tiengiungtong's rabbit hole is lined with bodhisattvas

"Welcome to the rabbit hole" is the entire caption on the reel that the artist behind tiengiungtong (天弓堂) posted in May: a first-person descent, one held click at a time, through tunnels lined with Buddhist statuary. The account has fewer than 7,000 followers. The reel has 125,000 likes and a comment section running on a single question—is this a game I can play? (cf. Miles Buckle)

It is not, yet. There is no title, no store page, no engine named. What the comments supply instead is a lineage, and it is a precise one: Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou and Cosmology of Kyoto, the 1990s Japanese CD-ROM explorations where clicking forward was itself the ritual, plus newer dream-logic work like ENA: Dream BBQ. The forward-click grammar is exactly right—this moves like Cosmology of Kyoto remembered through a dream.

The pattern in the responses is the more interesting thing: almost nobody reads it as horror. The recurring move in the thread is identification rather than fright—reading the central figure as a bodhisattva and deciding, in real time, that the space is a refuge. Dread resolving into safety is a rare register for liminal-space content, and it is one with a history here: we asked back in 2013 whether MirrorMoon EP was the first Buddhist videogame, and in 2016 climbed a mystical mountain built on Tibetan Buddhism. Whoever runs 天弓堂—the account publishes no name, just "I love dogs"—is working that same seam, and 125,000 people just asked them to keep going.