This conversation has been really helpful, thank you. Here's tentatively what I'm thinking for advancement:
```
A character must resolve at least one Karmic Attachment and bring Karma down to 1 in order to level up and gain (some bonus). If a character would become an ashura, they can instead level down (and Karma defaults to 5).
```
The idea being that you have to gain Karma in order to do stuff, and it empowers you (given the Karma Roll affecting degree of success), but then to ever actually advance, you have to resolve karmic attachments and impair yourself (less likely to fill succeed in any roll). You have to be willing to give up that material attachment. For this to work, resolving Karmic Attachments needs to divest more karma than is accrued by taking the attachment and/or I need to think of other ways Karma can be divested, but I'm ok with that.
And then, I like the idea that you can level down instead of becoming an ashura. It creates a buffer if a character gets in over their head, it's consistent with the themes of the setting, and because you'll be at a high Karma you're not significantly impaired, but it's going to take longer to bring your Karma all the way back down just to level back up to where you were before, making yourself weaker as you lower your Karma, which again feels fitting with the themes. It should be easy to gain Karma or level down, and enticing to do so, and difficult to resolve karmic attachments and divest their Karma. A player must divest their own Karmic Attachments if there is any hope for their character to do so ;).