I’m reading Kyoshis book at the moment and I find Kyoshis conversation with Lao Ge about his immortality fascinating.
Kyoshi’s first reaction to Lao Ge’s teachings is disgust. She immediately compares the pursuit of immortality to Jianzhu’s obsession with control. To her, trying to escape death feels unnatural, like believing you’re more important than everyone else. Lao Ge’s response is interesting because he completely reframes what “immortality” even means and makes her question her world view.
He explains aging as entropy: the body slowly falls into disorder. His technique is simply keeping the body “clean, neat, and tidy”, not frozen, just continually repaired by bending.
Then Kyoshi points out what seems like the obvious flaw:
“You’d have to decide what version of yourself you’d be stuck as, forever.”
And Lao Ge basically says: Exactly. That’s why you can’t. Then says:
“Those who grow, live and die. The stagnant pool is immortal, while the clear flowing river dies an uncountable number of deaths.”
He’s arguing that the worst kind of immortality isn’t endless life. It is refusing to change. A stagnant pool never changes. It is “immortal” because nothing about it dies. But it’s also lifeless. A river is constantly losing its old water. It “dies” thousands of times every day, yet it’s alive because it never stops changing.
So Lao Ge’s philosophy isn’t “live forever”. It’s: If you’re going to live forever, you’d better become a different person over and over again.
Ie: Your body stays ordered. Your soul never stays the same.
That’s why I don’t think Kyoshi suddenly wakes up one day and decides, “Actually, immortality sounds great.” I think she eventually realises that longevity doesn’t have to mean clinging to life. It can mean having more time to change not just the world but yourself. It’s more time to learn and more time to fix mistakes. More time to protect people.
Ironically, the Avatar is already someone who experiences this on a cosmic scale. Every Avatar is literally a continuation of the previous one, but none of them are the same person. The Avatar Spirit survives because it is always becoming someone new.
Kyoshi’s longevity almost feels like an extension of that idea. She doesn’t remain the same Avatar for two centuries. She becomes someone else again and again. The Kyoshi who dies at 230 is not the same Kyoshi who met Lao Ge. Which is exactly Lao Ge’s point.
Maybe immortality isn’t about refusing death. Maybe it’s about allowing parts of yourself to die so that the person who continues living is wiser than the one who came before. That’s a philosophy Kyoshi could accept later in life. Not because she feared dying but because she refused to stop growing.
And honestly, I think the fact that she eventually chose to end her life makes sense. Lao Ge was trying to teach her: immortality is only meaningful while you remain like the river.
And the tragedy of Kyoshi is that by the end of her life, she had carried the world’s burdens for so long that she may have felt herself becoming something harder and less human than the girl who first met Lao Ge. Not just hardened, but desensitised, so repeatedly exposed to death and violence that the weight of it stopped effecting her like it once did. She was more…stagnant.
And if that’s true, then choosing to let go wasn’t a rejection of his philosophy but the opposite. It was a recognition that when even death no longer moves you, when it ceases to feel like something sacred, then you risk drifting into a stillness far more dangerous than mortality itself. And stepping away becomes an act of reclaiming the humanity that “immortality” had gradually worn down.
I just find that interesting.
If yo uthink about it, the fact that Kyoshi couldn't stay immortal forever was implied from the start:
She opposes change from the beginning, too content with her little corner of life to accept it unless someone pushes it on her
She is pretty much established as being the embodiment of neutral jing from the very start, unomoving, waiting, patient
She was perfect for the technique because accounting for every single atom was something she had the patience and the meticulosity to do. She was terrible for the technique because she needs people to unclog her flow, and having others in your life is never a guarantee, especially when you are one of the scariest people on the planet, with no way to hide and reinvent yourself. After all, there is only one Avatar at a time
