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TRICYCLE RETREAT BY DAVID R. LOY

As a complex religious tradition, or groupof traditions, Buddhism has a lot to sayabout the natural world. Passages inmany Buddhist texts reveal sensitivity tothe beauties of nature and respect for itsvarious beings. A good example is the

Jataka tales (birth stories) that describethe previous lives of the Buddha before hebecame the Buddha. In many of them heis born as an animal, and in some of thebest-known tales the Buddha sacrificeshimself for lower animals, such asoffering his rabbit body to a weak tigressso that she can feed her starving cubs.Such fables challenge the duality usuallyassumed between humans and natureas if we were not part of nature! Theysuggest that the welfare of every livingbeing, no matter how insignificant it mayseem to us, is spiritually important and

WHAT CAN BUDDHISM CONTRIBUTE TO OUR

UNDERSTANDING OF THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS?

Healing Ecology

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deserving of our concern. All beings inthe Jatakas are able to feel compassion forothers and act selflessly to help ease theirsuffering. In contrast to a Darwiniansurvival of the fittest, which is oftenused to justify our abuse of other species,its stories offer a vision of life in which weare all interconnected, parts of the same

web of life, and therefore also inter-responsible, responsible for each other.

This compassion is not limited to theanimal realm. If we can believe thetraditional biographies, the Buddha wasborn under trees, meditated under trees,experienced his great awakening undertrees, often taught under trees, andpassed away under trees. Unsurprisingly,he often expressed his gratitude to treesand other plants. Some later Buddhisttexts explicitly deny that plants have

sentience, but the Pali Canon is moreambiguous. In one sutra, a tree spiritappears to the Buddha in a dream,complaining that its tree had beenchopped down by a monk. The nextmorning the Buddha prohibited sanghamembers from cutting down trees.Monks and nuns are still forbidden fromcutting off tree limbs, picking flowers,even plucking green leaves off plants.

Yet great sensitivity to nature is hardlyunique to Buddhism. So what specialperspective, if any, does Buddhism offerto our understanding of the biosphere,and our relationship to it, at this criticaltime in history when we are doing ourutmost to destroy it?

To answer that question, we have togo back to a more basic question: what isreally distinctive about Buddhism? The


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four noble (or ennobling) truths are allabout dukkha, and the Buddha empha-sized that his only concern was endingdukkha. To end our dukkha, however,

we need to understand and experienceanatta, our lack of self, which seen fromthe other side is also our interdependence

with all other things.

There are different ways to explainanatta, yet fundamentally it denies ourseparation from other people and fromthe rest of the natural world. Thepsychosocial construction of a separateself in here is at the same time theconstruction of an other out there, that

which is different from me. What isspecial about the Buddhist perspective isits emphasis on the dukkha built into thissituation. Basically, the self is dukkha.

One way to express the problem isthat the sense of self, being a construct, is

always insecure, because inherentlyungrounded. It can never secure itself,because there is no-thing that could besecured. The self is more like a process, ora function. The problem with processes,however, is that they are always temporal,necessarily impermanentbut we dont

want to be impermanent, something thatis changing all the time. We want to bereal! So we keep trying to ground

ourselves, often in ways that just makeour situation worse. For Buddhism theonly true solution lies in realizing ournonduality with others and under-standing that our own well-being cannotbe distinguished from their well-being.

Does this basic insight about theintimate connection between sense of self

and dukkha also apply to the sense ofseparation between ourselves and others?The issue here is whether separate self =dukkha also holds true for our biggestcollective sense of self: the dualitybetween us as a species, Homo sapiens,and the rest of the biosphere.

If this particular parallel betweenindividual and collective selves holds,there are two important implications.First, our collective sense of separationfrom the natural world must also be aconstant source of collective frustration

for us. Secondly, our responses to thatalienation, by trying to make ourcollective species-self more realin thiscase, by attempting to secure or self-ground ourselves technologically andeconomicallyare actually makingthings worse.

Western civilization developed out ofthe interaction between Judeo-Christian-ity and the culture of classical Greece.

Greek culture emphasized our uniquenessby distinguishing the conventions ofhuman society (culture, technology, andso on) from the rhythms of the natural

world. What is important about thisdistinction is the realization that

whatever is social convention can bechanged: we can reconstruct our own

societies and attempt to determine ourown collective destiny.

Today we take that insight forgranted, yet its not something that mostpremodern, traditionally conservativesocieties would have understood.

Without our sense of historical develop-ment, they have usually accepted theirown social conventions as inevitablebecause also natural. This often served to

justify social arrangements that we nowview as unjust, but there is nevertheless apsychological benefit in thinking that

way: such societies shared a collectivesense of meaning that we have lost today.For them, the meaning of their lives wasbuilt into the cosmos and revealed bytheir religion, which they took forgranted. For us, in contrast, the meaningof our lives and our societies has becomesomething that we have to determine forourselves in a universe whose meaning-fulness (if any) is no longer obvious. Even


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if we choose to be religious, we todaymust decide between various religiouspossibilities, which diminishes thespiritual security that religions havetraditionally provided. While we have afreedom that premodern societies did nothave, we lack their kind of socialsecurity, which is the basic psychological

comfort that comes from knowing onesplace and role in the world.

In other words, part of the richcultural legacy that the Greeks be-queathed the Westfor better and

worseis an increasing anxiety aboutwho we are and what it means to behuman. There is a basic tension betweensuch freedom (we decide what to valueand what to do) and security (beinggrounded in something greater, which istaking care of us), and we want both. Assoon as one of them is emphasized, we

want more of the other. In general,however, the modern history of the Westis a story of increasing freedom at the costof decreasing security, in the sense thatloss of faith in God has left us rudderless.Thanks to ever more powerful technolo-gies, it seems like we can accomplishalmost anything we want to doyet wedont know what our role is. Thatcontinues to be a source of great anxiety,not only for us individually but col-lectively. What sort of world do we wantto live in? What kind of society should wehave? If we cant depend on God to tellus, we are thrown back upon ourselves,and our lack of any grounding greaterthan ourselves is a profound source ofsuffering. This helps us to understand

why our collective sense of separationfrom the natural world is a continualsource of frustration. The stronger ouralienation from nature, the greater ouranxiety.

This brings us to the second implica-tion mentioned earlier: our collectiveresponse to this collective dukkha is justmaking things worse. First, lets remem-ber how things go wrong individually.

We usually respond to the delusion of aseparate self by trying to make that sense

of self more realwhich doesnt workand cant work, since there is no such selfthat can be isolated from its relationships

with others. Since we dont realize this,we tend to get caught up in viciouscircles. I never have enough money or

power, Im never famous enough, attractiveenough.

When we think about our collectiveresponse from this perspective, I thinkthe motivation becomes clear. Lackingthe security that comes from knowingones place and role in the cosmos, wehave been trying to create our ownsecurity. Technology, in particular, is ourcollective attempt to control the condi-tions of our existence on this earth. Wehave been trying to remold the earth sothat it is completely adapted to serve ourpurposes, until everything becomessubject to our will, a resource that we

can use. Ironically, though, this hasntbeen providing the sense of security andmeaning that we seek. We have becomemore anxious, not less. Thats becausetechnology can be a great means, but initself its a poor goal.

Sooner or later, one way or another,we will bump up against the limits of thiscompulsive but doomed project of endlessgrowth. Since our increasing reliance ontechnology as the solution to lifesproblems is itself a large part of theproblem, the ecological crisis does not callfor a primarily technological response.Dependence on sophisticated, ever morepowerful technologies tends to aggravateour sense of separation from the natural

world, whereas any successful solutionmust involve accepting that we are part ofthe natural world. That, of course, alsomeans embracing our responsibility forthe well-being of the biosphere, becauseits well-being ultimately cannot bedistinguished from our own well-being.

The solution does not lie in returningto nature. We cannot return to nature,because we have never left it. That way ofdescribing the natural world is dualistic;it dichotomizes between us and where weare located. The environment is notmerely the place where we live and act,for the biosphere is the ground from

which and within which we arise. Theearth is not only our home, it is ourmother. In fact, our relationship is evenmore intimate, because we can never cutthe umbilical cord. The air in my lungs,like the water and food that pass through

my mouth, is part of a great system thatdoes not stop with me but continuallycirculates through me. My life is adissipative process that depends upon andcontributes to that never-ending circula-tion. Eventually I too will be food for

worms.Any genuine solution to the ecologi-

cal crisis must involve something morethan technological improvements. If theroot of the problem is spiritual, thesolution must also have a spiritualdimension. And again, this does notmean a return to premodern religiousconviction, which is impossible for ustoday. Buddhism shows another way,

which de-emphasizes the role of dogmaand ritual. The Buddhist approach isquite pragmatic. The goal of theBuddhist path is wisdom in service ofpersonal and social transformation.

When we meditate, for example, we arenot transforming ourselves. We arebeing transformed. Quiet, focusedconcentration enables something else to

work in us and through us, somethingother than ones usual ego-self. Thisopens us up and liberates a deepergrounding within ourselves. Our lack ofself is what enables this process; it freesus from the compulsion to secureourselves within the world. We do notneed to become more real by becoming

wealthy, or famous, or powerful, orbeautiful. We are able to realize ournonduality with the world because weare freed from such fixations.

Although living beings are number-less, the bodhisattva vows to save themall. He or she assumes the grandestpossible role, on a path that can nevercome to an end. Although such acommitment is not compulsory, it followsnaturally from realizing that none ofthose beings is separate from oneself. Wediscover the meaning we seek in theongoing, long-term task of repairing therupture between us and Mother Earth,our natural ground. That healing willtransform us as much as the biosphere.

David R. Loy is a professor, writer, and Zen

teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan tradition of

Japanese Zen Buddhism. His books includeA

Great Awakening: Buddhist Social Theory and

The World is Made of Stories. This article was

adapted from Money, Sex, War, Karma: Notes

for a Buddhist Revolution by David R. Loy

2008. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom

Publications, wisdompubs.org.

To participate in David Loys retreat

Evolution, Ecology, and Emptiness:

Buddhist Social Ethics in Contemporary

Life , visit tricycle.com.

more atTRICYCLE.COM

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