If one kills a person or steals, karma will require payment either now or in the future. Please read the following story of how retribution is meted out for past crimes.
During the Song Dynasty, a villager named Feng Si in Fuzhou in what is now eastern Jiangxi Province, whose family was too poor to survive, fled to Yihuang County with his wife and six sons and joined a large family to help them plow and labor in the fields and govern their farm.
One day, Feng Si asked about his fate at a fortune-telling booth. The fortune teller said: “What your family did in a previous life has been revealed, and although you are usually very cautious, it’s already too late. If and when your family’s dogs give birth to two black males, misfortune will strike; I don’t know about the rest.”
The grandfather kills two merchants
After that, Feng Si was constantly worried about his fate. He secretly told others: “My father, who made his living by burning ceramics, once borrowed 20,000 yuan of yarn and silk from two merchants and agreed on a repayment date. When it was due, he refused to pay it back, so the merchants went to the pottery kiln to force my father to pay back the money in person.
“The place was very remote and deserted, with no people nearby. Because of the loan repayment, my father quarreled with the two merchants and later killed them. He put their bodies in the kiln and burned them so that no one outside would know about it. My father’s life soon ended, and he didn’t realize his children and grandchildren would have to pay retribution for this evil deed!”
The following year, the black dog that Feng Si’s family kept gave birth to two male dogs, and although he hated them very much, he did not dare to kill them. Later that year, the fifth son was arrested for stealing property, and the sixth son had an abscess on his thigh that the doctor considered incurable.
He was in so much pain that he could not bear it. Then, not long afterward, he hanged himself, and his wife followed him.
The second and fourth sons were tattooed on the face because they had committed robbery. Ultimately, Feng Si’s family was scattered, leaving him begging on the street. It had been 40 years since his father killed the merchants.
