Decisive Karma, and the Ten Karma-Paths' Three Fruits

T1606 explains each in turn: decisiveness in the act's own performance means that, once a prior karmic force has already fixed a certain continuity of ripened result in motion, this present life is bound, by that same fixed force, to actually carry out this specific act — a determinacy so strong, T1606 states pointedly, that not even a buddha's own great supernormal power can prevent it, since a fixed cause's own power simply continues transforming into its fixed result regardless. Decisiveness that a result will be received at all is simply the deliberately-volitional karma already discussed in Part 39 — acts performed out of firmly rooted conviction or distorted reasoning invariably ripen. And decisiveness as to timing is what the next three parts on this site will examine in detail: whether an act ripens in this very life, in the immediately following life, or only after that.

T1606 spells out the outflow fruit for each of the ten unwholesome paths with striking specificity: killing yields a short lifespan once reborn human; taking what is not given yields chronic poverty; sexual misconduct yields an unfaithful spouse; false speech yields being widely slandered by others; divisive speech yields estrangement from friends and family; harsh speech yields constantly hearing unwelcome words; frivolous speech yields being spoken to without dignity or respect; covetousness yields ever-intensifying craving; ill will yields ever-intensifying hatred; and wrong view yields ever-intensifying delusion. The dominant fruit, meanwhile, plays out in the external world itself: killing yields a world where crops and produce lose their vitality and luster; taking what is not given yields frequent hailstorms and frost damage; sexual misconduct yields excessive dust and grime; false speech yields foul odors pervading the environment; divisive speech yields treacherous, uneven terrain; harsh speech yields salty, barren, unusable soil; frivolous speech yields unpredictable, disordered seasons; covetousness yields scant fruit and harvest; ill will yields bitter-tasting fruit; and wrong view yields fruit that is bitter or entirely absent. Each unwholesome act, on this account, leaves its mark simultaneously on the destiny one is reborn into, the person one becomes within that destiny, and the very world one inhabits.

The wholesome karma-paths' three fruits mirror the unwholesome ones' exactly, item for item and in reverse: a long lifespan instead of a short one, wealth instead of poverty, a faithful spouse instead of an unfaithful one, and so on, down to a flourishing, fragrant, fertile world instead of a barren and foul one. The treatise leaves the wholesome parallels unstated in detail here precisely because the pattern has already been established in full by the unwholesome case just given — each unwholesome fruit's precise reverse is simply the corresponding wholesome fruit.

The attracting/completing distinction is one of this section's most practically important pieces of Abhidharma psychology, and it explains a puzzle anyone might otherwise wonder about: why do two people born into apparently identical circumstances — the same family, the same era — nonetheless live such different lives, one wealthy and content, another poor and miserable within the very same broad social position? The answer, on this account, is that attracting karma determines only the broad rebirth itself (human birth, into roughly this kind of circumstance), while a separate, further layer of completing karma then fills in the specific texture of agreeable and disagreeable experience within that rebirth — meaning a single rebirth is never the product of one uniform karmic cause, but of at least two distinct karmic forces operating at different levels of specificity. The closing four-way combinatorial breakdown (one act/one life, one act/many lives, many acts/one life, many acts/many lives) reinforces the same point from a different angle: there is no fixed one-to-one correspondence between a given deed and a given rebirth, and the ranking rule for which of many accumulated karmas ripens first — by weight, by what is uppermost in the dying mind, by habitual force, or by seniority — gives a concrete, ordered account of how a being's own complex karmic history actually resolves into the single next life that follows it.