Glossary / Techniques and Manuals
Techniques and Manuals in Chinese: 115 Terms and Their English Renderings
The books, methods and mental arts a cultivator learns from, plus the vocabulary of rank and secrecy around them.
115 terms
| Chinese | English | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 功法 | Cultivation Technique | The method itself: what to move, where, and in what order. |
| 心法 | Cultivation Method | The part you memorize rather than practice. The operating manual behind a technique. |
| 口诀 | Incantation | The spoken formula that goes with a technique. Said aloud to trigger it. |
| 秘籍 | Secret Manual | A written technique, usually stolen, inherited, or guarded by a sect. |
| 传承 | Inheritance | A technique or legacy handed down from a dead master. Usually comes with strings attached. |
| 神通 | Divine Ability | A power that breaks normal rules, not just a stronger punch. |
| 秘术 | Secret Art | A technique a sect keeps to itself. Using it in public identifies where you came from. |
| 剑诀 | Sword Art | A sword technique with fixed moves and a matching intent. |
| 剑意 | Sword Intent | The will behind the blade, felt before the blade moves. What separates a swordsman from a thug. |
| 天阶功法 | Heaven-Rank Technique | The top tier. The kind of manual a whole sect goes to war over. |
| 地阶功法 | Earth-Rank Technique | Second tier. Strong enough to make a small sect dangerous. |
| 玄阶功法 | Mystic-Rank Technique | Third tier. Standard issue for inner disciples of a real sect. |
| 黄阶功法 | Yellow-Rank Technique | The lowest tier. What outer disciples are handed on day one. |
| 残篇 | Incomplete Manual | Only part of the technique survived. Practice it wrong and you cripple yourself. |
| 逆练 | Reverse Practice | Running a technique backwards. Faster results, worse consequences. |
| 以身合道 | Fuse Body with the Dao | The final step some techniques demand: the body stops being separate from the law it follows. |
| 走火入魔 | Qi Deviation | A technique gone wrong inside the body. Crippling at best, insane and murderous at worst. |
| 炼体 | Body Refining | The branch that trains flesh and bone instead of qi. Sneered at by the mainstream right up until it punches through a shield. |
| 炼神 | Spirit Refining | The branch that trains the soul rather than the body. Slower, stranger, and devastating to anyone relying on divine sense. |
| 功法品级 | Technique Grade | The Heaven–Earth–Mystic–Yellow ladder. It sets the ceiling of everything you can become. |
| 无上功法 | Supreme Art | A technique with no documented limit. Always found rather than bought, and always followed. |
| 主修 | Primary Art | The one technique you build your cultivation on. Choose wrong and you pay for it for a lifetime. |
| 辅修 | Secondary Art | A supporting technique, taken to cover a weakness the main art leaves open. |
| 兼修 | Dual Practice | Running two arts at once. Doubles the ceiling and the risk of tearing yourself apart. |
| 转修 | Switch Arts | Abandoning your art for another. The old progress is not lost, it simply stops counting. |
| 功法残缺 | Incomplete Art | Only half the manual survived. Practised anyway, out of ambition or despair. |
| 功法反噬 | Art Backlash | The technique biting back. Slower and more patient than a forbidden art, and no easier to fix. |
| 心法口诀 | Core Incantation | The key lines of an art. One wrong character and the whole thing runs backwards. |
| 灌顶 | Empowerment | A senior forcing cultivation into a junior. It works, and it costs the senior their own progress. |
| 孤本 | Only Surviving Copy | One copy left in the world. Ownership becomes a political problem immediately. |
| 抄本 | Hand Copy | A reproduction, usually with errors. The errors are how the enemy tracks you. |
| 枪意 | Spear Intent | Reach and refusal. Spear users in this genre are almost always the patient type. |
| 古法 | Ancient Method | Older than the current system, usually stronger and much slower to learn. |
| 补全 | Complete the Manual | Finding the missing pages. The reward is not power but permission. |
| 拆招 | Break the Move | Analysing an opponent's technique mid-fight. Written as short declarative sentences. |
| 化用 | Adapt the Technique | Taking a move and rebuilding it for your own element. What geniuses do on the page. |
| 改良 | Improve the Method | Fixing an old flaw. Less dramatic than discovering a new one, and more useful in the long run. |
| 推演 | Derive the Next Step | Working out what the manual's author would have written next. The scholar's version of a breakthrough. |
| 参悟 | Study Until It Yields | Long quiet effort on a single line of text. The genre's favourite montage. |
| 自创 | Invent Your Own | Building a technique nobody taught you. Requires a moment of insight plus a chapter of practice. |
| 融合 | Merge Two Arts | Combining methods into one. Dangerous, because the two systems usually disagree. |
| 透支 | Overdraw | Spending future strength now. The bill arrives at the worst possible time. |
| 入道 | Enter the Dao | The moment the method becomes intuitive. After this the character no longer needs the manual. |
| 剑心通明 | Clear Sword Heart | A swordsman's state where nothing is in the way. Written as one sentence and a change in posture. |
| 人剑合一 | Man and Sword as One | The sword stops being a tool. Adaptations show it as the blade glowing; the text mostly shows the face. |
| 御剑术 | Sword Control Art | Commanding a blade at distance. The default ranged attack of every sword sect. |
| 掌法 | Palm Technique | Open-hand strikes that push rather than cut. Preferred by characters who want to humiliate rather than kill. |
| 指法 | Finger Technique | Precision strikes to a point. Often used to hit acupoints or pierce a single layer of defence. |
| 腿法 | Leg Technique | Kicks as a system, not a fallback. Rare enough in the genre to be a character trait. |
| 护体罡气 | Protective Aura | A shell of energy around the body. Absorbs the first hit, then needs rebuilding. |
| 炼体诀 | Body Refining Formula | The written method for hardening the flesh. Body refiners quote it like scripture. |
| 音波功 | Sound Wave Art | Attacking with voice or instrument. Ignores armour, which makes it a hard counter to defensive builds. |
| 瞳术 | Eye Technique | Illusion or pressure delivered by looking. Defence is to look elsewhere, so fights become staring contests. |
| 幻术 | Illusion Art | Manufactured perception. In this genre it is almost always a trap with a tell. |
| 毒功 | Poison Art | Slow damage delivered by contact. The genre treats poisoners as unglamorous and effective. |
| 傀儡术 | Puppet Art | Animating a body or an effigy. Used for infiltration more often than for fighting. |
| 御兽术 | Beast Command Art | Directing animals by will or contract. Companion beasts are the genre's softest subplot. |
| 符箓之道 | Talisman Dao | The discipline of writing effects onto paper. Slow to prepare, fast to use. |
| 丹道 | Alchemy Dao | The discipline of refinement, treated as a path in its own right. Alchemist protagonists are a whole subgenre. |
| 器道 | Artifact Dao | Forging and refining tools. Smiths in this genre are always underestimated until the final act. |
| 阵道 | Formation Dao | The study of arranged energy. Formation masters fight by terrain. |
| 剑道 | Sword Dao | Sword practice as a philosophical commitment. Once a character names it, the sword stops being optional. |
| 刀道 | Saber Dao | The same commitment, with less literature and more force. |
| 无情道 | Dao of Heartlessness | Cutting off attachment to advance. The genre's most reliable way to make a character unlikeable and then tragic. |
| 有情道 | Dao of Attachment | Keeping feeling and advancing anyway. Rare, and usually the author's argument with the previous one. |
| 杀道 | Dao of Killing | Progress through killing. Written as addiction with a body count. |
| 轮回大道 | Great Dao of Reincarnation | Control over what comes back. The top of most power systems, and almost never fully achieved on the page. |
| 时空法则 | Laws of Space and Time | The last tier. Novels that reach it usually end within twenty chapters. |
| 本源之力 | Source Power | The raw material behind an element. Whatever a character's speciality is, this is its floor. |
| 道纹 | Dao Mark | Visible lines of comprehension on skin or stone. Proof that understanding happened. |
| 法则碎片 | Fragment of Law | A piece of a fundamental rule, usable once. Loot from the highest-tier ruins. |
| 先天之气 | Innate Qi | The breath a person is born with. Spending it is easy; getting it back is not. |
| 后天之气 | Acquired Qi | Everything gained after birth. Weaker, unlimited, and what most characters actually use. |
| 阳气 | Yang Qi | Warm, gathered in sunlight and crowds. The standard counter to anything undead. |
| 浊气 | Turbid Qi | The heavy half of the primordial split. Poisonous to cultivators, useful to alchemists. |
| 清气 | Clear Qi | The light half of the same split. What the heavens are made of. |
| 七十二变 | Seventy-Two Transformations | The greater art, taught on Mount Fangcun. Games implement it as a morph ability with a cooldown; the text treats it as a complete change of body. |
| 三十六变 | Thirty-Six Transformations | The lesser count, held by Zhu Bajie. Fewer forms, more jokes, and a running gag about the pig choosing a bad shape. |
| 筋斗云 | Somersault Cloud | One somersault covers a hundred and eight thousand li. Adaptations show it as flight; the source treats it as a single jump. |
| 火眼金睛 | Fiery Eyes | The eyes that see through disguises, formed in a furnace. Every adaptation shows them glowing, which the source never says. |
| 定身法 | Immobilisation Art | A spoken command that freezes a target. Short, and always broken by someone stronger. |
| 分身法 | Self-Division Art | Plucking hairs and turning them into copies. The copies are stupid, which is why the trick works only once. |
| 三头六臂 | Three Heads, Six Arms | The combat form. Games render it as a second hitbox phase, because that is what it is. |
| 法天象地 | Heaven-and-Earth Manifestation | Growing to a size that changes the landscape. Used for one scene per book, and never twice. |
| 驾云 | Ride the Clouds | Ordinary cloud travel. Slower than the somersault, and used when the author wants someone to arrive late. |
| 遁法 | Escape Method | Any of the five-element travel methods. The counter is a barrier, so pursuit scenes are puzzles. |
| 隐身法 | Invisibility Art | Vanishing from sight. Wearing off at the worst moment is the entire genre convention. |
| 缩地法 | Ground-Shrinking Art | Folding distance. Cheaper than flight and more suspicious to onlookers. |
| 点石成金 | Stones into Gold | Transmutation, usually of metals rather than stone. In alchemy scenes it is a parlour trick and a way to pay for things. |
| 呼风唤雨 | Call Wind and Rain | Weather as an ability. The dragon kings do it officially and resent anyone else trying. |
| 移山填海 | Move Mountains, Fill Seas | The scale of highest-tier power. Used once per book as a demonstration rather than a fight. |
| 五行山镇压 | Imprisonment Under Five Elements Mountain | The punishment that works by weight and seal rather than by force. The source's model for every sealed villain. |
| 紧箍咒 | Headband Spell | The control mechanism on the monkey king. Reciting it causes pain, which adaptations render as sound. |
| 定海神功 | Sea-Calming Art | The technique connected to the pillar. Rare, and used to explain why one person can hold a shoreline. |
| 分身术 | Clone Technique | The generic version used by everyone else. Weaker copies, more of them. |
| 变化之术 | Transformation Art | The category term for the two counted arts. Translators should keep the distinction between the count-based versions and the generic word. |
| 金丹大道 | Great Way of the Golden Elixir | The internal alchemy path, named in the source as what the monkey king learns. It is also a real historical term, so the register matters. |
| 长生不老术 | Art of Undying Youth | What the protagonist of the source sets out to find. Every game gives it as a permanent buff. |
| 元神之眼 | Eye of the Primal Spirit | Perception that does not use eyes. Used to explain how a blind character still fights. |
| 天罡地煞 | Thirty-Six and Seventy-Two | The pair of numbered arts, named after the stars. Novels use the numbers as a power scale without explaining either. |
| 八九玄功 | Eight-Nine Mysterious Art | Yang Jian's body-hardening method, which survives decapitation. Game adaptations give it a revive passive. |
| 三昧真火 | Samadhi Fire | The fire that burns without fuel. Red Boy's version, and the reason water does not help. |
| 天眼通 | Divine Sight | Seeing across distance and through illusion. Standard equipment for gods with three eyes. |
| 穿墙术 | Pass-Wall Art | Walking through a wall. Works exactly once in any given infiltration. |
| 缩骨功 | Bone-Shrinking Art | Compressing the body to fit through gaps. Used for escapes and for comic humiliation. |
| 童子功 | Boyhood Art | A method that requires celibacy from childhood. Explains why some great masters are extremely awkward. |
| 清心咒 | Heart-Clearing Chant | A spoken formula that pushes out external influence. The counter to most illusions. |
| 静心诀 | Calming Formula | The shorter version, used before breakthroughs. |
| 金光咒 | Golden Light Incantation | A ward, recited while a golden field spreads. Real liturgy, borrowed whole. |
| 往生咒 | Rebirth Chant | Sung for the dead. In ghost scenes it is a weapon as much as a comfort. |
| 大悲咒 | Great Compassion Mantra | The long chant. Its length is the mechanic: it takes time to finish. |
| 金刚经 | Diamond Sutra | A text, not a spell, but chanting it is treated as one. The genre's most quoted scripture. |
| 绝学 | Signature Art | A sect's defining technique, passed to one or two people at a time. Losing it ends the sect more surely than losing a war. |
| 杀招 | Killing Move | The one technique held back until holding back is no longer possible. Announced by nobody, remembered by everyone. |
The distinction between an outer practice and an inner method is the one thing worth getting right here. Everything else varies by author. We use the renderings that already dominate the free cultivation novels on cultivationnovel.com.
Where these words turn up
Stories on this site that use them the way the notes describe.
I'm the Hehuan Sect Master's Personal Disciple, but They Call Me HeartlessA disciple of the pleasure sect who takes none of it seriously.心法 I Only Swept the Floor, So How Did I Become a Sword Saint?A floor sweeper who turns out to be the only person in the sect who understands a sword.剑诀 Master Broke His Vows: My 3,000 Years of Foodie Cultivation Can No Longer Be HiddenThree thousand years of cooking, disguised as three thousand years of seclusion.剑意Source: cultivationnovel.com · Cultivation Glossary