BUDDHISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT.pdf

I NTRODUCTION

BUDDHISM AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Simon P. James and David E. Cooper

It is often supposed that Buddhist teachings and practices are in line with the

concerns of latter-day environmental thinkers; that Buddhism, in short, is a

distinctively ‘green’ or ‘eco-friendly’ religion. Such was the view expressed, for

example, in inﬂuential works such as the edited collection Dharma Gaia (Badiner

1990).

In retrospect, this earlier conﬁdence in an alliance between Buddhism and

radical or ‘deep’ ecology seems premature. Certainly anyone wanting to maintain

this alliance would have to respond to the sceptical voices raised by, especially,

Lambert Schmithausen and Ian Harris (for example, Harris 2000; Schmithausen

1991). And there remain, moreover, important tasks of clariﬁcation. What precisely

is meant by ‘Buddhism’? After all, Buddhism is a broad church, and it cannot be

assumed at the outset of one’s enquiry that the teachings and practices of

different traditions are all of a piece. What, moreover, is meant by ‘environmental’

concerns? Different environmental thinkers are often committed to very different,

and sometimes diametrically opposed, causes. Is Buddhism supposed to be

‘environmental’ because of its emphasis on compassion for non-human animals?

Or is it committed to promoting the health of wider ecological communities

through acts of wildlife management, such as the culling of overabundant

species? Arguably, it cannot be both.

There is, therefore, much room for work on the broad topic of Buddhism and

the environment, and a need to articulate that topic into a number of more

particular issues that may then be addressed in detail. In this volume we have

gathered together ﬁve new essays that respond to this need and represent the

best recent work in the ﬁeld.

One often hears that Buddhism is ‘green’ on account of the Buddhist

conception of the world; that ‘the Buddhist worldview’, in emphasising the

interconnectedness of all things, including human beings, is singularly ‘eco-

friendly’. In the ﬁrst essay in this volume, Damien Keown takes a different line.

In Keown’s view, Buddhism is in certain respects amenable to environmental

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 8, No. 2, November 2007

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/07/020093-96

q 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940701636075

94 SIMON P. JAMES AND DAVID E. COOPER

concerns; however, this is not on account of its ‘worldview’, but because of its

conception of human life, and, in particular, its account of what it means to live

a good human life. Keown’s suggestion, then, is that the Buddhist dispensation

takes the form of a virtue ethic, similar in certain general respects to the ethical

systems of thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas. To be sure, this claim has

been defended before—for example, in Keown’s own study The Nature of

Buddhist Ethics. But in his essay for this volume Keown extends his earlier work

by drawing out the ‘environmental’ implications of the Buddhist virtues. With

their emphasis on compassion, self-restraint, non-violence, non-greed, and so

on, he suggests that Buddhist teachings provide the basis for an environmental

virtue ethic.

John Holder sees the virtue ethical approach of writers like Keown as

consistent with his own. Yet his essay introduces several interesting new themes.

First, Holder raises the question of whether, on the early Buddhist conception,

humans are regarded as being natural. His answer is an emphatic yes; although he

stresses that the ‘naturalism’ implied is of an ‘emergent’, rather than a ‘reductive’,

sort (which, very roughly, is to suggest that although, according to the teachings

of early Buddhism, all phenomena are natural, not all can be explained in terms of

interactions at the micro-physical level).

In the second part of his paper, Holder builds on his account of naturalism

by considering the ethical implications of the early Buddhist conception of nature.

This conception is often regarded as somewhat pessimistic: for early Buddhism

(one often hears), the natural world is ultimately unsatisfactory, a realm of

impermanence and suffering from which one should seek to escape. Holder

demurs. For early Buddhism, he argues, one is enjoined, not to escape the natural

world, but to learn to regard it without craving. This, however, is not a solely

anthropocentric endeavour, since to achieve this freedom from craving one must

develop certain kinds of ‘environmental’ concern: notably, compassion for non-

human sentient beings, and hence a concern to promote the health of those

habitats, wild or anthropogenic, on which they depend.

Ruben L. F. Habito, by contrast, is more pessimistic about the ‘green’

credentials of early Buddhism. He writes that early Buddhism, with its focus on the

awakening of human beings and its emphasis on the impermanence of all natural

things ‘provides no viable ground to support a positive and caring attitude

toward the environment, from a strictly and properly Buddhist perspective’.

Mahayana traditions, he suggests, provide a rosier (or rather, greener), outlook. In

making his case, Habito considers several Mahayana teachings, including the non-

duality of sams¯ra and nirv¯na (which ‘can pave the way for a positive evaluation

of earthly realities’) and the East Asian conception of ‘the Buddhahood of grasses

and trees’.

In the later sections of his paper, Habito frames our current environmental

situation in terms of some canonical Buddhist teachings. Our modern situation is,

he maintains, one of ‘global dukkha’—of war, poverty and disease, as well as

various environmental ills. Our ﬁrst task must be to awaken to this fact; our

INTRODUCTION 95

second, to identify its root causes in the ethos and institutions of modern life; our

third, to envision the cessation of global dukkha; and our fourth is to take steps to

bring this about.

Like most writers in the ﬁeld, Keown, Holder and Habito focus on the ethical

aspects of our relations with the natural world. With Ian Harris’s paper, however,

we move on to the different, yet related, topic of the aesthetic appreciation of

nature. Harris begins with a brief survey of the role of nature in western art, before

considering Indic attitudes towards the natural world. All this, however, serves as a

prelude to his main theme: the depiction of nature in art inspired by Sino-

Japanese Buddhist traditions. Harris identiﬁes the distinctive features of such art,

including its minimalism (in contrast to the horror vacui evident in much Indic

visual art), its realism (evident, for instance, in Japanese Buddhist mandalas, which

often evoke actual landscapes) and its attention to the everyday (related, perhaps,

to teachings on the non-duality of sams¯ra and nirv¯na). In addition, Harris draws

attention to the socio-political aspects of the topic: the nationalistic motivations

for D. T. Suzuki’s famous writings on ‘the Japanese love of nature’, and, more

generally, the relations between art and the ‘aristocratic values of dominion and

control’.

In the ﬁfth and ﬁnal paper of this volume, Susan Darlington considers

Buddhism, not just in theory, but in practice. Her focus is on the Thai practice of

consecrating areas of forest by symbolically ‘ordaining’ certain prominent trees.

Tree ordination has been used for the purposes of forest conservation in Thailand

since the late 1980s. Despite initial opposition from some more conservative

members of the Sangha, the practice has gone on to do much good, not least for

the local people who depend for their livelihood on the maintenance of

‘community forests’. Now, however, Darlington contends that the practice is

‘increasingly used to support national agendas and to undermine the power of the

rural people whom environmental monks aim to help’. Tree ordination, it seems,

has been appropriated by those in power to serve their own ends. Darlington ends

by suggesting that ‘Unlike tree ordinations, spirit beliefs and local or regional

rituals ... still hold sufﬁcient power and meaning for villagers to serve as focal

points for environmental projects’. Her point raises some interesting questions. If

spirit beliefs and local rituals are good for villagers and good for the forest, should

Buddhists therefore encourage them? It is not clear that they should not. What is

important, surely, is not that people are ‘Buddhists’, but that dukkha is ended. And

now, in the midst of our various environmental crises and the ‘global dukkha’of

which Habito writes, the time is perhaps right for the sensitive employment of

‘skilful means’.

REFERENCES

BADINER , A. H. , ed. 1990. Dharma Gaia: A harvest of essays in Buddhism and ecology.

Berkeley, CA: Parallax.

96 SIMON P. JAMES AND DAVID E. COOPER

HARRIS, IAN . 2000. Buddhism and ecology. Contemporary Buddhist ethics, edited by

Damien Keown. Surrey: Curzon Press.

SCHMITHAUSEN, LAMBERT . 1991. Buddhism and nature: The lecture delivered on the occasion

of the EXPO 1990. An enlarged version with notes. Tokyo: International Institute for

Buddhist Studies.

Simon P. James (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Durham

University, Department of Philosophy, 50 Old Elvet, Durham, DH1 3HN, UK ;

E-mail: s.p.james@durham.ac.uk

David E. Cooper, Department of Philosophy, Durham University, UK.

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