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

In recent years, the origins of human diseases have been traced to intimate encounters with other species. Over the past five years, for example, explanations for the COVID-19 pandemic have often focused on exoticized wet markets and meats (Lynteris, “The Imperative Origins of Covid-19” [2020]: 25; Keck, “Cryopolitics of Covid-19” [2021]), despite a lack of definitive evidence. Starting in January and February, 2020, Tibetan-language blogs and social media channels also circulated posts about the potential consequences of consuming meat from bats and other seemingly pathogenic animals. “For hundreds of years, Tibetans culture has said that bats have virulent diseases and therefore they should not be consumed,” reads a bilingual Tibetan- and Chinese-language post from February 2, 2020, on the Tibet Channel (Thu bhod ’phrin lam) on Facebook. Indeed, an association between human and animal diseases has persisted throughout Tibetan and other Buddhist sources for centuries and even millennia. Rather than represent a timeless concern regarding infection from inherently dangerous animals, however, Tibetan explanations for animal disease have long remained in dialogue with karmic, spectral, and other etiologies (van der Valk, “The Resurgence of a Tibetan Medical Hauntology” [2024]). In the pandemic discourses of Tibet, in other words, during an encounter between potentially culpable human vectors and exotic animals, diseases emerge from an interconnected web of agency, including that of beings both seen and unseen.

A classic explanation for disease in Buddhist discourse is, of course, karma. Countless Buddhist scriptures include narratives of morally meaningful actions and their pathogenic and salubrious consequences across lifetimes (Granoff, “Cures and Karma II,” [1998]). Disease, according to this etiology, is the result of sinful acts and similarly moralistic interventions are therefore necessary to cure and prevent it. Even among these relatively early examples of etiologies in Buddhist sources, however, karma is neither the sole cause of nor the sole cure for disease. Indeed, in the Pali Discourse to Sīvaka, for example, the Buddha explicitly refutes an exclusively karmic etiology. Instead, he explains, disease can be caused by eight distinct factors: each of the three humors, their combination, seasons, improper care, assault, and finally the “ripening of kamma as the eighth” (Jones, “Illness, Cure, and Care,” in Buddhism and Medicine [2017]: 5–6). The implication, of course, is that diseases caused by humoral imbalances should be treated with effective medicines and not simply with ritual or moral interventions. Around this same time, Buddhist communities also composed ex eventu prophecies about the role of disease in the eventual extinction of the Buddhist order. The Candragarbha Sūtra, for example, famously describes the “semblance of the true doctrine” (Skt. saddharma-pratirūpaka) as a time when “human diseases, animal diseases, and famine will arise” (Nattier, Once upon a Future Time [1991]: 241). During these desperate times, the monastic community will lose its discipline and their royal supporters will lose their faith, culminating in karmic acts of violence and persecution, as well as further sufferings from drought and disease. Even if karma is not the sole cause of disease in Buddhist discourse, the Buddhist order is predicted to disappear during a future period of sin, famine, violence, and, of course, widespread disease.

By the time that the Four Tantras (Rgyud bzhi) was composed in Tibet over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholars had already instituted this relationship between karma, widespread disease, and the degenerate age in Tibetan pandemic discourses. “During the final five hundred years [of the Buddhist order], people will behave perversely due to the power of their desires” (Rgyud bzhi dpe bsdur ma [2010]: vol. 2, 382), explains a chapter on “fever”  (rims = Skt. jvara) in the Four Tantras. After outlining the violent behaviors of both monastic and lay practitioners, in an allusion to Remati and perhaps others, the Four Tantras explains that these perverse behaviors will disturb ḍākinī and mother goddesses, who will then spread their pathogenic breath to cause widespread disease in human communities. The Four Tantras also mentions that fever can be caused by the nyen (gnyan), an unseen and potentially pathogenic being, usually as the result of expanded agricultural activity during times of famine. The plowing of new fields and the chopping of old trees, for example, will disturb the earth nyen, wood nyen, and others, who will then spread deadly diseases. In these and other examples found throughout the Four Tantras, the consequence of widespread disease is linked to the karmic cause of inappropriate behavior performed by destitute humans, but these passages does not emphasize the direct relationship between cause and effect that is usually a feature of karma. Instead, the perverse behaviors of humans disturb powerful and unseen beings all around them, who then causally link immoral acts to the emergence of widespread disease. Unlike the model presented in the Discourse to Sīvaka above, therefore, in Tibetan pandemic discourse the ultimate cause of all widespread disease is indeed karma, but its emergence is mediated by a complex web of interdependent agents whose activities ultimately result in the widespread violence, death, and disease of the degenerate age.