Saw your tags in the why demonic cultivation meta. Itās because the English translation is imprecise and TOO precise when the source language is more open to interpretation. The āmaā in ma dao zu shi refers generally to evil, including ghosts, demons, etc. Anything that isnāt a part of the living world.
Thank you soĀ much for responding!
I did figure itās probably also a translation thing, since I remember this postĀ (there were more but this is the first I could find) in which an alternative translation is given for ādemonic cultivationā. A quote from that post:Ā āé mo / evil spirit, demon, magicalā.
So this makes complete sense, but what Iām stumbling over then is when we are supposed to takeĀ āé mĆ³ā literally asĀ ādemonā and when itās supposed to refer toĀ general āevilā. Because in-universe, we have this lovely classification of evil beings:
āYao are formed from living, non-human beings; demons are formed from living humans; ghosts are formed from dead humans; monsters are formed from dead, non-human beings.āĀ -- GDC chapter 13
Then, also following a breakdown in this post that I really liked, aĀ ādemonā is a creature cultivated from a living human being, or just a possessed person. Examples in CQL would be Wen Ning and Song Lan. The differences are small, but apparently significant, as even the novel continues:
āāYaoā and āmonstersā are often confused. What is an example that distinguishes the two?ā
āThatās easy.ā Wei WuXian pointed at the viridian tree outside of the room and replied, āFor example, a living tree was tainted with the energy of books, cultivated into a conscious being, and causes mischief, it would be a āyaoā. If I took an axe and cut it in the middle, so that only a dead tree-stump was left, and then it cultivates into a being, it would be a āmonster.āāĀ -- GDC chapter 13
Technically, theĀ āpuppetsā in CQL whose spiritual consciousnesses are taken but who are still alive would be demons, whereas theĀ āfierce corpsesā that Wei Wuxian controls in MDZS would be ghosts.
So it really circles back to one question: isĀ ādemonic cultivationā a bit of a misnomer because there is already an in-universe definition for what constitutes ādemonsā, but the cultivation path is actually supposed to refer to something broader, just an āevilā path?
