Chinese karma is not the karma of Indian Buddhism, though it descends from it. By the time Buddhist doctrine had filtered through several centuries of Chinese folk imagination, yinguo 因果 — cause and effect — had become something more local: a moral ledger kept with the patience of a Chinese county clerk. Debts accrue interest. Animals remember the human who once mistreated them. Strangers recognize one another from a previous life. The arithmetic is exact, sometimes terrifyingly so, and rarely in a hurry.
The earliest collections — the Tang Records of the Underworld (冥报记) of Tang Lin — are openly didactic, written to convince readers of a Buddhist moral order. By the Qing, in Ji Yun's hands, the genre had cooled into something closer to forensic anecdote: he records the case, names his source, and lets the reader weigh the evidence. Yuan Mei's Zibuyu tilts more skeptical still, and Pu Songling's tales sit in the literary middle, willing to use karma as a structural device for tragedy.
For first-time readers, the short retribution tale — a single act of cruelty and its delayed return — is the cleanest entry. From there, the harder pieces: stories of debts paid across lifetimes, of animals who recognize old enemies in human form, of the slow patience that does not look like justice until much later. Read them not as religious instruction but as a long, sober argument about consequence.
— Editor's note, Cathay Tales
