What does cultivation mean in person?

Definition1396 words

Read the phrase as a grammar question

"What does cultivation mean in person" is an odd query, and the oddness is worth taking seriously. It is not asking what cultivation is. It is asking what it means when the word is applied to a person: not to a field, not to a plot, but to someone standing in front of you.

two readings follow.

The 1st is the genre's: what does it mean to be a cultivator, in person, as opposed to reading about one? That is a question about the fiction and it has a decent answer.

The 2nd is the word's: what does cultivation describe when a person is the object? That is a question about a very old metaphor, and its answer is duller and more useful.

Take the 2nd first, because the 1st depends on it.

The word is farming

Where does the word cultivation come from? Latin colere, to till, to tend, to honour. It covers both farming and the attentive care you give something you value, which is how the same verb produced cultivate and culture. English kept both senses; the Chinese term the novels translate carries a similar pair, since 修 means to repair or regulate and 炼 means to smelt and purify.

Used of a field, colere means working the ground. Used of a god, it means worship. The fact that one verb does both is the whole point: care and attention, applied over time, to something that grows.

English kept the pair. We cultivate land, and we cultivate a taste. We also have culture, which is the same root and used to sit alongside the agricultural sense comfortably: a person of culture is a person who has been worked on.

Chinese carries a similar pairing, and this is where the translation gets interesting. The novels' term is not 1 word but a compound of 2, 修炼 in the classic texts or 修行 in the religious register. 修 means to repair, to regulate, to put right. 炼 means to smelt, to heat until the impurities come out.

Repair plus smelt: two verbs, both industrial, and neither one patient in the way a garden is patient. The practitioner is not merely tending. He is correcting a defect and purifying a material, which is why the ladder has grades rather than harvests.

What it means applied to a person

Take the farming sense and move the field inside a body, and you get the genre.

The ground is the body. The seed is qi. The tending is daily practice, the same session at dawn for 40 years. The harvest is a body that no longer wears out. Every trope follows.

Take the same sense and leave the field where it is, and you get something ordinary. To cultivate a person is to work on them slowly, with attention, on the assumption that the result is not immediate. A cultivated voice. A cultivated habit. A person who has cultivated patience, which is a sentence nobody says and everybody means.

That second reading is the one the novels are using as an analogy. They are not inventing a new verb. They are taking a familiar one and raising the stakes, which is what good fantasy does with ordinary words.

The religious sense, which is separate

One clarification that English readers often miss.

修行 in Chinese is not reserved for immortals. A monk's daily routine is 修行. A Daoist priest's practice is 修行. Doing the dishes with full attention as part of a temple schedule is 修行. The word covers what English would call practice, discipline or devotion, depending on the context.

Japanese has the same word, shugyō, and uses it for training retreats, martial arts discipline, and the ascetic ordeals of mountain monks. A Japanese sword teacher will say it without any implication of immortality, and so will a temple cook.

So when a translation renders 修行 as cultivation, it is not wrong, but it is flattening three registers into 1: farming, self-improvement and religious discipline. The novels live in the overlap and the word is carrying all three at once.

Why the metaphor holds up

Here is the part I think is genuinely good, and it is why the genre keeps working even when the plots are formulaic.

The metaphor is not borrowed decoration. It describes the actual shape of any long practice: you start in a body you cannot change much, you do the same thing for years, and somewhere in there the body or the craft becomes able to do something it could not do before. Musicians know this. Runners know it. People learning a language know it.

The genre takes that shape and gives it an object. Instead of an unmeasurable improvement in skill, you get a numbered rung, a visible core, a stated lifespan: 300 to 800 years at the third stage, 800 to 1,000 at the fourth. The fantasy is not that the work pays off. It is that the payoff is legible.

That is a very human want, and it is not a stupid one. Most long practices do not announce their progress. A cultivation novel is a book about one that does.

Where the joke about three thousand years comes from

There is a well-known premise about someone who has refined qi for 3,000 years and is still on the 1st of the nine layers. People describe it as a comedy, and it is not really one, but the premise is funny in the same way the metaphor is serious.

If cultivation is long-term work, then someone who has worked for 3,000 years has done more than anyone. If the system rewards work, he should be at the top. The joke is that the system has other rules, that he is a specialist rather than a generalist, and that everyone around him has misread the arithmetic.

Why is 3000 years stuck at qi refining supposed to be funny? It is not a comic story, though a lot of discussion treats it that way. The joke is the time scale. Someone who has worked for three thousand years at the first rung should by every rule of the genre be a monster, and instead he is a specialist. The premise is a straight face applied to an absurd arithmetic.

That is the word's own logic pushed to a place it was never meant to go, which is the best defence of the entire genre. Take the metaphor seriously and you get a good story. Take it literally and you get a very long one.

What it does not mean

A short list, because these come up constantly.

Is a person who practices cultivation religious? Not necessarily, and the genre is often explicit that it is not. A cultivator in a novel may pay respect to an ancestor or a sect founder, but the work itself is training, not worship. The older practice had a religious frame, and the modern novel usually keeps the discipline and drops the frame.

A cultivator in a novel rarely asks for anything; the powerful figures in these settings are obstacles, not patrons.

It does not mean study. Knowing the method is assumed in every book. Doing it for 40 years is the part that separates characters.

And it does not mean self-care in the modern sense. The genre is not interested in a well-adjusted person. It is interested in a body that can take more, and it is honest that a body built over 200 years outlives everyone who watched it being built.

The answer in one line

In person, cultivation means treating yourself as something that can be worked on, slowly, for longer than you would like, and then living with the result.

That sentence is true of a farmer, a violinist, a monk and a protagonist in a cave. The genre just gave it a number and a crop failure.

Sources & References

• Cultivation Glossary, Cultivation Actions — sitting meditation and circulating qi, the two practices the word's fictional sense is built on. https://cultivationnovel.com/glossary/cultivation-actions/
• Kohn, Livia, Chinese Healing Exercises: The Tradition of Daoyin (University of Hawai'i Press, 2008) — practice as a daily discipline rather than a doctrine.
• Robinet, Isabelle, Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity (SUNY Press, 1993) — 修行 in its religious register.
• Wuxiaworld, General Glossary of Terms — the translation choices behind cultivation and its related terms. https://www.wuxiaworld.com/page/general-glossary-of-terms