Book 4: Chapter 6: Karma

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.

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.