Giving

"Radical what?"

"Buddhism," Valeria repeated. "They're a special kind of monk."

Hesta frowned slightly. "...They really are monks?"

"Yeah."

Both fell silent. In the distance, the Military Police were setting up cordons around several strongholds the Crimson Palm Sangha had occupied. Ambulances came down another road, taking the injured to nearby hospitals.

"I'd seen reports about them in the newspapers before coming to District 12... but until now, they'd always been active in the mountains, forests, and outskirts," Valeria said. "I never imagined we'd run into them in Saint Lom today..."

"Monks do this kind of thing too," Hesta murmured. "That's so strange."

"I don't understand it either."

"Actually, it's quite easy to understand," an unfamiliar voice said.

Hesta and Valeria turned around at the same time. An elderly woman sat at a table one table away from them. An empty coffee cup stood on her table, while the sweet biscuits and sugar packets beside it remained unopened. A woven burlap vegetable basket rested at her feet, bright green celery stalks leaning diagonally against its rim, their fresh, dewy leaves drooping down in a broad cluster.

Hesta turned halfway toward her, resting her left hand on the back of her chair. "How so?"

"All conditioned things are impermanent; all that is tainted is suffering. What a monk pursues throughout her life is liberation—for herself and for all sentient beings—from the suffering of birth, death, and rebirth... To achieve that, she must shatter 'ignorance,' escape the state of blindness and unknowing, and cast off the marks of her own foolishness.

"In the past, a Buddhist practitioner believed that if she could rely on her own enlightenment to extinguish the three evil fires of greed, anger, and delusion, she could be reborn into 'unabiding nirvana' and never again fall into the cycle