 |
| The universe isn’t a scoreboard of merit; it’s a canvas of chaos. My body, my self, and my story are not on trial—they simply are. |
I replied to him then and there. But the incident stayed with me, not because it hurt me, but because it showed me how thoroughly prejudice can hide behind the language of spirituality.
So I am writing this letter, not to that one man, but to the wider world.
I shall begin with a basic question. What kind of universe are we actually living in?
The man who spoke to me imagined a God who sits above the world, keeping score, and delivering physical disabilities as punishments for moral failures. This is a very human idea of God. We tend to imagine divinity in our own image because that is the easiest thing to do.
But one of the oldest texts of this land asks a different kind of question altogether.
The Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation from the tenth mandala of the Rigveda, does not tell us how the universe was made. It asks whether anyone really knows.
Nasadiya Sukta, Rigveda 10.129.7
नासदासीन्नो सदासीत्तदानीं नासीद्रजो नो व्योमा परो यत् । किम् आवरीवः कुह कस्य शर्मन्नम्भः किमासीद् गहनं गभीरम् ॥
Na asad asin, no sad asin tadanim; na asid rajo, no vyoma paro yat. Kim avarivah, kuha kasya sharmann; ambhah kim asid gahanam gabhiram.
"Neither non-being existed then, nor being. Neither the atmosphere nor the sky beyond it. What moved? And where? Under whose protection? Was there water, deep and unfathomable?"
The hymn closes with a remarkable admission. It suggests that even the overseer of the highest heaven may not know how all of this came to be. This is not a weakness. This is philosophical honesty. It tells us that certainty about the ultimate nature of things is not easily available to anyone.
If the Vedas themselves approach creation with this degree of humility, then the man who looked at my body and declared with full confidence that he knew the mind of the universe was claiming more than the Rigveda ever claimed. That is worth pausing on.
The second problem with the punitive view of disability is that it assumes the body tells us something definitive about the person inside it.
Indian philosophy, across several schools, says the opposite.
The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 22, is one of the clearest statements of this position.
Bhagavad Gita 2.22
वासांसि जीर्णानि यथा विहाय नवानि गृह्णाति नरोऽपराणि । तथा शरीराणि विहाय जीर्णा-न्यन्यानि संयाति नवानि देही ॥
Vasansi jirnani yatha vihaya navani grhnati naro 'parani; tatha sarirani vihaya jirnany anyani samyati navani dehi.
"Just as a person sets aside worn-out garments and puts on new ones, so the embodied soul discards worn-out bodies and takes on new ones."
The body, on this view, is a garment. What the man in that meeting did was look at my garment and draw conclusions about me. This is philosophically shallow. A torn shirt does not tell you anything about the person wearing it.
Advaita Vedanta goes further. It describes three layers of the human being: the gross body (Sthula Sarira), the subtle body (Suksma Sarira), and the causal body (Karana Sarira). The Atman, the true self, is distinct from all three. Whatever condition the gross body is in, the Atman remains unaffected.
Samkhya philosophy draws the same boundary from a different direction. It distinguishes between Purusha, which is pure consciousness, and Prakriti, which is matter. The body belongs entirely to Prakriti. Purusha is the silent witness. It does not change when Prakriti changes. A physical disability is a condition of Prakriti. Purusha is untouched by it.
To blame the soul for the condition of the body is to confuse the two. The Samkhya Karika makes this separation with considerable care, and rightly so, because the confusion between consciousness and matter is precisely the source of much unnecessary suffering.
Shakespeare wrote that all the world is a stage and all the men and women merely players. Indian philosophy has a parallel in the concept of Lila, the divine play, and Maya, the creative force that produces the forms of this world. The individual soul takes on a role in this vast theatre. The body is the costume for that role.
This is not merely a consoling metaphor. It has a precise philosophical implication. An audience member who believes that the actor playing a beggar is genuinely impoverished has failed to understand what theatre is. Similarly, a person who looks at a disabled body and treats it as moral evidence has failed to understand what the body actually is.
The story of Ashtavakra illustrates this with some force. Ashtavakra was born with deformities across eight parts of his body. The name itself means "eight bends." When he entered King Janaka's court as a young boy, the assembled scholars laughed at him.
Ashtavakra laughed back. Then he told them why he was laughing. He said he had come expecting an assembly of wise men, but had found instead a gathering of people who could see only skin. He used the term charma-drishti, which means vision limited to the surface. He contrasted this with atma-drishti, which is the capacity to perceive the self beyond the body.
Then he gave them a question worth sitting with.
Ashtavakra Gita 1.1
यदा देहं पृथक् कृत्य चिति विश्राम्य तिष्ठसि । अधुनैव सुखी शान्तो बन्धमुक्तो भविष्यसि ॥
Yada deham prthak krtya citi visramya tisthasi; adhunaiva sukhi santo bandhamukto bhavishyasi.
"When you set aside the body and rest in pure awareness, you become, at that very moment, peaceful, free, and whole."
And he offered this image to the scholars: the shape of the temple does not alter the sky inside it. The architecture of the pot does not affect the space within it. The condition of the body does not determine the quality of the consciousness residing in it.
King Janaka recognised the soundness of this and accepted Ashtavakra as his teacher. The entire subsequent dialogue between them forms the Ashtavakra Gita.
Even if one accepts the doctrine of karma, the punitive interpretation of it is not philosophically sound.
Karma means action, and the broader principle is that volitional actions have consequences. But several Indian and adjacent philosophical traditions have been careful to point out that karma is not the only force operating in the world.
The Buddhist texts are useful here. In the Sivaka Sutta (Samyutta Nikaya 36.21), a man named Moliya Sivaka puts exactly this question to the Buddha. He asks about the view that everything a person experiences is caused by past karma. The Buddha's response is direct: he says this view goes beyond what can actually be known, and that there are many causes of human experience.
He lists physical causes such as bile, phlegm, and wind, as well as climate, accident, and careless behaviour. His point is that the physical world operates according to its own laws, and not every physical event is a moral statement.
The broader framework in this tradition speaks of five orders of natural law, called the Niyamas. Karmic causation, Kammaniyama, is only one of them. Physical causation (Utuniyama) and biological causation (Bijaniyama) function independently of moral action. A person born with a genetic condition has been acted upon by biological law, not necessarily by karmic retribution.
Jainism holds a similar position. It classifies karma into eight types and does not require any supervising deity to dispense it. Karma, in the Jain view, is more like a natural law, similar to physics, than a system of divine punishment. And Jain philosophy is explicit that no god, prophet, or external authority can intervene in the soul's journey. The soul moves by its own effort.
The Carvaka school, which was a materialist tradition, rejected karma and the afterlife entirely and argued that physical events arise from the nature of matter itself. One does not have to accept Carvaka materialism in full to recognise what it contributes to the conversation: the idea that the world follows natural laws was always part of Indian philosophical debate, and the punitive karma view was always contested.
Having said all of this, the practical question remains. How does one act in a world that sometimes treats the disabled body as a site of moral inference?
The Bhagavad Gita's answer, in the doctrine of Nishkam Karma, is to act without attachment to the fruits of action.
Bhagavad Gita 2.47
कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन । मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि ॥
Karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadacana; ma karma-phala-hetur bhur ma te sango 'stv akarmani.
"You have a right to action alone, never to its fruits. Let not the fruits of action be your motive, nor let there be any attachment to inaction."
Swami Vivekananda, in his commentary on Karma Yoga, observed that a true Karma Yogi works because it is in his nature to give, not because he expects anything in return. He noted that because such a person does not ask for anything, he is also beyond the reach of misery.
This is not passivity. It is a very particular kind of engagement with the world. One does one's work because it is right to do it. One does not wait for the world to confirm one's worth before acting.
I do not write this letter out of bitterness towards the man who spoke to me at that meeting. I write it because the view he expressed is philosophically weak and causes real harm to real people.
It is weak because it assumes a human-like God who distributes physical punishment, which the Nasadiya Sukta does not support. It is weak because it mistakes the body for the self, which Advaita Vedanta, Samkhya, and the Ashtavakra Gita all explicitly reject. It is weak because it treats karma as the sole operating principle in the universe, which the Buddhist Niyama framework and the Sivaka Sutta both contradict.
And it causes harm because it teaches disabled people that their bodies are evidence against them. This is precisely the charma-drishti that Ashtavakra identified in King Janaka's court two thousand years ago, and it has not improved with age.
My body is what it is. Nobody chose it for me, and I did not choose it for myself. It could have been anyone's body. Things in this universe do not always follow a neat moral logic. They simply happen. This body simply fell to me. And the self that inhabits it is not on trial.
