The Venerated Triad - or the three poisons of MDZS
I’ve been sitting on this for literal years, it was something I was chewing on back when I was more involved in MDZS fandom and despite the passing time, nothing I’ve seen has changed my mind on this reading of the book, that the three poisons of Buddhist belief are all well represented in each member of the Venerated Triad/3Zun, and that it’s not an accident.
Let’s start off with the three poisons, or the Sandu (and yes, this is incredibly relevant to Jiang Cheng as well, even if he’s not mentioned in this essay, given that his sword is named after them) are a Buddhist concept, and refer to greed, wrath and ignorance as the greatest flaws a person can hold and must strive to overcome. Yes, ignorance is held to that same standard, and I can see where MXTX is laying that out in her story very clearly. Most of the cast struggles with at least one of these, and how much it impacts them is balanced by what their particular blinding trait leads them to do, especially among the antagonists both of past and present.
(Also to clarify on wording, while ignorance is the direct translation, I am more inclined to think that ignorance is closer to willful ignorance than just being too young to have learned everything yet, though it’s not wholly divorced. If you are unwilling to learn when young, it is still a bad thing and brings harm all the same. Just look at Jin Ling’s journey to see how this might be applied to young people who have yet to learn better and need to do so)
Now that you know what it is in theory, let me move on to the Venerated Triad in specific.
We’ll start with Jin Guangyao and Greed, since this tends to be the one missed most when talking about 3Zun as his reactions are more pointed at than his initial actions.
Meng Yao has been characterized as a man who’s always wanted and hungered since he was young. As a part of the Nie, he strives to make himself respectable enough in order to achieve his goal of being recognized as Jin Guangshan’s son and to be welcomed into the clan as an heir, and every action and reaction he takes is in response to that direct goal. When taking the honest path of a recommendation from a clan leader does not get him everything he wants, as he’s permitted to join the clan but is not immediately adopted and lifted up, he first resorts to backstabbing his allies for slights against him, then runs off to join the Wen instead, only switching sides again when he sees an opportunity to make himself too valuable in the optics of the war to be ignored.
Yet when he gets that goal of being adopted and made a part of the Jin family, it proves to not be enough as he still doesn’t have the respect and adoration he feels he deserves. He follows up by ingratiating himself with new allies who will either do his dirty work (Xue Yang, Su She) or turn a blind eye to his actions out of sympathy for his stated plights (Lan Xichen) and first helps his father divide all threats to their growth by sowing dissent between Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng, spinning their actions against the Wen as righteous and continuing the war against them despite a nominal peace having been struck, and swearing brotherhood with the other two clan leaders so that he personally is too valuable to get rid of despite his father’s distrust of his ambitions. In addition he also gets Qin Su pregnant in the days leading up to their wedding so that no one can dissolve it, only for that to backfire on him when it turns out that they’re secretly half siblings.
This culminates in him machinating the death of his half-brother and the other heir who would have been placed ahead of him when Su She curses Jin Zixun with the hundred holes curse and then blames it on Wei Wuxian before sending Jin Zixuan to fan the flames as it is very well known that he and Wei Wuxian have past enmity for his mistreatment of Jiang Yanli, which cements his goal of becoming the heir of Lanling Jin.
A great amount of the tragedies in MDZS can be traced back to his greed and ambition, as he used and discarded everyone in his desperate attempts to climb to the very top. Despite having gained far more than most in his place ever could have, it transparently is never enough, and his habits of discarding people who know too much once he’s done with them or if they’re aware of the things he’s done to climb so far only further to destabilize his very shaky position as his staircase to chief cultivator is drenched in blood. His greed and belief that he deserves the things he wants and should not be denied them no matter what is his chief flaw and marks him as one point in the triangle of Sandu, the three poisons. While he carries a good amount of wrath as well, it usually tends to be provoked by people reacting to the things he does to get ahead, thus locking in greed as the main element of the three.
Next we have Wrath and Nie Mingjue. From his very first mention in the cloud recesses lesson arc in the backstory, we know that he is a man characterized by anger. His own brother is frightened of his anger should he not be doing what Nie Mingjue thinks is best for him, and while this does come from a more genuine place, it is still telling that his reaction to anything not going his way is anger.
It is followed up in the war where he is one of the most vicious fighters, and while again that is needed at the time, the fact that he turns his anger at Wen Ruohan’s actions against anyone with the name Wen is still notable. The Wen clan is thousands strong, there’s no way that they all agree with his actions or would do the same, and they are too being ruled by a tyrant, yet that means nothing to him. His wrath is already driving his actions in the war to what we will see after the war, where he is perfectly happy to not only look the other way but champion the continued abuse and murder of the Wen as they are a part of the now former Wen clan and he never lets go of that anger even once the clan is completely dead and gone.
It’s also apparent in how he treats the other members of 3Zun, especially Jin Guangyao. Once he sees Jin Guangyao kill the Jin captain in a Wen style, his every thought of him afterwards is colored by that anger, and in death he turns that anger onto anyone who shares that blood with him, including Wei Wuxian in Mo Xuanyu’s body and Jin Ling, who was still a baby when he died. When he qi deviates at the end of his life, he goes on a killing spree and takes down anyone in his way, and in undeath he is fueled entirely by his wrath. It consumes him as fully as it did everyone who he saw as a perpetrator of his anger, no matter how tangentially connected they were to those who actually caused him and his harm.
He shares a touch of ignorance as well, in that he refuses to look at perspectives that aren’t his own or acknowledge that people might not be able to fight back in the ways he approves of. In addition, he’s perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to Jin Guangyao’s actions as long as they’re turned on someone he approves of hurting. He throws aside any question of the potential of the Wen Remnants being wrongfully persecuted, but turns on Jin Guangyao only after he saves Xue Yang, despite backing him up before then. In this we can see how his ignorance is fueled by his anger. As long as the people he doesn’t like are the ones being targeted, it does not matter what happens to them and he will do nothing to help or stop those injustices.
So that covers greed and wrath, and now we move forward to the third member of this triad and the only survivor, Lan Xichen.
Lan Xichen can stand out a lot to first time readers, and even more on a reread as many of his actions take on new tones, both good and bad, once you know the whole story. He’s a much more passive character than most of the others, including his sworn brothers, he has a kind bearing and stops to listen to people who others may not, but is very rarely driven to act of his own accord, and tends to take his own feelings about someone as the right interpretation, especially when it comes to someone he likes. He’s also strongly unwilling to look closer at the conflicts between those he cares about and will do his best to pretend that he can’t see it so that he doesn’t have to pick a side. This is notable not only in how he handles pretty much every conflict that comes his way up to Guanyin Temple, but especially in how he talks about his parents backstory. He does not want to believe that either his clan or his mother was in the wrong, and he knows that he is missing huge gaps of the story, but he refuses to look closer out of fear that he may have to reconcile that the people he cares about and trusts are capable of committing evil acts and instead chooses to remain in ignorance and do nothing to change things.
Thus he aids and abets Jin Guangyao’s greed as he chooses to trust that the things he’s doing he’s doing for the right reasons, and tries to assuage the enmity between Jin Guangyao and Nie Mingjue while listening to neither of them about how the other behaves. To face the fact that one or both of his friends are not who he would like them to be and that his words are fixing nothing is something that he cannot handle and so he doesn’t, and instead he turns his face away.
That being said, I think that the fact that ignorance can be broken down when irrefutable facts are laid out is part of what spares him in the story and also what makes him more sympathetic. We see it as a weakness that hurts him and others around him, yet over the course of the present day he does make an effort to stop turning away. He trusts Wei Wuxian’s information enough to actually verify it rather than refuting it outright, when he is given proof he revokes Jin Guangyao’s pass to the Cloud Recesses, and even later in the Guanyin Temple, when he realizes that Jin Guangyao truly has done everything he’s done either out of ambition or to cover up the costs of his ambition, he ends up stabbing him after rejecting his excuses where he would have accepted them before and rejecting his uncle’s words when they would have allowed him to continue along as willfully ignorant as before. It takes a lot of work and a long time, but his eyes are opened and he will not close them again, and thus he survives.
It’s very interesting how MXTX plays with these three concepts especially in MDZS, though knowing what they are adds depths to other relationships in her other novels, such as the balance between Shi Qingxuan, He Xuan and Shi Wudu, where we have another who chooses to trust what they have learned and to live a new life past that, someone who was so greedy and unwilling to sacrifice what they wanted that they destroyed someone else innocent for the sake of that greed, and then the shift to a wrath that does know when to stop, that was created by the actions of the greedy one and the ignorant one, which is a different dynamic than 3Zun ever had as Nie Mingjue is far less targeted in his wrath and never does let go of it as opposed to He Xuan who does move on once his grudge is settled.
Also while I called him Sir Not Appearing in this Essay, I will note that Jiang Cheng’s chief poison is actually a mix of wrath and ignorance. He has all the information he needs to make better choices and see past the illusions people lay before him, but his anger frequently leads him to ignore all of that despite knowing better and it is only when he is stripped of the ability to hold onto those illusions that he is given the chance to prove that he could be better, and that includes letting Wei Wuxian go at the end of the novel. While he definitely has greed too in that he wants the accolades and praise that Wei Wuxian has, as well as the connections that the other clans have made, he lacks the ambition to chase after them that Jin Guangyao has, so it turns to envy rather than avarice, and instead fuels his anger even higher.
It is up to him whether or not he’ll do better, but with the veil stripped from his view, he will no longer be able to pretend that his anger leads him to make the right decisions, and thus he also survives the end of the novel, but unlike Lan Xichen who was able to reach out to his brother and to Wei Wuxian when they gave him a chance, Jiang Cheng has poisoned those relationships too thoroughly for them to ever be close again.
Hi guys!!! The Weibo and Baidu NejiHina community are holding an event tomorrow and the day after (05/25/2026 to 05/26/2026) in which for 48hours they will be posting NejiHina fanworks.
I'm sharing with you the promoting images and the original link in Chinese here and a automatic translation of the event's post:
╳╳╳╳╳ White Night · Twin Mirrors ╳╳╳╳╳
—— NejiHina Day 48-Hour Fanwork Relay ——
「
Where Day and Night overlap,
Inside the gap between parallel worlds,
We act as each other's mirrors,
Shattering the cage of destiny together.
」
Event Tag: #2026宁雏日48H产粮接力#
Event Time: May 25 – May 26, 2026
Event Platforms: Weibo and Baidu
The 2026 NejiHina Day Fanwork Relay has been upgraded to a 48-round relay, starting at midnight!
Thank you everyone for your participation and support 💜
╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳╳
Main Planner & Promotional Image: @丁丁做事叮叮当w
-----
If there's someone from those communities who still visit tumblr, we would LOVE to learn more about this event and see the works you guys will be sharing. I will be lurking on weibo and baidu, but I don't know if I'll be able to share anything here, because of copyright, I'm not sure of the etiquette regarding these events and not speaking Chinese is a hindrance 🥲
Anyway, it is a joy to learn the NejiHina is alive and well in some corners of the internet :)
He sighed and covered his face with his hands; the boy clearly looked like he was going through some nasty inner battle, until he finally relented. His shoulders fell, and he raised brave eyes to Kurenai.
“Because I love her.”
“Do you, now?” She said in a sceptical tone, but she believed him; she just enjoyed seeing him suffer a little. In the years after the chunin exams she had observed how he treated her pupil with so much care that bordered on devotion, and heard from Hinata herself how close they’d gotten. It was a stark difference from how things were before that incident. She could hardly believe how someone could change that much. She even asked Guy about it one time, who explained to her that Neji had been an angry young man, but very protective of the people he cared about, and that his change of heart was genuine. That calmed Kurenai’s worries and, little by little, she started to notice how Hinata herself changed around Neji. It was different from the camaraderie she had with the Team Eight boys, but Kurenai never commented on it.
It was quite funny to watch Hinata mooning over Naruto—to whom, somehow, her feelings were still a mystery—while having another boy pining for her without her noticing. To be fair, she thought it was a matter of time for Hinata to give up on Kakashi’s hyperactive student and consider the boy who was by her side most days.
“Yes.”
“Does she know that?”
“I... I told her.”
Kurenai crossed her arms, amused; that one was almost as shocking as discovering her little shy pupil was two-timing.
“And what did she say?”
“I’m not entirely sure she understood... But she was surprised...” then he added under his breath, “which doesn’t make any sense.”
He was looking like he was about to implode; Kurenai was getting a little worried. Maybe she should call Guy after all.
“Why wouldn’t it make sense?” she asked gently.
“Don’t I show it enough?” He frowned and started shaking a little. Hinata was doing a number on that boy, goodness! “Sometimes I think it’s so obvious I feel disgusted with myself and we have... we have been... physical... very often.”
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andulkaphoto
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