Disabilities and Karma

In many Buddhist communities, including within my own, it is sometimes said that disability arises as the karmic result of past-life karmic consequences. Although usually spoken without ill intent, this view can be deeply painful and misleading to those with disabilities, especially those with disabilities that impact their participation in the dharma and/or sangha. It oversimplifies the complexity of karmic causation, ignores the universal reality of disability in human life, and risks placing blame on those who are already experiencing suffering. The following reflections offer a more accurate and compassionate understanding aligned with the Jonang view of interdependence, emptiness, and vast Bodhisattva compassion.

Within the Jonang understanding of karma and dependent origination, causes and conditions are infinitely layered. No single event, especially not a disability; can be traced to one's past-life action. Disability arises within a vast nexus of conditions: biological predispositions, environment, collective karma, societal structures, illness, trauma, and the universal process of aging.

Modern data shows that nearly 20% of people live with disability at any moment, and by old age, 99% of people will experience one. This makes disability a shared human experience, not a sign of moral fault. To claim it stems from one past-life reduces the subtlety of karmic causality and contradicts the nuanced interdependence.

Such simplifications also obscure the compassionate intention behind the Dharma. When disability is framed as a personal karmic flaw or punishment, it inadvertently creates harm: it blames the individual and ignores the real conditions that shape embodiment. This can generate shame and alienation rather than liberation. Jonang teachings emphasise that conditioned appearances have no inherent nature, they arise through mutual dependence.

Disability, like all phenomena, is empty of self-existing meaning; it does not reveal a person’s ethical worth or spiritual capacity. Buddha never taught that suffering should lead to judgment, only that it should inspire understanding.

From the Jonang perspective, disability is better understood as an expression of samsaric embodiment, an appearance arising within dependent origination. When we mistake samsaric conditions for evidence of someone’s past-life karmic consequences, we obscure the profound truth that all beings possess the same luminous potential. Disability does not punish, diminish or lessen that; if anything, it highlights the fragile and interdependent nature of human life.

Our task is not to judge the karmic origins of someone’s embodiment but to respond with care, service, and the wish to alleviate suffering.

When we support disabled people without blame, we embody the true intention of the teachings: recognising the emptiness of harm, the equality of all beings’ Buddha-nature, and the responsibility to act with great compassion. This view honours both the subtlety of karma and the dignity of those who live with disability.