Angulimala is a serial killer wearing a necklace of his victims' fingers when the Buddha walks calmly into his path. He ordains, becomes gentle, and then spends the rest of his life being stoned in the street by people whose relatives he murdered — and the Buddha tells him to bear it, because that is his karma ripening. The story refuses both easy endings: transformation is real and total, and consequences are not cancelled by it. In Southeast Asia he is invoked, of all things, as a protector of women in childbirth.