《杜子春》

《杜子春》 is the immortality-test story discussed near the end of 76.玄怪录：晚唐党争？没耽误宰相写大马猴的故事. The episode treats it as part of the [[XuanGuaiLu|《玄怪录》]] / [[XuXuanGuaiLu|《续玄怪录》]] story world and as a concentrated case of Transcendence Against Human Feeling.

In the source’s summary, 杜子春 squanders wealth twice, uses the third gift for charity, then follows an old man’s instruction to guard a cinnabar furnace at Mount Hua without speaking. He endures storm, beasts, violence, death, hell, and rebirth, but fails when he sees his child killed and cries out. The episode reads the failure not as simple weakness, but as the point where human feeling refuses to be stripped away for immortality.

The [[AkutagawaRyunosuke|芥川龙之介]] comparison sharpens the ethical reading. The source prefers Akutagawa’s version because it makes ordinary human life preferable to a transcendence that would require inhuman silence.

Connections

• Transcendence Against Human Feeling - concept generated from the story’s final test.
• 唐传奇 / Tang Chuanqi - genre frame for the story’s moral and supernatural compression.
• [[AkutagawaRyunosuke|芥川龙之介]] - later adapter compared by the source.
• Non-Instrumental Literary Reading - the story’s value lies in its felt ethical difficulty, not only in the plot lesson.