"The karmic wind raged fiercely, blowing all living beings into the sea of old age, sickness, and death."
-Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom
In Ancient Western Buddhism, it was believed that the karmic wind in the world caused people to age and cut short the lives of all living beings.
Nor was this notion unique. Daoist classics also held that wind could drive the stars and constellations in their courses, blow seas into mulberry fields, and blow flesh and blood into dry bones. Both the Fundamental Scripture of Heavenly Gang, Earthly Xun, and Human Spirit Manifesting Divinity and the Secret of Summoning Wind and Conveying Fortune Talismans, which Cheng Xinzhan cultivated, contained such accounts.
There were even legends of a "Wind of the Five Declines and Calamities" between heaven and earth. Wherever it blew, vegetation withered and human lives were cut short. This was the killing authority of heaven and earth.
Daoists regarded using wind to cut short lifespans and hasten the passage of time as a calamity, an authority belonging to heaven and earth alone, unseen unless a great tribulation descended upon the world.
Cultivating this divine wind of calamity entailed grave karmic consequences. The slightest carelessness could leave the cultivator prematurely aged. Legend held that only the Queen Mother of the West, a ruler of the Ancient Heavenly Court, could command this wind.
But the Queen Mother of the West was an ancient deity from ages long past, and her legacy had declined by the present day. What survived mostly concerned female cultivators nourishing life and ascending to immortality, or the path of western Gold Essence. No records of the calamitous wind had been heard of.
Beyond this, Daoist cultivation also held that aging was caused not only by calamitous winds outside the body. Once pathogenic