Socially Engaged Buddhism

Chapter 6 Ecology

CHAPTER 6 Ecology It is widely felt that there is a great compatibility between Buddhist principles—both concepts and values—and an ecological perspective. Some take this even farther, pointing to ways in which Buddhist thinking opens up new possibilities for ecological thinking. The Engaged Buddhists are among those who are pioneering the exploration of this new area. The Teachings of the Buddha and the Mahayana The concept of interdependence is the most important source in the Buddha’s teachings of the often cited compatibility between Buddhism and an ecological perspective. This concept, also known as dependent origination, points out that everything comes into being through a process of causes and conditions. That which has been caused in turn causes and conditions other things. Existence is thus a great web of interdependence or mutual interpenetration in which it is incorrect to think of things in isolation from each other. Things are immediately implicit in each other. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this by holding up a sheet of paper and asking his students whether they can see in it the cloud, sun, and soil. In other words, the paper comes from the tree, and the tree could not exist without the rain from the cloud, the warmth from the sun, and the minerals from the soil. Through Right Understanding one immediately sees cloud, sun, and soil upon viewing a sheet of paper. The ecological and economic implications of this become clear when we consider, in classic Buddhist fashion, that the reverse is also true: perhaps if the soil is too polluted or the sun’s warmth excessive from being trapped within the atmosphere, there will be no tree and no sheet of paper. Ecology 119 The possibility of there being no tree and no sheet of paper brings up a second crucially important teaching of the Buddha for an ecological perspective. If we were concerned only that there might be no sheet of paper, we would be concerned only with the instrumental value of the tree—that is, its value for humankind, the uses to which we could put it. In Buddhism one part of the view of nature does involve regarding the tree as having instrumental value. That is one of the implications of dependent origination: we constantly draw upon many things in order to live. An instrumental regard of nature is not bad; in fact, it is the source of a great deal of affection and esteem for the natural world in Buddhism. There is a great regard for the Bo tree, beneath which the Buddha attained enlightenment; the Buddha himself praised this tree, and its purported offspring are the sites of devoted pilgrimage. The forest in general has been highly regarded as the site within which forest monks wander; both the challenges and the resources that the forest itself and its denizens offer constitute the very stuff of the practice in this tradition, and, as we shall see, to be at home in the natural world—like a forest monk—is itself an important resource in an age such as ours, in which many people are estranged from nature. Moreover , Buddhist monasteries and temple grounds have often evolved into sites where animal and plant lives are protected and species are preserved, whether intentionally or circumstantially. At the same time, in Buddhism things are also seen as having intrinsic value—that is, they have value in themselves, just as they are, with no reference to their usefulness for oneself and one’s group. Intrinsic value is implied in Theravada teachings and further developed in some Mahayana and East Asian teachings. Certainly the teaching of no-self, fundamental to both Theravada and Mahayana, already implies the most important point: no one of us is the center of the universe. To see things always in an instrumental way—that is, to see things always in terms of their usefulness to oneself—is an egocentric perspective. In objective terms, it is simply not true that other things exist primarily for oneself or for humankind—that is, that their being is well understood if they are considered only in their relation to oneself. The fact that most of us think this way (usually subconsciously) is simply a manifestation of our fundamental ignorance. Buddhist practice is 120 SOCIALLY ENGAGED BUDDHISM all about making this shift from an egocentric perspective to a more objective perspective, and thus it is all about shifting from...