Book 4: Chapter 6: Karma
Their first day at the sect was both calmer and more tedious than Sen had expected. He’d planned for more than a little burning resentment from the water cultivators over his interference with their little war. In fact, he’d expected a lot of that. Either those people had been ordered to stay away from him or there just hadn’t been time for it to build up to the level that people were bursting with active hatred for him yet. That wasn’t to say that it was nonexistent. He caught glares from a few people and one man stared at him with eyes that blazed with fury. Sen made a point to burn that face into his memory since he expected that guy was one who would do something stupid. That, in turn, would force Sen to do something dramatic and permanent. On the whole, though, the people seemed more stunned that he was there or even mildly grateful that he’d done what he’d done.
Sen wished that he’d had nobler reasons for what he’d done, as he feared he was getting a kind of perceived credit for being better than he actually was. He hadn’t put a stop to the battle for their sakes, not really. Oh, he had wanted to put a stop to killing and death because it was such a hideous waste. He’d also wanted it to stop because an active battlefield was an ongoing threat to everyone on it, and he’d been on it. In the end, though, it hadn’t been especially heroic on his part. After all, he’d threatened death on an even bigger scale if they didn’t do what he told them to do. He certainly hadn’t cared about all of those people individually, or been worried about their karma, or even especially worried about their souls. It had been a practical choice on his part, not a moral one.
Then again, maybe that didn’t matter to the people on the other end of that bargain he’d shoved down everyone’s throats. He supposed for the people who had been out there fighting, bleeding, and dying, why he’d put a stop to it mattered a whole lot less than the fact that he’d put a stop to it before they died. He knew from personal experience that unexpected improvements in your survival odds had a way of improving your opinion of others. For that matter, he wasn’t even sure how much his intentions mattered to Karma in general. It was one of those topics that he’d touched on briefly with Uncle Kho and meant to circle back to, but had never found the time.
“That’s a terribly serious face,” said Chan Yu Ming.
Sen looked up from the plate of food that he’d been ignoring for at least ten minutes. “Is it?”
She nodded with a bemused look. “Whatever could you have been thinking about to create such a frown.”
“Karma,” said Sen. “I was wondering about how much intention matters to it.”
Chan Yu Ming looked a little surprised at him. “What an odd thing to not know.”
“Indeed, a very odd thing indeed for someone at your level of cultivation to be ignorant of,” said the elder sitting on his other side.
Sen turned to look at the man. “I didn’t benefit from religious education as a child or any education for that matter. What education I did receive on the topic came around my other training. There were bound to be gaps. This is one of them.”
The elder seemed taken aback, realizing that he had, however unintentionally, been insulting. “My apologies. I suppose most of us do take that knowledge for granted.”
Sen inclined his head to the elder. “You couldn’t have known.”
“The answer to your question is complicated. In fact, people have spent entire lifetimes on it. At the most basic level, though, your intentions are at the heart of your karma. Let us say that you are walking down the street and something distracts you. You bump into someone. They fall down and break their arm. You didn’t intend to knock them over. You didn’t intend to do anything to them. So, in that sense, you don’t incur substantial karma.”
Sen frowned. “Substantial karma?”
“Harm was still done, so there is a karmic debt there. But, it’s far less than if you had picked that person out of the crowd, targeted them, and pushed them over maliciously with the intent to do harm. If you do something like that, then you incur a much deeper karmic debt.”
“It gets even more complicated than that, though,” said a woman from across the table.
Sen looked at her, she was a slender, pale woman with a heart-shaped face and inky black hair. He supposed she was what people meant when they said jade beauty.
“How so?” asked Sen, engaging for the first time with the people around him.
“Let’s go back to the original example. Let’s say that you’re distracted and you bump into someone. Instead of falling down, they drop the food they were carrying. On the surface, even less harm is done. It’s simply food and easily replaced, correct?”
Sen frowned at that. He knew very well how hard food was to come by for some people. Still, he could tell that the woman was trying to make a point, so he played along.
“In theory,” he allowed.
“Now, what if that was all the food that person could afford for the week to keep herself and her children alive? If her baby then dies because they did not eat, your karmic debt is far, far deeper than it might otherwise have been.”
Sen thought that over for a moment. “You can’t realistically expect to know things like that in every situation. How can you possibly judge the karmic consequences for actions under those conditions.”
The woman smiled at him, and Sen felt his heart flutter a little bit. He felt a bit of abrupt sympathy for all of those blushing mortal girls he’d encountered over the years. It must have shown on his face a little because Chan Yu Ming kicked his ankle hard enough to hurt.
“You can’t know,” said the jade beauty, “which is the point. There are some few who can actually see the web of karma around us and, with great effort and insight, influence it. For most of us, though, it’s a mystery. The best we can do is to avoid intentionally doing harm and to put right those harms we do as best we can. However, even that is an imperfect solution. One can never truly avoid karmic entanglements, unless you become some kind of ascetic, shunning all contact with others.”
“That sounds like a terribly empty life,” observed Sen.
“It is, and an impractical one for cultivators. Too much of what we learn, we learn through…experience,” she said, giving Sen a thoughtful look that made him unaccountably nervous. “Although, even cultivators can benefit from periods of seclusion and solitary cultivation.”
“Liang Daiyu is, technically, correct,” said the man Sen was originally talking to, “but she paints an unnecessarily bleak picture. Remember, intentions matter, not just consequences.”
“But can’t you intend to do something good and still cause harm?” asked Sen. “How does Karma account for that?”
Liang Daiyu sat up a little straighter. “That’s an excellent question. And one without a straightforward answer. Obviously, it must account for such things, but there is no formula for understanding it. After all, none of us can truly know how good, how pure, our intentions are, so we can’t determine how deep or shallow of a debt we incur when the intentions go wrong.”
“It almost sounds like the universe doesn’t want us to know.”
Liang Daiyu nodded. “That is one theory. Another theory is that, with sufficient self-knowledge, one actually could gauge those debts.”
“Who could ever know themselves that well?” asked Chan Yu Ming. “It sounds like it would take perfect self-knowledge to gauge one’s karmic debts. Perfect self-knowledge sounds like the kind of thing that would trigger a kind of immediate transcendence.”
“Perhaps, but that’s beyond the question of karma and intentions,” said Liang Daiyu. “That’s a matter of enlightenment.”
“So, are karma and enlightenment linked?” asked Sen.
Liang Daiyu looked like she was going to speak, but Chan Yu Ming beat her to it. “Yes. How could they not be?”
“I only have my own experiences to judge by,” said Sen. “I can see how they might be linked, but I could just as easily see them being independent things.”
“Think of it this way. Karma will, in one way or another, influence the kinds of experiences you have, the people you meet, the situations you find yourself in. All of that will, in one way or another, drive the opportunities for enlightenment that you experience. Let’s say, for example, that you’re a wandering cultivator,” said Chan Yu Ming with a gleam in her eye.
Sen didn’t expect he’d love where things were about to go, but he played along. “Sure. Let’s say that.”
“Now, if you’re a normal wandering cultivator with basically neutral karma, the odds are good that you’ll experience normal things. You have some fights, some you’ll have good fortune, and you’ll have some bad fortune. All very boring and mundane for a wandering cultivator. Now, let’s say that you have extreme karma, good or bad, then you might find yourself in extraordinary situations. The kind of situations where you’d, for example, expose a demonic cultivator cabal, or bless an entire village with miraculous healing, or drive back a beast tide, or…,”
“We understand,” said Sen, giving Chan Yu Ming a stern look. “Your point?”
Chan Yu Ming gave him a bright smile. “The point is that extreme situations are going to give you very different opportunities for enlightenment than regular situations. The kinds of enlightenment you might receive in those extreme situations are potentially going to be more extraordinary simply because your experiences are so different. Hence, you cannot disconnect karma from enlightenment.”
“Crudely put,” said Liang Daiyu, drawing Sen’s attention again, “but she has the crux of the matter surrounded. You say that you’ve experienced moments of enlightenment before. Do you recall how many?”
Sen thought back about it. “I don’t know the exact number offhand. Maybe two dozen.”
Silence fell all around the table, which made Sen glance around at the dumbstruck faces of the water cultivators around him. Liang Daiyu seemed to recover first.
“Two dozen? In how many years?”
“At this point, six or seven I guess.”
Liang Daiyu’s mouth worked a few times without any noises coming out. Chan Yu Ming was staring at him like he’d casually announced that he was going to break through to the nascent soul stage in precisely three minutes and forty-seven seconds. The man who had originally answered his karma question broke the silence.
“You’re averaging three to four moments of true enlightenment per year?”
Sen found himself wishing that he’d asked other people a lot more questions about their experiences with enlightenment. It had just never occurred to him to ask about how often they’d had them. Still, he was already committed to answering. He nodded a little self-consciously.
“Um, yeah. Why? Is that not normal?”
Then, everyone was yelling questions at him.
Updated from fr𝒆ewebnov𝒆l.(c)om