theoretically thereâs some other Wen Ning spirit doing ancestral spirit-y things).
Oh yeah, by the way, all of my previous rambling is entirely moot. Unless Iâm gravely misremembering something, the first time I ever heard anything about Wei Wuxianâs cultivation âbreaking the cycle of reincarnation,â is in fandom spaces. I donât remember anything like that being stated in the book.
(Which is why I have to stress that I only know novel canon. For all I know, in The Untamed or the donghua, they might explicitly state âYes, Wei Wuxianâs cultivation cuts off the cycle of reincarnation.â This is why metas in this fandom are complicated. Adaptation or no, The Untamed is functionally an entirely separate story from the novel, so a meta for one just isnât applicable to the other. AnywaysâŠ)
If it is a theory that developed from the novel, my best guess is that it spawned from this passage:
Everyone in the room was stunned. Lan QiRen sprang to his feet, âThe essence of exorcising demons and annihilating ghosts is to liberate! You do not study the methods of liberation, and even think about increasing their energy of resentment! You reverse the natural order, and ignore ethics and morality!â
(Exiled Rebels scans, Ch. 14)
Specifically this part, âYou reverse the natural order,â is what I suspect spawned the headcanon.
âBreaking the cycle of reincarnationâ could be considered as âreversing the natural order,â but just stirring up resentful energy instead of pacifying it would also be âreversing the natural order.â (Depending on who you ask, pineapple on pizza is reversing the order of things. âReversing the natural orderâ is not exactly specific in its wording to illustrate what that might entail.)
Also, that isnât even word for word what Lan Qiren says. Rather than, âYou reverse the natural order, and ignore ethics and morality!â What he actually says is this: âæŹæ«ćçœźïŒçœéĄ§äșșć«!â
âçœéĄ§äșșć«â just means âdisregard ethics,â so nothing to dig into there, but âæŹæ«ćçœźâ is a chengyu that more literally translates to âinvert root and branch.â Itâs typically compared with the saying âputting the cart before the horse,â as the closest English equivalent. Itâs a saying to mean that the wrong thing is being prioritized, or to prioritize the consequential or superficial over the fundamentals. In line with the âcart before the horseâ comparison, an example of inverting root and branch would be something like renting out a wedding venue before you even propose. However, another potential example that doesnât quite line up with the aforementioned English idiom is basically what happened with Motherâs day (really most Western holidays) where it was a day meant to show appreciation to your mother, but itâs been commercialized to hell and back with cards and carnations and whatever marketable gifts you should totally buy to show that you truly appreciate your mother. Thatâs also inverting root and branch, where you lost sight of the original purpose.
When people hear âreverse the natural order,â it isnât unthinkable that they thought he was talking in the sense of âcrimes against natureâ and warping the way of how the world works, but what Lan Qiren is actually saying is, âGet your priorities straight.â
In other words, the notion that guidao closes off the cycle of reincarnation to ghosts raised by it is a headcanon, not an actual fact of the novel. So maybe it breaks the cycle of reincarnation, or maybe it doesnât interfere with the reincarnation process at all, or maybe reincarnation was never on the table to begin with. If itâs either of the latter two, it would explain why Wei Wuxianâs cultivation wasnât treated as that big of a deal in that regard.
TLDR: Religion is messy, and we donât know if there was any reincarnation to break the cycle of, let alone whether or not guidao would even break it.