2.1 A Question Obscured by Language
The word "cultivation" carries way too much baggage these days.
Some people wear hemp clothes and sit in mountain caves---they call it cultivation. Others post daily meditation selfies---they call it cultivation. Some drop thirty-eight thousand dollars on an "Energy Awakening" seminar---they call it cultivation. And then there's the crowd that throws veganism, juice cleanses, crystals, and burning sage all into the same bucket labeled "cultivation."
What's the result? The truly important stuff gets buried under the noise.
Just like in Part One where "ghost" was an overstuffed drawer, "cultivation" is the same mess. Before we go any further, I need to empty that drawer and take out what doesn't belong.
The cultivation discussed here is not a lifestyle choice. It's not stress relief. It's not self-help fluff. It's not vague "spiritual growth."
From the perspective of this lineage, cultivation is a technology---a set of techniques refined over thousands of years on Chinese soil, focused on the active management of one's existential state.
This technology has roots that go deeper than organized religion. Daoism later adopted it and built a systematic framework around it, but the core practices predate Daoism's formation. Buddhism absorbed some of it upon arrival in China, but it isn't Buddhist.
It is the legacy of the ancient Qi Cultivators.
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