Su Jie is a scholar who was born with "leak body" and cannot cultivate. In order to save his mother, he knelt in front of the gate of Dazen Temple for seven days and seven nights, but was turned away by the words "no chance of becoming a Buddha". When his mother died of illness, he burned all the Buddhist scriptures he had copied 3,000 times in front of her grave. Among the ashes, a "Secret Record of the Inner Demon" from the Western Regions revealed the true words - "All Buddhas use compassion to save the world, and I use the inner demon to save people."
From then on, there was one less scholar seeking Buddha in the world, and one more madman seeking magic.
As a mortal, he experienced eighty-one levels of inner demon calamity. Greed, anger, stupidity, pride, and doubt are not defilements that need to be eliminated, but forces that need to be subdued. When Buddhists are chasing him, he kills the Buddha in reverse; when all sentient beings perish, he uses demonic ways to save them. When he went up to Lingshan Mountain and sat down with the Tathagata to discuss the Tao, a truth that had been covered up for eternity was about to be revealed - the inner demon was never the opposite of the Buddha, but the other half of the Buddha's nature that had been deliberately erased.
If the Buddha doesn't save you, he will save you. What the Buddha does not tolerate, He tolerates. He does not want to destroy Buddhism, but to become another possibility of Buddha.
The ninth demon was born from this.
