This piece is me going back over my own books. Two years ago I wrote down a sentence I’d counted among the things I had figured out. Recently, while chasing the source of a four-character phrase, I pulled it back out — and found it may be backwards from top to bottom.
A sentence I’ve been carrying for two years
In October 2025 I wrote this in my notes:
Gamified existentialism: given that existence is absurd and free, with no meaning built in — meaning is something people make. Which means life, society, history, even suffering, can be seen as a “game” made of rules, goals, roles and narrative.
What we hold is a player’s mentality, and we play the game with it.
Gamified existentialism isn’t coldness. It’s a kind of compassion. Suffering is part of the game too: don’t belittle it, and don’t be swallowed by it.
I used that passage for a long time. On the trail when I couldn’t take another step. In a relationship when it hurt. When work I cared about came back with no echo.
It worked. It kept me standing in a few moments where I should have gone down.
That last line I still stand by, and I think it’s the hard part, because it blocks two different directions of collapse at once.
The line that turned out to have a problem is the middle one: what we hold is a player’s mentality.
Not that it’s wrong exactly — but it smuggles something in that I couldn’t see at the time. To get it out into the open, we have to take a detour, starting with the four characters themselves.
Putting the phrase back where it came from
For two years I read 游戏三昧 — yóuxì sānmèi, usually rendered “the samādhi of play” — as “play” plus “samādhi,” and slid comfortably into “life is like a video game.” Tracking down the source showed me that slide swaps one thing for another.
The most standard occurrence of the term in Zen literature is in the Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, fascicle 8, in the entry for Nanquan Puyuan. The passage has to be read whole, because what matters isn’t the four characters — it’s the long run-up in front of them:
池州南泉普願禪師者，鄭州新鄭人也，姓王氏。唐至德二年依大隗山大慧禪師受業。三十詣嵩嶽受戒。初習相部舊章，究毘尼篇聚；次遊諸講肆，歷聽楞伽、華嚴，入中、百、門觀，精練玄義。後扣大寂之室，頓然忘筌，得遊戲三昧。
Chan master Nanquan Puyuan of Chizhou… First he studied the old codes of the Vinaya school and exhausted its divisions of monastic discipline; then he travelled the lecture halls, hearing the Laṅkāvatāra and the Avataṃsaka, entering the Middle Treatise, the Hundred Treatise and the Twelve Gate Treatise, refining their profound meanings. Afterwards he knocked at the door of Mazu’s room, suddenly forgot the fish-trap, and obtained the samādhi of play.
— Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, fascicle 8 (CBETA T51, no. 2076)
Translate that résumé into today’s terms: he mastered monastic law and its whole conceptual apparatus; then made the rounds of the lecture circuit, studying two of the densest Mahāyāna sutras; then went into Madhyamaka — the three treatises — and drilled its logic to a fine edge.
That is as complete an academic track as existed. It is the most systematic, most rigorous framework a person could build for himself.
Then the turn. “Suddenly forgot the fish-trap.”
“Forgetting the fish-trap” isn’t a Buddhist phrase. It’s Zhuangzi. Outer Things:
荃者所以在魚，得魚而忘荃；蹄者所以在兔，得兔而忘蹄；言者所以在意，得意而忘言。
The trap exists for the fish; once you have the fish, you forget the trap. The snare exists for the rabbit; once you have the rabbit, you forget the snare. Words exist for the meaning; once you have the meaning, you forget the words.
The trap is a woven bamboo basket for catching fish. Once you have the fish, put the basket down.
So the sentence in the Transmission of the Lamp says: Puyuan obtained the samādhi of play only after setting that entire precise framework down. First the trap, then forgetting the trap, then the samādhi of play.
That made me uncomfortable, because it reads almost exactly backwards from what I had written.
I once built something quite handsome for “the samādhi of play”: four layers of how the world runs (physical, biological, social, psychological), a six-row table comparing games with life, a star rating on each row for degree of overlap, a flowchart of the three stages of awakening, a checklist of who should and shouldn’t read it.
That was a map. It was a trap.
And this biography is saying: the samādhi of play shows up at the moment the map is dropped. To write it up as four layers, three stages and six comparisons is to be facing the wrong way — that isn’t obtaining the samādhi of play, that’s weaving a finer trap.
I don’t want to conclude from this that the framework was worthless. Puyuan also studied for a decade and a half before he had anything to forget. The problem is that I stopped at the weaving and thought I had arrived.
One more piece of philology. Ding Fubao’s Dictionary of Buddhist Terms glosses the term:
遊戲三昧：遊戲者，自在之義。三昧者，禪定之異名。菩薩得神通自在，於一切法門遊戲自在，無所罣礙，謂之遊戲三昧。
Samādhi of play: “play” here means freedom, self-possession. “Samādhi” is another name for meditative absorption. When a bodhisattva attains freedom in supernormal power and moves freely through all the dharma-gates with nothing obstructing, that is called the samādhi of play.
“Play” is glossed as freedom — not amusement, and not “don’t take it seriously.”
This matters, because it means the Zen 游 and the “game” we say today have entirely different bloodlines.
The Zen 游 has its family tree in Zhuangzi. The 游 of free and easy wandering. The 游 of the blade moves with room to spare. It names a way of moving — unconditioned, unobstructed, a blade travelling through the gaps between joints. No score. No levels. No win condition. No save file.
When we say “game” today, the template in our heads is the video game: rules, goals, XP, achievement systems, progress bars. It is one of the most tightly structured things humans have ever built. As for gamification — that word’s technical ancestor isn’t Zen, it’s the Skinner box: variable-ratio reinforcement used to shape behaviour.
So “treat life as a game” points in opposite directions under the two vocabularies:
In the Zen sense it points toward liberation. In the product-manager sense it points toward remaking yourself into a character driven by an incentive structure.
Same four characters, two thousand years, different core.
What the thought “player” actually installs
With that detour done, back to the sentence.
What we hold is a player’s mentality.
Stop there and ask a concrete question: when I say “I am the player,” what have I installed?
A watcher.
Someone sitting outside the screen. Someone the plot doesn’t touch. Someone who can pause at will, exit at will, say “it’s only one round” at will. That someone isn’t inside the game; he’s watching it from outside. The pain, the losses, the humiliation — those happen to the character, not to him.
It sounds enormously freeing. It has one problem: it is precisely the thing the Buddhist doctrine of no-self is meant to dismantle.
Last week I published What Remains When You Take It All Apart , which does one thing from beginning to end: it takes the self apart. It uses the chariot from The Questions of King Milinda — the wheel isn’t the chariot, the axle isn’t the chariot; lay every piece on the ground and “the chariot” has nowhere left to hide. Then it works down through the five aggregates, removing form, feeling, perception, formations and consciousness one at a time, until the “I” in the middle has no separate hiding place either.
The conclusion of that piece: there is no watcher tucked behind experience, unborn and undying, observing it all happen. What we call “I” is a name we give the whole when these parts, in a certain relation, are running.
Now put “player mentality” next to that conclusion.
“Player” is that watcher.
It is the self that got dismantled, coming back in more fashionable clothes. It isn’t called a soul, or ātman, or the Cartesian thinking substance — it’s called the player. But it does exactly the same job: it installs, behind the flow of experience, a subject that doesn’t flow, isn’t affected, and can step out.
I spent one essay carefully taking it apart, and then, in another, cheerfully invited it back and gave it a cooler name.
So, strictly: there is no player in the samādhi of play.
That sounds like a riddle, but it can be checked. Look at how someone describes the state and you’ll know.
Cook Ding’s blade travels in the gaps
The ox-carving passage in Zhuangzi’s Essentials for Nurturing Life is the best gloss on 游 there is.
庖丁為文惠君解牛，手之所觸，肩之所倚，足之所履，膝之所踦，砉然嚮然，奏刀騞然，莫不中音。合於桑林之舞，乃中經首之會。
Cook Ding was carving an ox for Lord Wenhui. Wherever his hand touched, his shoulder leaned, his foot stepped, his knee pressed — the flesh fell away with a hiss, the blade sang through with a swish, and none of it was out of rhythm. It matched the Dance of the Mulberry Grove, it kept time with the Jingshou music.
Lord Wenhui asks how skill can reach such a level. Cook Ding answers:
臣之所好者道也，進乎技矣。始臣之解牛之時，所見無非牛者。三年之後，未嘗見全牛也。方今之時，臣以神遇而不以目視，官知止而神欲行。
What I care about is the Way; it goes beyond skill. When I first began carving oxen, all I could see was the ox. After three years, I no longer saw the whole ox. These days, I meet it with my spirit rather than looking with my eyes. The knowing of the senses stops, and the spirit moves as it wishes.
Watch the sequence.
At first: all he could see was the ox. In front of him is a whole, massive object to be dealt with. This is the stage where subject and object are still split — I’m over here, the ox is over there, and I have to solve it.
After three years: he no longer saw the whole ox. The unified “object” dissolves; what he sees is structure, grain, gaps.
Now: spirit rather than eyes; the knowing of the senses stops. The one who was looking is gone.
Only then comes the famous line:
彼節者有間，而刀刃者無厚；以無厚入有間，恢恢乎其於遊刃必有餘地矣。
Those joints have spaces, and the blade has no thickness. Put what has no thickness into what has space, and there is room — abundant room — for the blade to travel.
This is where 游 lives. The blade can travel not because it is strong, but because it is thin to the point of having no thickness, while the joints have gaps between them. The condition for 游 is the absence of obstruction, not the absence of an object.
Which is exactly where 游 and “player mentality” come apart:
If Cook Ding were thinking I’m playing the ox-carving game, the blade would jam on the next stroke. Because the thought “I am playing” is itself a thickness. A blade with thickness can’t enter the gap.
游 is a property of the movement, not a property of the stance.
A stance stands, watches, stays outside. A movement goes in, is inside, has no distance from its object.
A detached vantage point can never travel — it can only stand and look. And the one standing and looking will feel he is travelling, because he genuinely does feel free. But that freedom is the freedom of not having entered, not the freedom of having entered without obstruction. From outside the two look alike. From inside they’re opposites.
One more detail is worth pausing on. After Cook Ding finishes:
提刀而立，為之四顧，為之躊躇滿志，善刀而藏之。
He stands there holding the blade, looks around, thoroughly pleased with himself, wipes the blade clean and puts it away.
He’s satisfied. He stands there, glances about, feels good about it, cleans the knife and stows it.
This is not a transcendent man. This is a man who just did a piece of work beautifully and is happy about it. People in the samādhi of play are capable of delight. That point comes back later.
The moment you call someone an NPC
Following “player” leads straight to its other half: NPC.
In that same 2025 note I wrote something harsher: “They’re all NPCs in your growth.”
At the time the line felt clarifying. Rereading it now, I see something else.
NPC stands for non-player character. Note how the term is defined: not by any property of its own, but by a lack — it lacks a player. It lacks someone outside the screen with agency, actually making choices.
So when I say “they’re all NPCs in my growth,” what I’m doing is: withdrawing “has an inner vantage point” from them, and awarding it exclusively to myself.
Spelled out, the sentence means: only one person in this world is actually undergoing anything; everyone else is here to help him undergo it.
I thought I was writing about growth. Now it reads as a very lonely sentence.
Because if everyone thought this way — and everyone has grounds to, since each of us can only see from one vantage point — then it isn’t a game at all. It’s an unbounded number of single-player rooms that don’t recognise each other. In each room stands someone who calls himself the only player, surrounded by people he has classified as NPCs, who are also in pain.
And the move has a deeper problem: it guarantees you can never really be pierced by anyone.
If a person is an NPC, his words don’t have to be actually heard, his pain doesn’t have to be actually taken, his judgment of you doesn’t have to constitute a real challenge — because he’s only script. The operation buys you absolute safety in relationships: no one can hurt you, because no one is real.
That isn’t compassion. That’s armour.
And it’s cleverer than ordinary armour, because it can even reinterpret “I’m avoiding this” as “I’m playing this transcendently.”
To be fair to it: seeing others as one link in your own road is useful in some situations — when you’re being treated with malice, refusing to take the other person’s assessment as the truth about you is necessary self-protection. The problem is that the move leaks. Once it becomes habit, it moves from blocking malice to blocking everyone, including the people you actually care about.
And love, and real relationship, happen at the opposite point: at the moment you give up the setting “I am the only player” and admit that the one across from you is also whole, also in pain, also has a vantage point of their own.
The few people you value most are exactly the people you can’t turn into NPCs. That isn’t coincidence. That’s the definition.
Who the actual NPCs are
Now turn the binary over.
In my original framework, “NPC mentality” looked like this: passively accepts quests, follows the script, doesn’t question the rules, takes meaning from outside. “Player mentality” was its mirror: chooses quests, probes boundaries, questions the rules, builds meaning itself.
That comparison rests on a hidden assumption: NPCs are the ones who don’t move — the asleep, the ones drifting with the current.
I now think that assumption is wrong.
Look at a modern person’s day. He wakes and checks his progress. Every app has a streak counter. His run has a pace leaderboard. His reading has hours logged. His work has OKRs and a completion percentage. His social platforms give him likes and a follower curve. He is extremely active, extremely goal-oriented, levelling up every day. He is emphatically not asleep.
He is thoroughly scripted.
Real NPCs aren’t people without goals. Real NPCs are people who take an externally supplied goal as their own and get pleasure from it. The levels, the progress, the achievements, the rankings — the very things that make him feel he’s playing are the script itself.
Which is what’s ironic about the word “gamification”: it is the technology of installing scripts into people, sold on the promise of making you a player.
There’s an authoritative judgment to borrow here. Johan Huizinga wrote Homo Ludens in 1938 and gave play a definition still in circulation:
Play is a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner.
— Huizinga, Homo Ludens, ch. 1
Note the emphasised clause: no material interest, no profit.
By that definition, gamification is not play at all. The entire point of gamification is to use game mechanics in pursuit of external returns — retention, conversion, performance, revenue. It keeps the shell of play (progress, achievement, leaderboards) and extracts the core (that it is for nothing).
That isn’t my judgment. The founding definition of the field excludes it.
And “for nothing” is nearly the same sentence as Zhuangzi’s 無所待 — dependent on nothing. Free and easy wandering depends on no external condition; Huizinga’s play depends on no external return. East and west, twenty-three centuries apart, pointing at the same thing.
So “a gamified life” and “the samādhi of play” are not two descriptions of one thing. They are two opposite things sharing a word.
“It’s all a game” is the eighth picture
I once wrote out three stages of awakening:
Asleep — “the world is what it is, accept it.” Awake — “all of this is constructed, and I’m going to resist it.” Beyond — “it’s all a game, and I choose to play it seriously.”
I made those three up. Zen has an existing version, far more finely grained, and it turns out to be a good instrument for checking where I actually got to.
In the Southern Song, Kuoan Shiyuan painted ten pictures — the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures — using ox-herding as a figure for training the mind. Searching for the ox, seeing its tracks, seeing the ox, catching it, herding it, riding it home, then forgetting the ox.
The eighth picture is “Both Ox and Self Forgotten.” It is an empty circle. Nothing left — no ox, and no person either. Everything empty.
Most people take this for the destination. It’s the most famous of the ten and the one most often printed on merchandise.
But it’s the eighth. There are two more.
The ninth, “Returning to the Origin”:
返本還源已費功，爭如直下若盲聾。 庵中不見庵前物，水自茫茫花自紅。
Returning to the origin has already cost effort — better to have been blind and deaf from the start. Inside the hut he doesn’t see what’s in front of the hut. The water flows on by itself; the flowers are red by themselves.
After the emptiness, mountains are mountains again. The water runs wide, the flowers are red. The world comes back, and comes back clearer than before.
The tenth, “Entering the Marketplace with Open Hands”:
露胸跣足入廛來，抹土塗灰笑滿腮。 不用神仙真祕訣，直教枯木放花開。
Bare-chested and barefoot he comes into the market, smeared with dirt and ash, grinning ear to ear. No need for the immortals’ secret formula — he simply makes the withered tree bloom.
With this commentary attached:
柴門獨掩，千聖不知。埋自己之風光，負前聖之途轍。提瓢入市，策杖還家。酒肆魚行，化令成佛！
The brushwood gate stays shut; a thousand sages don’t know him. He buries his own splendour and turns his back on the road the former sages walked. Gourd in hand he enters the market; staff in hand he returns home. Wine shops and fish stalls — he turns them all toward Buddhahood.
Bare-chested, barefoot, covered in dust, laughing, walking into the market. To the wine shop. To the fish stall.
This tradition explicitly places “seeing through everything” third from the end. After you’ve walked it, you come back — and the way you come back is by walking into the most crowded, dirtiest, noisiest place available.
That structure is far stronger than the three stages I invented, because it isn’t my claim. It’s the tradition’s own.
It also hands me an uncomfortable test: was my “Beyond: it’s all a game, and I choose to play it seriously” the tenth picture, or was it the eighth with a “Beyond” label stuck on?
Honestly: the latter. Because “it’s all a game” is exactly the sentence that exempts you from the coming-back step. If it’s all a game, where would you return to?
The one whose heart takes no joy
There is a startlingly precise record of that stuck state — harsher than anything in modern psychology.
In the Lotus Sutra, chapter four, Subhūti, Kātyāyana, Kāśyapa and Maudgalyāyana speak before the Buddha. These aren’t beginners. They are “foremost among the assembly,” the most senior practitioners there. They say:
我等居僧之首，年並朽邁，自謂已得涅槃，無所堪任，不復進求阿耨多羅三藐三菩提。世尊往昔說法既久，我時在座，身體疲懈，但念空、無相、無作，於菩薩法——遊戲神通、淨佛國土、成就眾生——心不喜樂。
We stand at the head of the Sangha, all of us aged and worn. We told ourselves we had already attained nirvāṇa, that we were fit for nothing further, and we stopped seeking supreme awakening. When the World-Honoured One taught at length long ago, we sat there with tired bodies, dwelling only on emptiness, signlessness, wishlessness — and toward the bodhisattva’s dharma of playing freely with supernormal power, purifying buddha-lands, and bringing beings to maturity, our hearts took no joy.
The verse section puts it even more plainly:
我等若聞，淨佛國土，教化眾生，都無欣樂。所以者何？一切諸法，皆悉空寂，無生無滅，無大無小，無漏無為。如是思惟，不生喜樂。
When we heard of purifying buddha-lands and teaching living beings, we felt no gladness at all. Why? Because all dharmas are empty and still, without arising or ceasing, without large or small, without outflows, unconditioned. Thinking in this way, no joy arose.
I stopped cold the first time I read this.
These people are not unawakened. They awakened too smoothly.
“Dwelling only on emptiness, signlessness, wishlessness” — everything has been thought through. All dharmas empty and still, no arising, no ceasing, no large, no small. Every distinction dismantled, every attachment seen through. That’s a high attainment, not a fudge.
And the result?
“Our hearts took no joy.” “No gladness at all.” “No joy arose.”
In one sentence: he saw through it, and after that nothing could move him.
Someone mentions going and doing something, helping someone, making some corner of the world slightly better — and he can’t summon interest. Because all dharmas are empty and still, so what would be the point.
The sutra follows this with the parable of the destitute son. A son wanders off as a child, drifts for fifty years in poverty, and one day stumbles back into his father’s city. The father recognises him instantly; the son panics and runs. So the father has him hired, anonymously, to shovel dung. He shovels for twenty years. Eventually the father puts him in charge of the entire estate, and he manages it flawlessly — yet “he had no thought of taking so much as a single meal for himself.” The treasure is in front of him and he neither dares claim it nor wants to.
The Lotus Sutra rules this state unfinished. Not the destination. Stuck.
The reason it stopped me is that it describes, exactly, what “it’s all a game” can do to you. If that sentence leads to the heart takes no joy — if, after saying it, you can’t rouse yourself to do anything, to move toward anyone, to make any corner better — then by the Lotus Sutra’s reckoning this isn’t liberation. This is the destitute son.
And look back at Cook Ding. After the ox, he is thoroughly pleased with himself. He’s happy. He’s happy about the thing he just did.
People in the samādhi of play are capable of delight. The one whose heart takes no joy isn’t in it — he has simply switched the game off.
The grammar of “playing freely” is entering
So what does someone look like who has gone past the eighth picture and come back?
There is a complete portrait in the sutras, and it uses this exact word. Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa, chapter two:
爾時毘耶離大城中有長者，名維摩詰，已曾供養無量諸佛，深植善本，得無生忍；辯才無礙，遊戲神通，逮諸總持……
At that time in the great city of Vaiśālī there was an elder named Vimalakīrti… his eloquence unobstructed, playing freely with supernormal power, having attained all the dhāraṇīs…
First, who he is: not a hermit in the mountains, but an elder in the city of Vaiśālī. Wife, children, wealth, jewellery. The first time these words appear, they describe a householder.
Then the sutra spells out what his “playing freely” consists of:
雖為白衣，奉持沙門清淨律行；雖處居家，不著三界；示有妻子，常修梵行；……雖復飲食，而以禪悅為味；若至博弈戲處，輒以度人；……
遊諸四衢，饒益眾生；入治政法，救護一切；入講論處，導以大乘；入諸學堂，誘開童蒙；入諸婬舍，示欲之過；入諸酒肆，能立其志。
Though a layman, he kept the pure discipline of a monk. Though living at home, he was unattached to the three realms. He showed a wife and children, yet practised celibacy… Though he ate and drank, his real taste was the joy of meditation. When he went to places of gambling and games, it was always to bring people across. …
He wandered the crossroads, benefiting beings; he entered government and protected all; he entered lecture halls and guided people toward the Great Vehicle; he entered schools and drew out the children; he entered the brothels to show the fault in desire; he entered the wine shops and there steadied people’s resolve.
Count the verbs.
Entered government. Entered lecture halls. Entered schools. Entered brothels. Entered wine shops. Wandered the crossroads.
All of them are “enter.”
The grammar of playing freely is entering, not withdrawing. And the places he goes are the busiest, dirtiest, least pure parts of the city.
That alone nearly overturns the reading of “life as a game” as licence to detach. In the sutra, this freedom moves inward.
And there’s a line that reads as though it were written for this essay: “When he went to places of gambling and games, it was always to bring people across.”
He goes to the actual gaming houses, and even there he goes to help. The sutra is drawing the distinction itself — between games of chance (worldly games) and playing freely with supernormal power (unobstructed freedom). That contrast isn’t imposed by me; it’s in the text.
Now set it beside the commentary on the tenth ox-herding picture: “Wine shops and fish stalls — he turns them all toward Buddhahood.”
Wine shops.
One is an Indian sutra from around the first century. One is a Southern Song painting cycle. More than a thousand years and a continent apart, landing on the same address.
I don’t think that’s coincidence. I think two groups walked that far and saw the same thing: at the end of it, you’re in the bar.
Incidentally, the Lotus Sutra plants an internal contrast of its own. In the burning-house parable of chapter three, the three realms are a house on fire and the children are inside:
眾生沒在其中，歡喜遊戲，不覺不知、不驚不怖，亦不生厭，不求解脫。
Beings are sunk in it, delightedly at play, unaware and unknowing, unalarmed and unafraid, feeling no weariness and seeking no escape.
Here “play” is pejorative — oblivious absorption. The house is burning and the children are having a wonderful time.
The same sutra uses the same word for the children’s numb games in the burning house and for the bodhisattva’s free play. Same word, opposite states.
What separates them? Knowing the house is on fire.
The children in the burning house are “unaware and unknowing, unalarmed and unafraid” — that’s why they can play. The one playing freely knows: knows impermanence, knows loss is coming, knows it all ends — and walks into the wine shop anyway.
The first kind of freedom comes from not seeing. The second comes from seeing and staying.
Surprise, and being willing to be pierced
There’s a modern statement of “seeing and staying,” from James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games (1986).
His first sentence:
There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
That binary is widely quoted and needs no elaboration. The line that actually stings comes later:
Surprise causes finite play to end; it is the reason for infinite play to continue.
Carse explains: the finite player wants to become a Master Player — so perfectly skilled that nothing can surprise him. The infinite player does the opposite. He prepares himself to be surprised by the future and plays in complete openness — “an openness as in vulnerability.”
Putting that beside “player mentality” is awkward.
What does the thought “I am the player” pursue? Nothing can surprise me. I’ve seen through all of it. Nothing can really hurt me.
By Carse’s division, that is the finite player’s posture. It wants to win, wants not to be pierced, wants to end. What it pursues is control.
The mark of the infinite player is the reverse: willing to be surprised, willing to be vulnerable.
Carse has a shorter line too:
Whoever must play, cannot play.
Play has to be voluntary. Which connects to Bernard Suits’s definition, still unrefuted:
Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.
A golfer could walk over and drop the ball in the hole; that’s the efficient method. He doesn’t. He accepts a set of rules that make it harder, for one reason only: accepting them is what makes “playing golf” exist at all.
Press that definition onto life and you get two steps.
The negative step: most of life’s suffering is neither voluntary nor unnecessary. Illness, loss, ageing, parting — you didn’t opt into those rules. So strictly, life is not a game. “It’s all a game” fails the test.
The positive step, and I think this is where the whole thing lands: there is a part of life that fits the definition perfectly — commitment.
Marriage. The long game. Raising someone. Keeping a principle nobody requires you to keep. Loving someone you could leave at any moment.
All of these are voluntarily accepting unnecessary constraints. You could have been more efficient, freer, less hurt. You choose not to be. And your reason for accepting the constraint is exactly Suits’s: only once it’s accepted does the thing exist.
So the only part of life that genuinely meets the definition of a game is not detachment. It’s meaning it.
The essence of the lusory attitude was never “none of this is real.” It’s “I know I could not, and I’m taking this rule as binding.”
That incidentally settles something I’d never worked out. In my old comparison table, I gave “cost of failure: irreversible” the lowest overlap score — as if irreversibility were where life falls short of games.
I now think that has to be reversed. What makes a player’s pulse go up is never the round you can reload. Permadeath, hardcore mode, ranked ladder — it’s the rounds you can’t repeat. A game with a save file is played loosely.
Irreversibility isn’t the bug. It’s this game’s core mechanic. It’s where the weight comes from. The Japanese call it ichigo ichie — this once, never again — and what it produces is total presence, not transcendence.
Huizinga has one more line that closes this section:
The play-concept as such is of a higher order than is seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness.
Seriousness is not the opposite of play. Seriousness is something play is large enough to hold.
No player, only travelling
After all that, back to the original sentence.
What we hold is a player’s mentality, and we play the game with it.
The trouble isn’t “game.” It’s “player.”
“Player” is a vantage point. And a vantage point is by nature outside — it needs distance to exist, needs a fixed spot to watch from. That’s why it feels free: because it hasn’t gone in.
Whereas 游 is a movement. Cook Ding’s blade travels in the gaps between the joints, entirely inside, no distance, no watcher. The knowing of the senses stops, and the spirit moves as it wishes — the one who was looking is gone, and only then does the movement work.
The samādhi of play isn’t a vantage point. It’s a way of moving. That’s its deepest difference from “player mentality,” and the thing I couldn’t see two years ago.
So the real endgame here isn’t “I choose to play this game seriously” — there’s still a player standing inside that sentence, doing the choosing.
It’s this: in certain moments, with certain people, put down the thought “this is a game” as well, and let yourself — undefended, for real — lose once, hurt once, love once.
In that moment there is no player. And no NPC. Just two people, both present.
Which is, in the end, the full meaning of the one line I still stand by:
“Don’t belittle suffering, and don’t be swallowed by it.”
Don’t belittle it: the cut is real, it actually hurts, and you can’t flatten it with it’s only a game. Don’t be swallowed: losing this round doesn’t mean the whole of you is ruined.
The narrow path between those two isn’t walked by standing further back. It’s walked by going in — and going in without armour.
The man in the Vimalakīrti ends up in a wine shop. The man in the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures ends up in a wine shop too. They hadn’t failed to see through it; they saw through it and came back, grinning.
Seeing that it’s all a game is the eighth picture.
What’s written on the tenth is: having seen through it, still daring to mean it.
Sources
So that none of this rests on vibes, here is where the material comes from:
- The samādhi of play: Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp, fascicle 8, entry for Nanquan Puyuan of Chizhou (CBETA T51, no. 2076).
- “Play here means freedom”: Ding Fubao, Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, entry 遊戲三昧.
- Forgetting the fish-trap: Zhuangzi, “Outer Things.” Cook Ding: Zhuangzi, “Essentials for Nurturing Life.”
- Playing freely with supernormal power, and entering the wine shops: Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa, fascicle 1, chapter 2 (CBETA T14, no. 475).
- “Dwelling only on emptiness… the heart takes no joy,” and the parable of the destitute son: Lotus Sutra, fascicle 2, chapter 4 (CBETA T09, no. 262). The burning house with children “delightedly at play” is chapter 3 of the same fascicle.
- Ninth and tenth verses and commentary: Kuoan Shiyuan, Verses on the Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, Southern Song.
- The definition of play and “play can very well include seriousness”: Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1938; Routledge & Kegan Paul English edition, 1949), ch. 1.
- Finite/infinite games, surprise and vulnerability: James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (1986).
- “The voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”: Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia (1978).
Translations of the classical Chinese are my own, kept close to the original rather than smoothed.
There is also a story in Zen circles that Huanglong Huinan, released from prison, told his students: “In prison I attained the bodhisattva’s samādhi of play.” I could not locate the exact fascicle for that one, so it stays out of the body of the essay — but it’s worth noting here, because if it’s genuine it’s the evidence this piece most wants: the samādhi of play is not attained anywhere comfortable.
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