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sunshine_challenge prompt, neither stone is something that I know much about, so expect even more wandering afield than usual, and neither is a Steven Universe character, either. It also seems prudent to state up front that a lot of what I'll be talking about is from the perspective of a nonpractitioner with a lay scholarly interest. So I might screw something up, and if I do, let me know, please.
The bonus gem is hematite, which drives its name from being the color of blood (that's the name, "blood-stone") and being an iron oxide (which gives you additional blood associations.) Doing a quick wiki dive about both stones, it turns out that they sit well on a spectrum on ends far away from each other. Kyanite's use in our world is as a stone that resists high heat, is electrically resistive, and is selectively hard (there's an alignment of its crystalline structure such that you can scratch it with a steel needle if you draw the needle parallel to the alignment, and you can't if you draw the needle perpendicular), and so is extremely useful in the production of ceramics, which need high heat to come into existence. Hematite, on the other hand, doesn't do so great in very high heat, is electrically conductive, and a lot less tough on principle. Primarily, hematite-infused clay (as ochre) is useful for pigmenting things red.
And if you went looking for hematite's primary magical application as a gemstone, you'll find all sorts of things, of course, but many of the results are about balancing energies in the body and as I've seen on at least one search engine result, passion and handling blood-related issues. Which is conveniently cherry-picked to help my narrative point, of course. If I do it right, you won't notice at all that I'm helping to frame and guide how you think and feel about these things.
So, between the two, you have a certain opposites dynamic: blue-red, hard-soft, resistive-conductive, mind-body. The last of these, whether mind-body or body-soul, has been a bedrock of philosophical and religious thinking for at least as long as we've had people writing down their thoughts about the cosmos and what role humans might have in it. For those who worship the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, the origin story of humanity is that said Being fashioned a human from clay and then breathed life (or a soul) into him, taking the clay and crafting something in the image of the deity. (And then the bit with the gaining of knowledge forbidden to the man and the woman and the exile that starts the long chain of misery and joy that is the record of humanity.) The humble origins of the human are recalled and admonished to Catholics on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten fast, with the phrase "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." (Or, at least that's what it was when I was still practicing. It may have changed since then.) Several strains of Christianity take this idea of the body as temporary vessel and the soul as the thing of eternal concern and run with it, with the promise of perfected bodies in the world to come and the sometimes over-concern with the question if whether a soul has been recorded in the ledger for the cause of light or condemned to eternal fire and damnation in Hell. (Cosmologies differ on whether Hell is indeed eternal torment or whether at the end of the universe, even Hell's souls will be redeemed and brought into the presence of the deity for eternal bliss and happiness. Catholicism considers the existence of purgatory, an in-between state where a soul that is sinful but not damned performs purgation of sin through various means, assisted by the prayers of the living, before ascending to the heavens. Christianity's various denominations are a fascinating study unto themselves, even as a small slice of the variety of religious and spiritual practice.)
In any case, when the mind-body duality is usually invoked, the body is almost always the loser, considered the place of base instinct and bereft of the structures and learning that make humans what we are. The animals have bodies, but no minds, and they behave accordingly, or so it goes. ("Mindless" and "mindful" in the language, for example, highlight this distinction, but we'll get there in a bit.) Many a philosopher champions the exercise of mind to control body, so as to rise above our animal instincts into civilization and refinement. You can take that to its logical extreme to produce Star Trek's Vulcans, a race of humanoids that made a grand bargain with themselves to follow Logic as the way of rising above the emotional and violent entities they were. (I give Logic a majuscule here intentionally, even if doing so might raise an eyebrow from the Vulcans, as they do not likely conceive of their pathway as religious or spiritual at first examination, even if at least to this outside observer, it has several of the hallmarks of such.) At this point, I recommend to you![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
sixbeforelunch's Pi'maat series, which you will need an AO3 account to view, as an excellent meditation on how Logic is sufficient but imperfect as a system to run a society on. It talks about healing from the horror of war, about Logic in relation to a body that isn't always cooperative, about abuses of trust, about the revenge the body takes against the mind in pon farr, and so much more that skillfully illuminates both why Vulcans continue to follow Logic even as it can't cover all cases and all situations. Like kyanite, Logic is sometimes harder or softer depending on whether or not the breaking force is applied parallel to or perpendicular to its particular arrangement.
An equally likely extreme of prioritizing mind over body produces the Confucian conception of rectification of names and the societal structure it imposes, where higher-ups in the structure are expected to be more perfect models of Confucianism, such that their underlings will strive to be like them, and in doing so, provide examples of proper behavior for their underlings to strive for, moving in the direction of having perfect alignment all throughout the structure so that the structure itself is also perfected as the people on the structure perfect themselves. (Which allows words to be perfected so that the correct word is always used to describe something, and names of things, actions, roles, and people correspond to their function, so that when a name is applied, the function of the name is always perfectly executed.) And that leads to my favorite example of Confucian values at work, Avatar: the Last Airbender's Fire Nation. Ministers and Admirals and peasants and the Fire Lord at the top, and when everything is moving in harmony, the Fire Nation moves together toward achieving their goals.
"But Silver, they're the bad guys in A:tLA." Precisely. The Fire Nation is also an excellent example of the fragility of a Confucian system. Fire Lord Ozai is out of alignment with Confucian goals (after all, if you achieve perfect governance and society, you never have to fight wars, because your potential opponents will surrender immediately to your superiority and ask to become part of your society), and because the Fire Lord is out of alignment, the entire country is similarly out of alignment. Which produces both the hotheaded Zuko, eventually ritually banished and given an impossible task, and the sadistic Azula, who is in better alignment with her father and better espouses the values of the Fire Nation in the way she treats Mai and Ty Lee. The Fire Nation is extremely strong and difficult to defeat on matters that oppose them on their strengths, but like kyanite, threats that align with their system, like a corrupted Fire Lord and his corrupted Ministers, Generals, and Admirals are much more difficult to defeat and excise. (You could argue that the Fire Nation is much more hematite than kyanite, of course, and you would probably be right.)
Speaking of Zuko, he's often the character of contrasts. He's trying to be a perfect Confucian and failing at it, and he doesn't know why he's failing at it until significant personal growth happens. He's been given a Daoist sage in his Uncle Iroh (he's definitely a sage, his presence in the Spirit World of Korra confirms for me that he achieved the Daoist goal of immortality, even if not in a corporeal bodily form) who is both gently trying to show him the flaws in the system and also trying to get Zuko to move away from seeing the mind and the body as separated entities (more on that later.) Zuko even has a very literal moment of Red Oni, Blue Oni, disguising himself in his opposite colors and trying to engage in vigilante justice that's cold, calculating, and as far away from the hotheaded Prince as possible so nobody suspects it's him. He's very bad at it. And it's that hotheadedness that I think drives a lot of the Zutara (Zuko /Katara) pairing, because both of the primary waterbenders of both series (Katara and Korra) are brash hotheads, compared to what the Water Tribes (and an observing public) expect of them to be defensive, nurturing, healing, and motherly. They're not having any of that, and Katara's willingness to go with her passions and flow (how Daoist of you, as well as on point for water) puts her in contrast to the society she lives in (and that her brother, Sokka, is trying to be hypermasculine in because of his own issues with growth and manhood) and in contrast to Zuko and the structure he's trying to uphold. (Katara and Zuko are both hematite in a kyanite society, sometimes literalized by waterbenders being able to bend the water in a person's blood when they're sufficiently overcharged.)
For contrast to the philosophies that seek to separate mind and body and make the mind the only important one, there are also more than a few philosophies and religions that seek to do away with the dichotomy between the mind and the body altogether and move towards an integrated whole that is in harmony or discord with the universe. We can even stay in the Avatar universe to get some good examples. Uncle Iroh, who I am convinced is a Daoist sage, seems extremely in harmony with the core principle of Daoism rendered as wu-wei, or "effortless action." (According to The Other Wiki, wu-wei is also potentially Confucian, describing a state where everyone is in harmony and working advising to their role without having to strive for it or put in effort to control themselves toward perfection, so Iroh's perfect as a sage, regardless of how you look at him.) Laozi and Mengzi use the term to oppose to the rigidity and structure of the Confucians and Legalists, instead understanding the perfect state as the one that goes with the flow, as it were, rather than trying to impose a specific method and practice. Uncle Iroh isn't trying to become the Fire Lord, even though he clearly could oppose Ozai and potentially win political power. Instead, he acts in seemingly random and nonsensical ways that obscure his true acts, producing effects that seem to arise naturally, unconnected to himself. Iroh impresses upon his nephew the need for manners, but not for unquestioning obedience. His "accidental" actions often result in desired outcomes, but he looks like a doddering old man while doing it. Most prisons he lands in are ones he could get out of, but that would require tipping his hand about how strong he actually is. He's "The Dragon of the West," and a member of a secret society trying to help the Avatar, and he runs a tea shop and plays pai sho when he's not being dragged along by his nephew. He looks like he's soft and fat and stupid, and he is anything but. Zuko eventually picked up on how much of it is an act, but it takes him actually observing what is happening in front of him, instead of confirming his biases, before he does. (Toph, the blind earthbender, might be the one who twigs to Iroh the fastest, perhaps because she's not impeded by her eyes.)
Iroh's pretty subtle, though, and we're not supposed to notice him until it's obvious that he's been playing everyone, including the audience, for suckers. The more obvious contrast is with the Air Nomad society, who seem to be patterned after Buddhists, with shaved heads, saffron robes, and other visual indications and practices of various schools of Buddhism, like vegetarianism and mediation. (Which school of Buddhism they're most clearly patterned after stays relatively obscure, as it's basically "whatever Aang remembered and passed on to his children" that constitutes Air Nomad practice in Korra. The leader of the Air Nomads being Tenzin, possibly after Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, might be a clue as to which school, though. Or it might be the right name, but the implications stop there.)
Buddhist conceptions of nirvana and karma and reincarnation are present in the Avatar universe. They're downplayed more in Korra, because she relates to the world more through her Water Tribe upbringing instead of Aang's Air Nomad traditions, but Aang struggles throughout his series between mind and body, between being the Avatar and being Aang. Mind and body as separated entities, with the discipline of the mind overcoming the temptations of the body. Aang seems entirely too concerned with his karma as Avatar, but he's also the titular last airbender, so he lacks any mentors or other practitioners that could help him on his journey except the previous Avatars that he has connection to through part life memories. And he's being asked to save the world after being blamed for letting it get into this state through an accident of self-preservation.
Karma could be described as the cosmic residue of an entity's actions, I suppose, and the accumulation thereof, whether virtuous or vicious, determines what any given being will reincarnate as for their next life, whether as an animal, an insect, a human, a god, and so forth. Karma is, at least in Buddhism, the result of attachments to the world, and the actions that come forth from those attachments. From ignorance, desire, and hatred, people classify and divide and become attached to things, and from those attachments, there are intentions that create actions and those actions create karma. The accumulation of karma continues the process of rebirth.
Perhaps I should let Master Yoda sum up karma, even though what he describes is applicable to more than just fear:
Humans are special creatures in the cosmology of Buddhism because humans are the entities where it is the easiest to achieve the state of nirvana, a complete one-ness with the cosmos, usually after death of their human form. (The achievement of this state is usually translated as "enlightenment," as understanding nirvana enough to achieve it often involves adjusting how a human perceives themselves and the universe.) For a US audience, the most popular and easily noticed school of Buddhism is the Chan school, usually rendered nowadays as Zen, as it traversed from China through Japan and then from there outward, and the name became localized to Japan. Zen is often memorable for its koans, often contradictory, paradoxical, or nonsensical statements and questions designed to snap the mind out of its beliefs about the world into a true understanding that the divisions of the world are artificial, including things like the concept of "self" as a unique being different from all the other beings in existence. Zen philosophy is as prestigious as treatise and text and as accessible as children's stories or one-page comics. It also acknowledges that it might take a lifetime of practice toward creating what is often translated as "Beginner's Mind" to achieve the singular moment of enlightenment. (Slightly comforting, actually, that. And also, for the most part, how Korra ends up learning and then relearning how to access the spiritual parts of her abilities, starting with airbending.)
One of the common practices across Buddhist schools, including Zen, is meditation, and to a US audience, it's usually packaged as "mindfulness meditation" or in that context (often in contrast to "mindlessness," reinforcing a duality that gets discarded on the way to enlightenment). The point of mindfulness is to consciously pull the mind away from the ten thousand things that demand attention, intention, and action and examine them, their causes, and their requests and, usually, to let them float by, rather than pursuing them and the emotional states they can bring with them, or getting wrapped up in those same things. It's not easy to detach from those things, and there's usually forgiveness and understanding recommended when the meditator catches themselves having pursued a thought instead of examining it dispassionately and allowing it to exist, but without any kind of need to act on it. During meditation, or out in the world. Here Comes A Thought (here's the obligatory Steven Universe reference) is a visualization and song on the practice of the meditation. Estelle and AJ sing it beautifully, and the visuals that come with it are excellent references for the conception of the thoughts and how they can become either overwhelming or how they can be followed with a singular focus to the existing of everything else, and how either of those pathways can generate feelings of greed, hate, or anger, and the suffering that comes with that.
Getting back to Aang, his central conflict is between achievement of nirvana, becoming truly one with the Avatar State and being able to use the fiullest extent of its powers, including ones that are extremely destructive, in the service of balancing the world and stopping Fire Lord Ozai from a rampage using the overcharge to his firebending provided by Sozin's Comet, or to forsake the path of nirvana, remain able to access the Avatar State, even if not as fully powered as it can be, and try to defeat Ozai because of the attachments he has to others, like Katara, who he's had a crush on since the beginning that might be developing into a full-blown mutual love between them. Aang ultimately doesn't achieve the ultimate Avatar State, and they do defeat Ozai, and Aang goes on to have at least one child, Tenzin, who inherits airbending, and the wheel of the Avatar turns to reincarnate as Korra, and people remember Aang pretty fondly for the rest of his life. Even the ones who were only sometimes amused by his antics. (And, well, Aang's a child, barely a teenager, and being asked to make this kind of decision. Even the Buddha made it to middle age before making his declaration that this would be his last lifetime.) Still, unlike Zuko, unlike Ozai, unlike Azula, even though he's not embracing nirvana, Aang imparted to his children much more of a balance between mind and body. Tenzin didn't take it, because he felt all the pressure of carrying on Aang's legacy. His grandchildren, however, seem to have it figured out (Jinora eventually learns to astrally project), as do many of the new acolytes that he gains over the course of the show. And, after all, if the point is to recognize that mind and body is an artificial dualism, like all the other ones, then it's not kyanite opposed to hematite, but kyanite and hematite working together in harmony with themselves and the cosmos around them. (Which, y'know, Korra and the spirit world and the revelation of how the Avatar came to be, as a fusion of a body and a spirit, and, again, Garnet and Stevonnie both, as the characters composed of two entities in harmony with each other, even with their individual extremes.)
Yeah, that one went places, didn't it? And that's without really leaning into exploring man-woman dualism at all, either through the philosophical, religious, or Avatar and Steven Universe lenses.
sunshine_challenge prompt, neither stone is something that I know much about, so expect even more wandering afield than usual, and neither is a Steven Universe character, either. It also seems prudent to state up front that a lot of what I'll be talking about is from the perspective of a nonpractitioner with a lay scholarly interest. So I might screw something up, and if I do, let me know, please.Kyanite typically ranges from light to dark blue (which gives it its name, from the Greek kyanos) and usually appears in sprays of bladed crystals. It is usually associated with calming, grounding energy, and sometimes linked to clarity and logic as well. It's a lesser-known gemstone that you won't often see in jewelry stores, but can be a beautiful, steadying presence among flashier stones.
The bonus gem is hematite, which drives its name from being the color of blood (that's the name, "blood-stone") and being an iron oxide (which gives you additional blood associations.) Doing a quick wiki dive about both stones, it turns out that they sit well on a spectrum on ends far away from each other. Kyanite's use in our world is as a stone that resists high heat, is electrically resistive, and is selectively hard (there's an alignment of its crystalline structure such that you can scratch it with a steel needle if you draw the needle parallel to the alignment, and you can't if you draw the needle perpendicular), and so is extremely useful in the production of ceramics, which need high heat to come into existence. Hematite, on the other hand, doesn't do so great in very high heat, is electrically conductive, and a lot less tough on principle. Primarily, hematite-infused clay (as ochre) is useful for pigmenting things red.
And if you went looking for hematite's primary magical application as a gemstone, you'll find all sorts of things, of course, but many of the results are about balancing energies in the body and as I've seen on at least one search engine result, passion and handling blood-related issues. Which is conveniently cherry-picked to help my narrative point, of course. If I do it right, you won't notice at all that I'm helping to frame and guide how you think and feel about these things.
So, between the two, you have a certain opposites dynamic: blue-red, hard-soft, resistive-conductive, mind-body. The last of these, whether mind-body or body-soul, has been a bedrock of philosophical and religious thinking for at least as long as we've had people writing down their thoughts about the cosmos and what role humans might have in it. For those who worship the Being Represented By The Tetragrammaton, the origin story of humanity is that said Being fashioned a human from clay and then breathed life (or a soul) into him, taking the clay and crafting something in the image of the deity. (And then the bit with the gaining of knowledge forbidden to the man and the woman and the exile that starts the long chain of misery and joy that is the record of humanity.) The humble origins of the human are recalled and admonished to Catholics on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten fast, with the phrase "Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return." (Or, at least that's what it was when I was still practicing. It may have changed since then.) Several strains of Christianity take this idea of the body as temporary vessel and the soul as the thing of eternal concern and run with it, with the promise of perfected bodies in the world to come and the sometimes over-concern with the question if whether a soul has been recorded in the ledger for the cause of light or condemned to eternal fire and damnation in Hell. (Cosmologies differ on whether Hell is indeed eternal torment or whether at the end of the universe, even Hell's souls will be redeemed and brought into the presence of the deity for eternal bliss and happiness. Catholicism considers the existence of purgatory, an in-between state where a soul that is sinful but not damned performs purgation of sin through various means, assisted by the prayers of the living, before ascending to the heavens. Christianity's various denominations are a fascinating study unto themselves, even as a small slice of the variety of religious and spiritual practice.)
In any case, when the mind-body duality is usually invoked, the body is almost always the loser, considered the place of base instinct and bereft of the structures and learning that make humans what we are. The animals have bodies, but no minds, and they behave accordingly, or so it goes. ("Mindless" and "mindful" in the language, for example, highlight this distinction, but we'll get there in a bit.) Many a philosopher champions the exercise of mind to control body, so as to rise above our animal instincts into civilization and refinement. You can take that to its logical extreme to produce Star Trek's Vulcans, a race of humanoids that made a grand bargain with themselves to follow Logic as the way of rising above the emotional and violent entities they were. (I give Logic a majuscule here intentionally, even if doing so might raise an eyebrow from the Vulcans, as they do not likely conceive of their pathway as religious or spiritual at first examination, even if at least to this outside observer, it has several of the hallmarks of such.) At this point, I recommend to you
An equally likely extreme of prioritizing mind over body produces the Confucian conception of rectification of names and the societal structure it imposes, where higher-ups in the structure are expected to be more perfect models of Confucianism, such that their underlings will strive to be like them, and in doing so, provide examples of proper behavior for their underlings to strive for, moving in the direction of having perfect alignment all throughout the structure so that the structure itself is also perfected as the people on the structure perfect themselves. (Which allows words to be perfected so that the correct word is always used to describe something, and names of things, actions, roles, and people correspond to their function, so that when a name is applied, the function of the name is always perfectly executed.) And that leads to my favorite example of Confucian values at work, Avatar: the Last Airbender's Fire Nation. Ministers and Admirals and peasants and the Fire Lord at the top, and when everything is moving in harmony, the Fire Nation moves together toward achieving their goals.
"But Silver, they're the bad guys in A:tLA." Precisely. The Fire Nation is also an excellent example of the fragility of a Confucian system. Fire Lord Ozai is out of alignment with Confucian goals (after all, if you achieve perfect governance and society, you never have to fight wars, because your potential opponents will surrender immediately to your superiority and ask to become part of your society), and because the Fire Lord is out of alignment, the entire country is similarly out of alignment. Which produces both the hotheaded Zuko, eventually ritually banished and given an impossible task, and the sadistic Azula, who is in better alignment with her father and better espouses the values of the Fire Nation in the way she treats Mai and Ty Lee. The Fire Nation is extremely strong and difficult to defeat on matters that oppose them on their strengths, but like kyanite, threats that align with their system, like a corrupted Fire Lord and his corrupted Ministers, Generals, and Admirals are much more difficult to defeat and excise. (You could argue that the Fire Nation is much more hematite than kyanite, of course, and you would probably be right.)
Speaking of Zuko, he's often the character of contrasts. He's trying to be a perfect Confucian and failing at it, and he doesn't know why he's failing at it until significant personal growth happens. He's been given a Daoist sage in his Uncle Iroh (he's definitely a sage, his presence in the Spirit World of Korra confirms for me that he achieved the Daoist goal of immortality, even if not in a corporeal bodily form) who is both gently trying to show him the flaws in the system and also trying to get Zuko to move away from seeing the mind and the body as separated entities (more on that later.) Zuko even has a very literal moment of Red Oni, Blue Oni, disguising himself in his opposite colors and trying to engage in vigilante justice that's cold, calculating, and as far away from the hotheaded Prince as possible so nobody suspects it's him. He's very bad at it. And it's that hotheadedness that I think drives a lot of the Zutara (Zuko /Katara) pairing, because both of the primary waterbenders of both series (Katara and Korra) are brash hotheads, compared to what the Water Tribes (and an observing public) expect of them to be defensive, nurturing, healing, and motherly. They're not having any of that, and Katara's willingness to go with her passions and flow (how Daoist of you, as well as on point for water) puts her in contrast to the society she lives in (and that her brother, Sokka, is trying to be hypermasculine in because of his own issues with growth and manhood) and in contrast to Zuko and the structure he's trying to uphold. (Katara and Zuko are both hematite in a kyanite society, sometimes literalized by waterbenders being able to bend the water in a person's blood when they're sufficiently overcharged.)
For contrast to the philosophies that seek to separate mind and body and make the mind the only important one, there are also more than a few philosophies and religions that seek to do away with the dichotomy between the mind and the body altogether and move towards an integrated whole that is in harmony or discord with the universe. We can even stay in the Avatar universe to get some good examples. Uncle Iroh, who I am convinced is a Daoist sage, seems extremely in harmony with the core principle of Daoism rendered as wu-wei, or "effortless action." (According to The Other Wiki, wu-wei is also potentially Confucian, describing a state where everyone is in harmony and working advising to their role without having to strive for it or put in effort to control themselves toward perfection, so Iroh's perfect as a sage, regardless of how you look at him.) Laozi and Mengzi use the term to oppose to the rigidity and structure of the Confucians and Legalists, instead understanding the perfect state as the one that goes with the flow, as it were, rather than trying to impose a specific method and practice. Uncle Iroh isn't trying to become the Fire Lord, even though he clearly could oppose Ozai and potentially win political power. Instead, he acts in seemingly random and nonsensical ways that obscure his true acts, producing effects that seem to arise naturally, unconnected to himself. Iroh impresses upon his nephew the need for manners, but not for unquestioning obedience. His "accidental" actions often result in desired outcomes, but he looks like a doddering old man while doing it. Most prisons he lands in are ones he could get out of, but that would require tipping his hand about how strong he actually is. He's "The Dragon of the West," and a member of a secret society trying to help the Avatar, and he runs a tea shop and plays pai sho when he's not being dragged along by his nephew. He looks like he's soft and fat and stupid, and he is anything but. Zuko eventually picked up on how much of it is an act, but it takes him actually observing what is happening in front of him, instead of confirming his biases, before he does. (Toph, the blind earthbender, might be the one who twigs to Iroh the fastest, perhaps because she's not impeded by her eyes.)
Iroh's pretty subtle, though, and we're not supposed to notice him until it's obvious that he's been playing everyone, including the audience, for suckers. The more obvious contrast is with the Air Nomad society, who seem to be patterned after Buddhists, with shaved heads, saffron robes, and other visual indications and practices of various schools of Buddhism, like vegetarianism and mediation. (Which school of Buddhism they're most clearly patterned after stays relatively obscure, as it's basically "whatever Aang remembered and passed on to his children" that constitutes Air Nomad practice in Korra. The leader of the Air Nomads being Tenzin, possibly after Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, might be a clue as to which school, though. Or it might be the right name, but the implications stop there.)
Buddhist conceptions of nirvana and karma and reincarnation are present in the Avatar universe. They're downplayed more in Korra, because she relates to the world more through her Water Tribe upbringing instead of Aang's Air Nomad traditions, but Aang struggles throughout his series between mind and body, between being the Avatar and being Aang. Mind and body as separated entities, with the discipline of the mind overcoming the temptations of the body. Aang seems entirely too concerned with his karma as Avatar, but he's also the titular last airbender, so he lacks any mentors or other practitioners that could help him on his journey except the previous Avatars that he has connection to through part life memories. And he's being asked to save the world after being blamed for letting it get into this state through an accident of self-preservation.
Karma could be described as the cosmic residue of an entity's actions, I suppose, and the accumulation thereof, whether virtuous or vicious, determines what any given being will reincarnate as for their next life, whether as an animal, an insect, a human, a god, and so forth. Karma is, at least in Buddhism, the result of attachments to the world, and the actions that come forth from those attachments. From ignorance, desire, and hatred, people classify and divide and become attached to things, and from those attachments, there are intentions that create actions and those actions create karma. The accumulation of karma continues the process of rebirth.
Perhaps I should let Master Yoda sum up karma, even though what he describes is applicable to more than just fear:
Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.
Humans are special creatures in the cosmology of Buddhism because humans are the entities where it is the easiest to achieve the state of nirvana, a complete one-ness with the cosmos, usually after death of their human form. (The achievement of this state is usually translated as "enlightenment," as understanding nirvana enough to achieve it often involves adjusting how a human perceives themselves and the universe.) For a US audience, the most popular and easily noticed school of Buddhism is the Chan school, usually rendered nowadays as Zen, as it traversed from China through Japan and then from there outward, and the name became localized to Japan. Zen is often memorable for its koans, often contradictory, paradoxical, or nonsensical statements and questions designed to snap the mind out of its beliefs about the world into a true understanding that the divisions of the world are artificial, including things like the concept of "self" as a unique being different from all the other beings in existence. Zen philosophy is as prestigious as treatise and text and as accessible as children's stories or one-page comics. It also acknowledges that it might take a lifetime of practice toward creating what is often translated as "Beginner's Mind" to achieve the singular moment of enlightenment. (Slightly comforting, actually, that. And also, for the most part, how Korra ends up learning and then relearning how to access the spiritual parts of her abilities, starting with airbending.)
One of the common practices across Buddhist schools, including Zen, is meditation, and to a US audience, it's usually packaged as "mindfulness meditation" or in that context (often in contrast to "mindlessness," reinforcing a duality that gets discarded on the way to enlightenment). The point of mindfulness is to consciously pull the mind away from the ten thousand things that demand attention, intention, and action and examine them, their causes, and their requests and, usually, to let them float by, rather than pursuing them and the emotional states they can bring with them, or getting wrapped up in those same things. It's not easy to detach from those things, and there's usually forgiveness and understanding recommended when the meditator catches themselves having pursued a thought instead of examining it dispassionately and allowing it to exist, but without any kind of need to act on it. During meditation, or out in the world. Here Comes A Thought (here's the obligatory Steven Universe reference) is a visualization and song on the practice of the meditation. Estelle and AJ sing it beautifully, and the visuals that come with it are excellent references for the conception of the thoughts and how they can become either overwhelming or how they can be followed with a singular focus to the existing of everything else, and how either of those pathways can generate feelings of greed, hate, or anger, and the suffering that comes with that.
Getting back to Aang, his central conflict is between achievement of nirvana, becoming truly one with the Avatar State and being able to use the fiullest extent of its powers, including ones that are extremely destructive, in the service of balancing the world and stopping Fire Lord Ozai from a rampage using the overcharge to his firebending provided by Sozin's Comet, or to forsake the path of nirvana, remain able to access the Avatar State, even if not as fully powered as it can be, and try to defeat Ozai because of the attachments he has to others, like Katara, who he's had a crush on since the beginning that might be developing into a full-blown mutual love between them. Aang ultimately doesn't achieve the ultimate Avatar State, and they do defeat Ozai, and Aang goes on to have at least one child, Tenzin, who inherits airbending, and the wheel of the Avatar turns to reincarnate as Korra, and people remember Aang pretty fondly for the rest of his life. Even the ones who were only sometimes amused by his antics. (And, well, Aang's a child, barely a teenager, and being asked to make this kind of decision. Even the Buddha made it to middle age before making his declaration that this would be his last lifetime.) Still, unlike Zuko, unlike Ozai, unlike Azula, even though he's not embracing nirvana, Aang imparted to his children much more of a balance between mind and body. Tenzin didn't take it, because he felt all the pressure of carrying on Aang's legacy. His grandchildren, however, seem to have it figured out (Jinora eventually learns to astrally project), as do many of the new acolytes that he gains over the course of the show. And, after all, if the point is to recognize that mind and body is an artificial dualism, like all the other ones, then it's not kyanite opposed to hematite, but kyanite and hematite working together in harmony with themselves and the cosmos around them. (Which, y'know, Korra and the spirit world and the revelation of how the Avatar came to be, as a fusion of a body and a spirit, and, again, Garnet and Stevonnie both, as the characters composed of two entities in harmony with each other, even with their individual extremes.)
Yeah, that one went places, didn't it? And that's without really leaning into exploring man-woman dualism at all, either through the philosophical, religious, or Avatar and Steven Universe lenses.
