following the theme of "feral xxc headcanons" can you give me some headcanons about Baoshan Sanren and her feral little sect and how everyday life looked on the mountain?
A lot of it was chores.
I mean, there was certainly martial arts training and memorizing of sacred texts and seated meditation and spiritual healing )clearly they teach some impressive doctoring), but the rest of the day was chores. They’re a self-sufficient community. They garden (herbs and food) and fish and go into the woods for nuts and berries and other edible plants.
They sew and weave and clean and build. There are just enough members of the not-sect that people can specialize (Xiao Xingchen, for example, spent a lot of time in the herb garden but never learned to thatch a roof so there you go), but not enough people that anyone could go without working. A lot of the busier work is characterized as meditative exercises, and it’s frowned upon to use spiritual energy. So people sweep-meditate and weed-mediate.
The older kids help raise the younger kids and everybody pitches in. At times it’s a lot like a multigenerational family. People eat and sleep and spar together. More experienced elders pair with younger ones to teach them any number of things.
It’s both very egalitarian, shockingly so compared to the rest of the world, and very regimented. Everyone pays each other a lot of respect. The only places where hierarchy really remains is in age. People respect and obey their elders and everyone takes that very seriously. Other than that, though, people tend to be blunt with one another and everyone assumed to be at everyone else’s disposal. Time is shared, the work is shared.
There’s not a lot of privacy in most of the living quarters, but there is a whole mountain to explore so if someone took off for a few days of wilderness living, no one batted an eye, especially if they came back with, say, fish and newly woven basket. People know each other’s business. They share things with each other. People don’t have much in the way of their own possessions - mostly their swords and other small things.
And it’s, of course, Daoist. There’s a true dedication to passivity, remaining apart from the world (obviously), and not leaving much of a mark. People are expected to get along and if they can’t, spend time on their own rather than argue or fight. Too much attachment is frowned upon, whether that means of possessions or less tangible things. Gentleness and inaction and passive endurance are virtues, so things don’t change often. (It’s a lot easier to accomplish this on the mountain and Xiao Xingchen begins to stray immediately from this path when he enters the world, because suddenly he has things he wants to achieve and accomplish.)
It’s a lot less orthodox though than the sort of Daoist monasteries and sects you might find off the mountain. Partially because they don’t keep up with the times. Partially because Baoshan Sanren is an eccentric. And in general they’re not big with rules. More guidelines. So Xiao Xingchen actually learned a lot from Song Lan when it came to what people would expect a wandering daoshi to do and say, rather than what he would do automatically.
Listen. They’re just weird up there. At least Xiao Xingchen never cut off anyone’s beard, Cangse Sanren.
