"Flower-Plucking Records": My View of the Spirit and Character of "Immortal Road"-Ten Years Lurking

Written by "Ten Years Lurking" on February 20, 2006.

Master Guan's "Immortal Road" captured the essence of classical Chinese writing in its prose style, with concise, polished phrasing and simple rhetoric throughout. It resembled a fresh, luminous landscape painted in freehand brushwork, without a trace of affectation. It combined the economy and precision of classical Chinese with the accessibility of vernacular prose, earning the deep affection of its readers.

Unlike the other two major works then enjoying readers' acclaim, "Jade Dynasty" and "Sword of the Immortal," whose characters wielded immortal arts while conducting human affairs, yet whose paths to divinity and immortality remained far beyond reach, the monsters, spirits, deities, and ghosts in "Immortal Road" shared the same tiny grain of existence with humankind-Lord of the Clouds, Ling Yier, Kou Xueyi, Qiong Rong, Fan Chuan, Xiao Mang, and so on. Becoming an immortal and seeking the Dao did not seem impossibly remote. Yet the pursuit of immortality in "Immortal Road" lacked the rigid hierarchy found in the cultivation novels popular at the time, which simply divided the process into a few stages, as though cultivating a technique to a particular level and surviving a particular heavenly tribulation would suffice to attain the Dao and ascend.

What, then, was the path to immortality in "Immortal Road"? Perhaps we could find a few clues in its characters' thinking. The opening installment described how Xing Yan repeatedly tried, without success, to become Qinghe of the Shangqing Palace's disciple. The text then described the society of the time as follows: "In those days, the entire country admired Daoism. Not only did incense offerings at the Daoist Order's temples grow ever more abundant, but even the scholars and renowned men of the Mortal World regarded intensive study of Daoist scriptures as the fashion of the