Li Chen, standing before the tenth step, looked back.
In climbing these nine steps he had unknowingly opened 364 acupoints — including three of the major ones. Among them, the Heaven Layer acupoint Yintang had opened, granting access to the upper dantian. And in the moment he shed his ignorance of self, when the question he could not un-ask had cracked something open at the crown of his head — his Baihui had opened, reaching the peak of the acupoint opening stage.
Not only that. He had shed the first of his ten fetters. Self-view — the belief in a fixed, permanent self. Gone. Not suppressed, not intellectually dismissed — seen through. And what is seen through cannot be unseen.
He understood now that this temple was a supreme treasure, one that would be extraordinary even for a seasoned cultivator. A pity he had arrived here at the earliest stage of his cultivation. And yet — perhaps not a pity at all. Perhaps exactly on time.
'The three poisons, karma, the six emotions, the twelve Nidānas — the entire cycle of samsara is contained here. This is a treasure trove beyond reckoning. Shedding all ten fetters and attaining Arhatship would benefit my cultivation enormously — not as cultivation itself but as the foundation beneath it. No matter how long it takes, I will not leave this place until I become one,' Li Chen promised himself quietly.
He resumed walking.
He chanted as he stepped forward, each step the same as the last — breath in, syllable, breath out, bead pushed back. But his heart was no longer the same. It was filled with hatred now.
Scenes he had long since buried surfaced without invitation. His parents fighting each other, cursing him in the midst of it — as though he were not a child standing between them but a piece of furniture they were arguing over. The pan hitting his head. The darkness that followed.
His hatred toward them had never fully dissolved — only settled, like sediment at the bottom of still water. Now it rose. His hatred for their abandonment of responsibility, for losing their reason, for forgetting that he was but a child who had done nothing to deserve being made the battlefield of their failures.
He saw their eyes in that moment — and what struck him was not cruelty but horror. Not horror at what they were doing to him. Horror at the thought of losing their inheritance from his grandparents. If something were to happen to him because of them, his grandparents would donate everything to the poor rather than let them inherit a single coin. He had not been their child in those moments. He had been their insurance.
He saw the television news. The crimes. The faces of monsters wearing ordinary clothes, living ordinary lives, committing extraordinary cruelties. His hatred toward them had felt righteous — clean, even. The hatred of someone who still believed the world should be better than it was.
He saw the boardrooms of great companies, the documents signed, the atrocities buried in footnotes and quarterly reports. The poor ground down quietly so the wealthy could remain comfortable in their ignorance. His hatred here was colder, more settled — the kind that comes not from shock but from having understood exactly how the machinery worked and being unable to stop it.
Then the children. The war. Bombs tracing arcs across skies that should have held nothing but clouds. Their crying cutting through frequencies that no philosophy could silence. The twisted reasoning of those who ordered it, dressed in the language of necessity and protection and progress. And the people — the ordinary, exhausted, frightened people — who believed them. Who fell for it not because they were stupid but because they were tired and afraid, and someone had handed them a simple story to explain a complicated pain.
Hate — where does this path lead?
He stepped forward and stood still, the question sitting in him like a stone dropped into deep water.
Hatred toward his parents — personal, born from wound. It had led to distance, coldness, and a childhood spent at his grandmother's house. The hatred had protected him. But it had also isolated him.
Hatred toward criminals and corporations — righteous, born from values. It had led to restlessness, an inability to be at peace with the world as it actually was rather than as it should be.
Hatred toward war and its architects — grief wearing a mask, born from love for what was being destroyed. This was the most important realisation. Beneath his deepest hatred there had always been love for something. The hatred was never the root. The love was.
If hatred is grief wearing a mask — what had he been grieving all along?
The loss of a world that should have been safe. The loss of a childhood that should have been simple. The loss of a species he had believed, somewhere underneath all his cynicism, was capable of better.
He did not know how long he spent walking these nine steps. Each step was a single moment — but how long a moment lasted in this place he could not say. Perhaps a breath. Perhaps a day. Perhaps an eon. Time here did not move the way it did outside. By the time he reached the eighteenth step he had traversed the full breadth of the hell realm's poisonous emotion — anger and hatred — and something in his chest that had been clenched for forty-nine years had quietly, without ceremony, released.
---
He arrived at the eighteenth step.
The second Nidāna — Saṅkhāra. Volitional Formations.
The landing was the same shape as the first — a spacious mandala of rough basalt, brass bowls in the four corners, wind chimes hanging in the alcoves. But the wind chimes here were longer by half, their pitch lower, their resonance slower. Where the first platform had struck him like a sharp bell, this one settled into him like a gong's aftermath — the sound that outlasts the strike.
He stepped to the centre and sat. The sound wave that passed through him was stronger than before — not louder, but deeper. As though it were resonating with something further down than hearing could reach.
From ignorance arise volitional formations — the deep karmic imprints left by intentional actions of body, speech, and mind. Not just actions but the mental force behind them. Good formations, bad formations, neutral formations — all still formations, all still binding, all still leaving seeds in the stream of consciousness to flower in future moments and future lives.
He saw them now. The grooves.
Someone who expected betrayal before it arrived. Who braced against the world as a default posture, shoulders slightly raised, heart slightly behind glass. Who kept people at careful, measured distances — close enough to care, far enough to survive losing them.
'You think your personality is you,' Li Chen said quietly to no one. 'It is not. It is your history wearing your face.'
He sat with this.
The distance he kept — he had always told himself it was wisdom. Not getting too attached, not depending too heavily on anyone. But he saw now it was not wisdom first. It was a wound first. Wisdom came later, quietly, to justify what the wound had already decided before wisdom arrived.
The watching habit. He had spent forty-nine years being extraordinarily perceptive about other people's inner lives — studying psychology, reading people, understanding motivations with unusual clarity. He had considered it a gift. He saw now that this gift was partly a formation seeded in a child who had learned to read his parents' moods as a survival mechanism. Read the room before the pan comes out. Understand the pattern before the pattern reaches you.
The lightness of landing. He had never fully committed to any place, any person, any future. His grandmother's house had been the single exception — the one place he had allowed himself to put down roots without reservation. He saw now that his transmigration itself — throwing the jade, crossing the worlds, arriving in this body — was the ultimate expression of this formation taken to its absolute extreme. When the world became unbearable he had not stayed. He had left it entirely.
And then — the most uncomfortable seeing of all.
His cultivation goal itself carried this formation.
Wanting enough time to finish his questions. Wanting to understand existence to its most fundamental state. Wanting peace.
These were genuine. He did not dismiss them. They were real and they were his and they were beautiful in their way. But underneath them — if he looked honestly, without the mercy he usually extended to himself — there was also a man who had learned very young that the inner world was safer than the outer one. That understanding was more controllable than loving. That stillness was less dangerous than being fully present in a world that had already demonstrated, clearly and repeatedly, that it could hurt you without warning and without reason.
His retreat into philosophy had not only been love of truth. It had also been a formation. A wound that learned to dress itself in something magnificent.
He sat with this for a long time. Days passed. He did not grow hungry. He did not feel his strength wane. The temple held him without demanding anything.
He finally understood the difference between actions born from wounds and actions born from genuine wisdom. He began, carefully and without rush, to separate them. To look at each formation not with shame but with the clear eyes of someone doing an honest inventory after a long journey. This came from here. This came from there. This one I carried without knowing I was carrying it. This one I mistook for virtue for decades.
When he finally stood again, something had shifted in the quality of his stillness. It was not the stillness of someone who kept their distance. It was the stillness of someone who had chosen, with full knowledge of the cost, to no longer keep it.
He would no longer watch from a careful distance, arms folded, heart behind glass, calling it wisdom. He would make his move, show his resolution, and let his intentions lead him forward.
He pushed the bead back and stepped onto the nineteenth step.
The first two Nidānas describe the past and its causes. The next eight describe the present — the effects of the past and the new causes sowed here. The last two represent the effects reaped in the future.
He was now met with intense greed — his greed for knowledge and progress in his cultivation.
How does greed affect oneself?
'Greed is like insatiable hunger, causing mental turmoil, fueling anxiety, jealousy, and anger when desires are not met. What I could have become? Rather than what I would become. What I could have become if I had that person's opportunity, rather than what I would shape myself into through my own. It brings about ignorance of impermanence, clinging to things that are not permanent and causing pain when losing them. It attaches negative karma and becomes an obstruction to enlightenment,' he said, and took one more step forward.
He arrived at the third platform.
The bronze chimes here were longer still — reaching a person's full height. Their tone was so low it was felt more than heard, a resonance that moved through bone rather than air.
Viññāṇa — Consciousness.
Formations condition consciousness.
The conditioned consciousness that carries karmic seeds from one life to the next — and in this life, the stream of awareness that perceives moment to moment. Continuity without a fixed thing that continues.
He stepped to the centre and sat. He observed the arising and passing of conscious moments without identifying with them — without saying this is I, this is mine. The river continues but the one who drowns in it disappears. The stream of consciousness is purified through deep samādhi — through Right Concentration and Right Mindfulness applied without flinching.
He sat until the river became visible to him as a river. Not as himself. As a river.
Then he stood and walked on.
---
At the twenty-eighth step he was met with craving — Tṛṣṇā — though not from where he expected.
Of the three cravings, the craving for sensual pleasures was essentially non-existent in him. That fire had never burned very strongly. He had always been more interested in understanding things than in possessing them.
The craving of becoming was different. He did carry this — but not in the way most people did. It was not ambition for power or status or rank. It was something quieter and more stubborn. The desire to leave proof of his existence. To know that he had not lived in vain. That his life had bought something good for the world even in some small way.
It keeps you perpetually unsatisfied with the present, he observed, because you are always chasing a future version of yourself that will finally have done enough.
'Why do I wish to leave a mark?' he asked himself. 'Why do I want to be acknowledged — letting people judge a life that was not easy to begin with, so they can leave a good remark? Rating my life as if it were an experience on a menu. They did not live what I lived. They cannot. So on what principle do they judge me? Are they enlightened? Do their principles hold more weight than mine? I believe mine. You believe yours. As long as I live by mine, it is enough. Their acknowledgment was never the measure.'
The craving of non-becoming was subtler still — and in some ways the most honest of the three to examine. As a philosopher, even an amateur one, he had read enough to know what nihilism was. He had not been untouched by it.
The desire to escape. To dissolve. To cease.
He saw now that this was precisely what had led him here — the desire to escape a world that had become unbearable. He had left an entire planet. He had crossed the void. That was not wisdom at the time. That was flight wearing the face of fate.
He would no longer escape. Not from this, not from anything.
Rejection and avoidance are never the answer. To hate a version of yourself or your life is still a form of attachment — you are still giving it power, still trapped in the cycle of reaction, still spinning inside the wheel by pushing against it rather than walking through it.
'To move toward equanimity — observing life as it is, without trying to forcefully become something new or erase what currently exists — this is the way,' Li Chen said, and stepped onto the thirty-sixth step.
---
Throughout these steps — from the hell realm's anger and hatred, through the hungry ghost realm's greed and craving — he had come to understand the three marks of existence not as philosophical propositions but as direct experience.
Impermanence — Anicca. Nothing holds. Not pain, not joy, not the self that experiences either.
Suffering — Dukkha. Not merely pain but the pervasive unsatisfactoriness of clinging to what cannot be held.
Non-self — Anattā. There is no fixed thing at the centre of experience doing the experiencing. There never was.
In understanding these three marks he shed the delusion that had generated suffering across two lifetimes. The hungry ghost realm was behind him. Greed and craving, examined fully, released.
And with them — two more fetters broke.
Doubt — Vicikicchā — dissolved. There had always been a part of him that wondered whether any of this was real. Whether the path led anywhere. Whether understanding was possible at all or just another form of grasping. Now he knew. Not because someone told him. Because he had walked far enough to see the path with his own feet. Doubt requires a gap between you and the truth. The gap had closed.
Attachment to rites and rituals — dissolved before it could even form. He had never believed in superstition or empty ceremony to begin with. This fetter had nothing to grip in him. It fell away without resistance.
Three fetters broken. Self-view. Doubt. Attachment to rites and rituals.
He had reached Sotāpanna — Stream Entry. The first of the four stages of enlightenment. The one who has entered the stream is guaranteed to reach the far shore. The wheel is not yet done with him — but it is done deceiving him.
His three fires — hatred, greed, and delusion — not extinguished yet, but seen through. And what is seen through loses the power to consume.
For one breath he caught a glimpse of Nirvāṇa.
Not a vision. Not a light. A cessation — the most complete silence he had ever known, beneath all sound, beneath all thought, beneath the river of consciousness itself. The unconditioned. The unborn.
'There is an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned,' he said quietly, his voice steady and low. 'If there were not that unborn — no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned.'
Then — before he could grasp it, before the mind could turn it into a concept and cage it — it was gone.
What remained in its wake was a stillness that felt less like something achieved and more like something remembered.
His body began to shine — faintly, from within, as though a lamp had been lit somewhere deep in his chest. Above his head, at the crown where Baihui had cracked open at the nineth step, three shapes began to form. Not fully. Not completely. The vaguest outline of three flowers hovering above him, their petals half-suggested, half-dissolved — present for one breath, gone the next.
Three flowers at the crown.
In that same moment he felt his essence, qi, and spirit stir simultaneously — as though three sleeping things had opened their eyes at once. A sensation arose, clear and certain: if he wished, he could call upon the heavens right now to grant him spiritual roots and enter qi condensation. The heavens would answer. He felt this with no uncertainty.
He did not move.
He knew — with the same clarity — that roots granted this way, at this stage, in this body, would be of low grade. The timing was wrong, his karma is not fully cleansed and he did not accumlate enough karma for his high grade roots. The foundation would be flawed. A man who understood formations well enough to see through them would not now rush forward and plant a poor one simply because the door had opened.
The door would still be there when he was ready.
He pushed the bead back and stepped forward.