Karma and the Emergence Widespread Disease: Agency in the Pandemic Discourses of Tibet

The COVID-19 pandemic involved the simultaneous outbreak of fever, pneumonia, and other related manifestations of disease in human communities throughout the world. Human agency must have contributed to its spread, but karma alone is also insufficient for explaining this and other widespread disease outbreaks. Indeed, early Buddhist scriptures explain that karma is just one among many other factors that contribute to the emergence of disease, and karmic acts such as violence and the persecution of the Buddhist order are both causes of and caused by disasters like famine and widespread disease. Building upon these precedents, the Four Tantras describes a degenerate age in Tibet, during which perverse human actions will disturb pathogenic beings. Rather than simply trace widespread disease to culpable humans and the karma of spillover events, however, this paper highlights the interlinked agency of human and non-human beings featured in the pandemic discourses of Tibet.