Non-human Karmic Collectives

According to the Sāṃkhyakārikā, each individual puruṣa (self) is joined with prakṛti (material nature) for many lifetimes before attaining liberation. These various incarnations, taking form from Brahmā to a blade of grass, are categorized as divine, animal, or human. The animal (“horizontal”) creation is fivefold, elaborated in the Gauḍapādabhāṣya as domesticated animals, wild animals, birds, reptiles, and inanimate objects. In all forms of creation, suffering exists through inherent nature. While a human birth is precious in our ability to seek liberation from the cycle of rebirth, we are also uniquely positioned to extend compassion to all beings, as strongly advocated in Jainism. As the 22nd Jina Neminātha profoundly witnessed on his wedding day, compelling him towards renunciation, our pain is reflected in the cries of animals. However, as this paper will explore, in our interconnected karmic web this relationship is reciprocal—the animal creation can teach and support us too.

This paper analyzes lived Buddhist relationships with nonhuman animals to extend and complicate existing notions of collective karma. It begins by unpacking how individualized notions of karma function to both justify both exploitation and liberation of animals in canonical Buddhism. Then, it analyzes a selection of historical and contemporary accounts of Buddhist relationships with animals to show how these narratives often departed from these canonical ideas in favor of more collective understandings of karma. Drawing from these examples, it then theorizes how a more-than-human collective karma can inform present day justice initiatives. It develops the idea of “more-than-human collective karma” as a potential tool for social and animal justice, and argues that the kinds of collective karma we find in the lived expressions of Mahāyāna Buddhism can be used to articulate a unique Buddhist approach to ethics, justice, and freedom inclusive of human and nonhuman animals alike. 

This paper examines two passages from the Unimpeded Sound Tantra (Sgra thal ‘gyur)—a key Great Perfection (Rdzogs chen) Buddhist text—and one of its earliest known 12th-century commentaries. These passages describe a distinctive Buddhist practice of sky divination, in which practitioners interpret signs in the elements (earth, water, fire, and wind) manifesting as omens in the sky. These practices are said to reveal insights into a community’s collective karma, understood as its reservoirs of virtue and likelihood of positive or negative destinies.

The theme of community emerges through multiple interwoven examples: in a narrative describing the interdependence between human and more-than-human beings; in human engagements with elemental ecologies; and in the relational role of the contemplative practitioner who performs divinations for others. This paper reflects on how these materials conceptualize shared karma across human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships, presenting contemplative life as embedded in overlapping social domains.

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.