The Outcast: A Buddhist Cultivator

Ji Ming, a young man from the modern era carrying the regrets of a lifetime, has his soul transmigrate to the remote mountain temple of Withered Cloud Monastery, where he becomes a twelve-year-old novice monk.

The monastery’s century-old Withered Cloud Meditation Breath seems capable of storing qi and prolonging life, but in truth it is an incomplete dead end. It takes only meditative concentration to store qi, abandoning the other two disciplines of Buddhist practice: precepts and wisdom. The deeper one cultivates, the more easily hidden delusions turn into illusions. Mistake an illusion for reality, and inner demons will entangle you, your qi channels will collapse, and you will meet your end. Generations of monks have been trapped by this method, with none reaching its culmination.

Drawing on the thoughtful nature he developed in his previous life, Ji Ming buries himself in the surviving fragments in the Sutra Library and studies the Tripitaka in detail. Taking precepts as his foundation, concentration as his pillar, and wisdom as his means of insight, he attempts to fuse Buddhism’s Three Trainings with the Withered Cloud Meditation Breath and reconstruct this incomplete technique.

Years pass in the mountains amid morning bells and evening drums. He gathers herbs, studies sutras, and meditates. He debates the mind and qi with his master, Xuan Chen, and practices meditative breathing with his senior brother, Ji Yuan. In the meditation hall late at night, he faces an illusion of the demon of lust and watches the memories of his previous life rush toward him in vivid, lifelike form.

Demons do not come from outside. Delusion arises from the mind.

This is not a cultivation story about seeking nothing but supernatural powers and eternal life. Ji Ming’s goal is not simply to grow stronger, but to see through the delusions of his own mind and complete a path of cultivation that has been broken for a hundred years. When his bitter training in the mountains reaches its end, he will finally leave the ancient monastery of Withered Cloud and enter the vast, turbulent world of the extraordinary, where he will test the path of Perfected Chan that he himself devised.