Discussion What is an "immortal"? A definition reflecting the way the term is understood in real-life Daoism

I was reading Early Daoist Scriptures by Stephen R. Bokenkamp, an academic monograph of translations of some early Daoist scriptures and treatises, and there was this handy description of terminology used, including an entry for "immortals" xian 仙.

Cultivation novel readers often ask about what immortals are since they sometimes die in these novels. Well, I dunno about the novels, but in real life, this is how Daoist religious sects understood the term often translated as "immortal":

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Transcendent Beings

It is common in works on China to describe Daoism as the “religion of immortality.” This commonplace is not quite accurate, at least not as we in the West tend to understand immortality. The Dao itself is immortal, and the goal of Daoists was to merge with the Dao. As we have seen, however, one of the primary characteristics of the Dao is change. Specifically, the Dao moves in cycles, first dividing to form the universe in its ever-increasing complexity and then imploding back in on itself to begin all over again from its state of primal unity. This cosmic rhythm, sometimes seen as occurring in cycles of impossible magnitude—one Han source calculates the length of one cycle as 23,639,040 years—led to the concept of world-ages. Sometimes the larger world-age was said to be divided into five minor ones, each associated with one of the five phases. Whatever the case, when the Dao returned to its primal unity, nothing outside of it remained and nothing continued in the state it had existed in to that point. This was as true for scriptures, deities, and powers as it was for humans who had joined with the Dao. Immortality of shape and substance was thus impossible. The best one could hope for was to “cross over” with the Dao to be formed anew in the next world-age. Many of the highest gods of Daoism were considered such precisely because they had undergone this transfiguration from the “prior heavens” to reappear in the “latter heavens. That is why the texts translated here, and all others of which I am aware, tend to speak in terms of “longevity,” “long life,” and, more poetically, “an existence equal with that of the sun and moon” rather than of immortality.[1] As change and transformation are so central to Daoism, the details of this doctrine, though it perhaps differs only subtly from what we recognize as “immortality” in other religions, should be respected.

Beyond this distinction, about which the texts translated here tend to be quite careful, there is the additional fact that the term often translated as “immortal” (xian) denotes a variety of different beings, from the “earth-bound xian” existing on the terrestrial plane or under it in the cavern-heavens to celestial beings proper. One quality these beings share is that they have been “transferred,” in the etymological gloss of the Lingbao scriptures, from the common human state to a more subtilized form of existence, closer to the nature of the Dao. There is thus not a single chasm between mortals and immortals, but a chain of being, extending from nonsentient forms of life that also experience growth and decay to the highest reaches of the empyrean. The term designating those who have ascended to rungs of the ladder higher than those occupied by humans, the xian, will accordingly be translated as “transcendent.”

In the Shangqing and Lingbao scriptures we encounter yet another type of being, the Perfected.[2] These beings, even more exalted than the transcendents, are described as having left behind all vestiges of earthly corruptibility to achieve bodies formed of stellar substance. They move effortlessly through the highest heavens and tend to be described with metaphors conveying gemlike brilliance and durability. More will be said about these beings in the introduction to the Purple Texts.

(from pgs. 21-23)

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[1] One of the terms usually translated as "immortality", busi 不死, means instead "not dying"—that is, passing to a new and more exalted state of existence without first dying. There are many ways in which this was said to happen. One of the foremost was "deliverance from the corpse," during which physical and spiritual constituents of the self shed the mortal body like a cicada its chrysalis.

[2] In some works on Daoism, the reader will find the term denoting these beings, zhenren 真人, translated as "true persons" or "realized persons." In fact, the opposite of zhen 真 is jia 假 ("false, fabricated, borrowed"), and the term was probably adopted to emphasize that perfection was the original state of human beings before they willfully turned from the Dao. I have chosen not to use these terms simply as a matter of convenience. The phrases "true persons" and "realized ones" are unwieldy, especially for terms that occur so often in these texts. One solution might be to abbreviate them to "the True" or "the Realized", as I have done with "Perfected", were it not for the fact that these words, standing alone, allow for understandings quite alien to the way the term zhenren is mean to be understood in these texts. "The True" might mean either "real people" or "the faithful", while "the Realized" carries with it inescapable connotations of mental realization, whereas Daoist perfection is always both mental and physical.

 

hmmm the transcend, similar concept but not same on budhism the buddha state itself? there similar concept of time is circle meaning birth, live, death circle also apply to universe~

as for perfect maybe the enlightened although it mainly about mentally~ but on Buddhism there also sect or hmm path(?) that use physical force to gain enlightened state as opposite of pure thinking way~ still nah this cat to lack of knowledge about it~

 

In my language, 仙 is translated as fairy, a transcendent being above the sky.

 

The concept of mortality is pretty simple: Everything that has a beginning has a predetermined ending. It can be cut short or prolonged, but the fact that there is an ending remains.

In pretty much any religion, a person's body is considered mortal, but their soul immortal. There are some disagreements on where they come from or where they go after the body dies, but the basic consensus is that the soul is immortal (can be destroyed, eaten, whatever, but will generally exist forever if left to its own devices).

Basically, cultivation is cheating your mortality by replacing your mortal body bit by bit with spiritual energy. Kind of like becoming a cyborg and gradually replacing your own body parts with machine parts, eventually even replacing your brain with a computer that has your mind uploaded onto it. Only magical.

 

In cultivation “immortality” is the end goal of every cultivator but no one reaches immortality. This is because no matter how powerful anyone becomes they can always get killed by someone stronger at some point in time. True immortality by definition means you can’t die even by accident.

they throw out terms like immortal lands or reaching the immortal level but these normally just mean they have surpassed what’s possible for normal mortals. An “immortal” can call the wind and rain and can move mountains and drain seas but the are still not true immortals and they just use the term immortal l.

 

Another passage on "immortals", this one from Edward H. Schafer's book Mirages on the Sea of Time: The Taoist Poetry of Ts'ao T'ang: