Chakra: Form and Function

An essay by Haruno Sakura

What is chakra?

Sit down and buckle up, children, for I am about to learn you a thing.

Before we go any further, I would like to impress upon you that people who think they are smart are complete fools. You want to know why? Because we get bored. Why read chapter one of an introduction when we can skip to the juicy bits? Why listen to someone explain something we have no idea about when we could guess? Could experiment? Wouldn't that be so much more interesting?

If you want to write a realistic horror film, kill the genius first. Trust me.

Now, chakra. One of my teachers would be quick to tell you that chakra isn't mysterious, it simply is. If you think it's mysterious, that just means you don't understand it. Right, I'm totally on board with this. But you want to know what fatal mistake I made?

I guessed.

I hate not understanding things, so without even thinking about it, I rack up on assumptions. Tons. I don't even notice I'm doing it, that's the scary part.

Want to know what I assumed chakra was? Energy. Seems reasonable, right? I wasn't even wrong! The main mistake I made was all of the background assumptions I had about how energy worked. When I think of energy, I think of steam engines. I think of a kid throwing a ball. I think of a boulder rolling down a hill. Just, bam! Thing, plus energy, equals thing doing a thing. Simple! Obvious!

And since I had this assumption so close to heart, I didn't even bother adding all the other things I knew about chakra. I knew that intent changed what chakra does. I knew that chakra came in different forms, depending upon that intent, and the origin of the chakra itself. And you know what I thought? That can't be right! These people must just be superstitious fools!

I didn't even think it directly. I was entirely under the impression that I respected the knowledge of the people around me. And my brain assumed they were fools anyway. I've spent my entire life training myself to know exactly what my mind was doing, and I still made this mistake.

And that's how I almost died.

Let's back up a bit. Let's take all this giant mess, and pick it apart. Let's find the glaringly obvious thing I was missing, just because I felt too smart to ask. Or to flip back to the introductory section of all those big, huge books I read.

So. Chakra. It's energy, and it changes depending on origin and intent. You can use it to perform jutsu, by focusing your body's energy in certain formations and concentrating on an outcome. You can use it to heal, by sharing your chakra with an underlying intent to right something gone awry. You can use it to increase the force of a punch, use it to strengthen a blade, use it to stick yourself to a wall.

The human body, all living things, and even non-living things contain chakra.

The chakra of the body contains different varieties.

Chakra has its own word; we do not call it "energy".

Why? How can the chakra know to act in this way?

As it turns out, for the same reason electrical and chemical pulses in your brain can turn into a thought. For the same reason a computer can spit out information by plugging it in and running electricity through precisely placed silicone and metal.

Chakra is information that hasn't been processed yet.

Want to know how I found out? By taking a fistful of "fixing" chakra and applying it directly to 1) a seal on my forehead that is specifically in place to regulate my chakra, and 2) the (dysfunctional) brain behind it.

Oops.

In conclusion, I'm the worst. Please give this essay an F in order to pay proper respects. Thank you for attending my DED Talk.

A/N: A bit short, but it fit, and I figured we could all use a little something right now. Also, when I began writing this, it was originally a proper essay. Before remembering that it was written by Sakarin "I have never cared what a teacher thought" Hirano. (Maybe someday I'll write out her textbooks properly as a side-story type deal.) And as much as I hate "explaining" the story too much in notes: she is being a little too harsh on herself here, and she's mad at herself for not-quite the right reasons. But she is very much a fourteen year old girl who is far too smart for her own good. The perspective of the adults around her will come up in the next chapter.