BUDDHISM AND THE NATURAL WORLD
Deep Ecology, Community, and the Dharma
Kamalashila
Talk for WBO Combined Convention, Wymondham College, Norfolk,
8th August 2005
I am not sure why it is, but we seem
to be witnessing a new wave of interest in environmental issues. I remember in the early days of the movement,
concern about the worsening state of the earth was very much in the air. For
example, I remember I was part of the small team building Vajraloka in 1979. Atula was
our boss. And Atula got me to make a
composting toilet. As I remember I
designed it like a huge throne, with a small ladder to take you up to the
seat. Some of you may even have sat upon
it. The actual seat was made from the
same kind of mahogany as was used at the LBC shrine room. And after six to eight months, this wonderful
throne brought forth huge barrels of rich, and quite odourless, dry manure. A very satisfying conclusion, I always thought,
to that whole process. In the early
Vajraloka community we also grew vegetables in the front garden – leeks and
flowers. But as the 80s gave way to the
nineties, compost –etc.– became less and less interesting – even, increasingly,
almost an object of disdain. It seemed
that the more agitated the green activists got, the more disdainful the popular
response was. What became popular was
money, material comfort and personal security.
And for that whole decade, the ethics of nature and the environment
seemed somehow irrelevant.
But now, something seems to be
shifting. Maybe the shift started with
the attack on the Twin Towers. That, and
what followed, has been a deep shock. There now seems some sense that we need to
look for new approaches. More inclusive
approaches to life, approaches that don't depend on isolating ourselves from
underprivileged nations and underprivileged people. Also there’s an uncomfortable awareness of
the damage our way of living has created, a sense that we need to find approaches
that harmonise with the living forces of nature, instead of just isolating
ourselves from them.
No doubt the shift, if there is
one, is different for different people. It
was a bit different for me; it happened over the eighteen month solitary retreat
that I spent in a canvas dome, alone in the midst of wild nature. I went there soon after 9/11. I lived very simply, burning wood, drawing
water from the hillside, and very immediately affected by the sun, rain,
insects, animals, and the wind. That
experience taught me how we always learn from nature, in a very simple way, in a
way I, at least, seem largely to have forgotten. Nature very straightforwardly taught me how, for
example, to let go my preferences, and my need for convenience.
I found that when you live on the
side of a hill, you learn from simple natural facts. For example you often have to go outside into
the weather. You cannot avoid it; you
have to go out to get some more wood, get some water. To go to the toilet or clean your teeth, you
have to go out there. Often that is
quite OK as you can imagine. You want to
be outside. It is beautiful to be living
in a grove of trees, with a view of hills and mountains. Sometimes, though, you feel resistance, and
sometimes, if the weather is very cold or very wet - or you are very ill - there is great resistance. Yet there is no choice. Resistance or no resistance, you just have to
go out there and do it.
After a few months of this,
something shifts. You learn that it
doesn't matter, that it will be OK to go outside even in the snow or the
pouring rain. It is never as bad as you think. Indeed, you start to notice how much your
thoughts actually cause your resistance, actually are your resistance. That one constructs a wall of ideas about how
things are that merely obscures how things are.
Country people sometimes understand
this better I think. In the country, you
have to accept the weather. In the city,
we can feel that nature hardly touches us.
Perhaps that is how human beings have acquired that sense that somehow, we
are more powerful than nature, or even we are something beyond it.
But this seems a very great
mistake. To feel superior or even different
from nature seems a great hubris or arrogance. For Buddhism there is no such
separation. People, animals, insects and
plants all participate, in an amazing diversity of ways, in what is essentially
the same nature. What is that nature? That’s something we need to reflect deeply
about, if we want to try to approach it.
But some kind of understanding of our place in nature seems an essential
basis for gaining insight into reality.
Nature, as I understand it, is not
separate from Buddha Nature. Bugs may be a long way from being Buddhas, but
all beings partake of mind in some form.
The only difference is in realisation of the nature of mind. So we should not reject nature, even subtly,
but revere it as a teacher and expect
insights from it. Of course, to see how
nature is not different from Buddha Nature, we need to appreciate the
connection with nature in the first place.
That is a problem, because most of us, in our present society, are
already quite alienated from it. So it’s
lucky that the dharma is precisely what counters alienation. The dharma is precisely what re-connects us to
our real nature. That is, first of all, with
simple nature – our elemental, embodied,
earth-and-water nature. Secondly, and more
fundamentally, with our Buddha Nature, with the fact that all forms of being
somehow contain the seed of Buddhahood.
My talk today is an exploration of
nature in both these senses. After
my long retreat, I discovered deep ecology, and though I am totally unqualified, I want to share it with you. Because Deep ecology seems, potentially at
least, to be a form of dharma. Certainly
in the sense that it is a way into ultimate reality. And in our time, it seems important that we
find forms of the dharma that address our place in the natural world.
So what’s deep ecology? Well, ordinary ecology is the science of
natural relationships. It’s the study of
all beings’ relations to one another and to the physical environment in which
they live. By studying how all beings relate to one
another, studying them in all their variety of needs and desires, I think one gains
a kind of overview of all life, everywhere.
This could lead to a kind of insight.
However, we tend to use our
scientific knowledge to promote what we human beings want. On the whole, that comes to mean whatever ensures
a comfortable and convenient lifestyle.
So in that way, the potential for insight through an ecological world
view is rather spoiled. Yes, you do get an
overview of universal life, but there’s a
very strong self-serving ego observing it.
As we know, for insight to arise,
the ego has to dissolve. And that’s where
‘deep’ ecology comes in. Because it
looks for a viewpoint on life within which mankind’s needs form just part of
the picture. The whole of life is seen
as an interplay of forces, so one finds a truer, fuller, overview. Deep ecology is simply an exploration. It is not someone’s fixed philosophy. It is a way that anyone can attempt to gain a
deeper viewpoint, and act from it. Obviously
the exploration is still a human construction, but nonetheless one tries to see
things as they are, and with compassion.
It is a vehicle in which one tries to let go human self-cherishing, to
seek deeper truths, undiscovered truths, for the sake of benefiting the
whole of life.
Perhaps in itself, this is still not
quite Buddhism; but for existing Buddhist practitioners, I think this begins to
evoke the perspective of the Mahayana. Ultimately,
it looks like it can evoke even the perspective of simultaneous emptiness and
compassion. For example, some Buddhist
teachers take this perspective very deep indeed, right into anatta, anicca,
and sunyata. For all life forms really
do depend on each other, ultimately, for their existence. We actually define one another; and so, in a
certain sense, we are one another. Here we
start exploring interbeing or interconnectedness. My identity can’t be described as separate
from any being anywhere. In a sense I am
my enemy, because she or he is not separate from me, and has a strong influence
on me. We are all inseparable.
I know such reflections seem
obscure when you’re not in the mood, but that’s inevitable; no one can explain interconnectedness
in a way that everyone will find intellectually satisfying. Like everything, when you look into it, it is
inconceivable and cannot be expressed in words.
The real nature of identity and ownership can be revealed only to the
individual, through deep reflection and meditation. And the experimental method of deep ecology gets
us doing that - looking from the point of view of other beings, imagining what
it is like to be them, looking out for their needs, and avoiding treating them
with violence. Nature becomes the
‘other’ which can enable us to break through self and other. And ‘other’ is not limited merely to other human
beings, though it doesn't exclude them either.
Deep ecology is an ethical perspective that provides insights in our
relations with all others.
An ecologist called Aldo Leopold remarked[1]
on how we have enlarged our ethical sense over the years, and how this has
enhanced human life. Not long ago,
people could be disposed of like property.
You could give away your son, wife or daughter to someone else, if you
wanted to. And sometimes people do want
to. You could sell them for cash. You could buy a servant. You could hang your slaves, execute your
workers. We don’t do such things any
more, thankfully. But we do still treat
nature as though it were property. You
can still do pretty much what you like to the land you own, and to the animals on
it. Indeed, you can still own animals. You can still own land. When you think about it, owning other beings
and their worlds comes to seem rather a peculiar idea. Leopold said that it will be a significant
new evolutionary stage when human beings extend their notion of ethics to the
environment, and we start actually feeling that using nature, like
property, is wrong. The Mahayana Buddhist
angle is that it is unethical to ‘use’ nature because nature is nothing else
but living beings. Life is living
beings. There is no life outside living
beings. So it is wrong to use nature
like property, because it would be an abuse of our own brothers and
sisters. The land we have always lived on is not just
soil. It is not just dirt. How can we see it like that. It is just not like that, not at all. If you look at it closely, you see it is a
community of living beings. The reason
we don’t see this is because we are cut off from our place in that community.
To take our place in nature again
- to notice our alienation and dissolve it - to cultivate this greater ethical
awareness - we need to do more than just think through these issues. The main thing is to spend time in
nature. Change isn't going to happen
through thought alone. For us
westerners, being in nature can be one of the profoundest meditations we can
engage in. For it shows us our natural
place amongst living beings.
I wonder if we have any sense of
this at all; maybe you’re thinking, why does this matter. Well, if you’re a typical Buddhist, you probably
feel you need to be on your own sometimes.
And that a good way to get some solitude is to go into the country. That’s why a lot of people move out to the
country, or do country retreats. Your
experience is that you go to the country for a week, say, and you are
refreshed. But is that refreshment really
a consequence of being alone? It may
have a lot to do with not having other humans around, but in fact, when we go
into the country we not alone at all. We
are much more alone in the city, actually.
in the city, there is just tarmac, glass, machines and some other
humans. OK, a few flies and
cockroaches, maybe a pigeon or two. But
in the country, we are surrounded by vast numbers of non human beings. Surrounded by plants, trees, grasses, birds,
insects, animals –thousands upon thousands of them. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I have
wondered if some of the refreshment we feel by going into the countryside is actually
a consequence of that experience of the sheer diversity of living nature. I’m not sure, but maybe that is a spiritual
need – something we recognise only dimly, because of our habitual mode of life
and our way of thinking of nature.
Anyway… we don't feel that very
often, if we ever do. On the whole, our family
relationship with nature is rather dysfunctional. We don't have much sensitivity to others in that
community. We tend not to notice or
think about them. So perhaps we need to
ask more, ‘what is nature? What is
life?’ Make it an insight practice to look,
with full openness, at natural things. It
can be a beneficial and refreshing reflection to look deeply at plants and
other beings, to read about and study them, to try to understand their
existence and their point of view.
The Buddha himself lived out of
doors. And all spiritual practitioners benefit,
like him, from deep contact with nature.
We can all use that awareness, in the Mahayana spirit, to gain insight
into reality. Meditation, too, in the
sense of dhyana, offers us a way to connect deeply with nature: it’s also a kind of communion with vast, unexpressed
nature, manifest in the four great elements, the great spirits, the
Mahabhutas.
Nature is vastly other than
ourselves. We can use its powerful
otherness to see beyond conventional ego.
And in a more obvious way, involvement in nature offers insight into
ourselves simply because we ourselves are part of nature. “Nature” is never somewhere else, in a park
or a flower pot. Just look at your own body
and senses, and you realise how much you don’t understand even that which is
closest to you and which governs by far the greatest part of your needs and
desires. We can discover our alienation
from nature, and the reunion we need with nature, right here inside our
clothes. Our relationship with nature is
there in the way we hold ourselves, it is there in our tension and stress. Perhaps it is even there in our disease. We think of nature as being somewhere else somehow,
but our own bodies are incredibly mysterious, wild nature. We can become so much more intensely
conscious of the earth, water, and fire of our body, and of its movement in
space. All these are great
mysteries. Perhaps if we became more physical
and sensuous, we’d practice more fully the foundations of mindfulness:
awareness of the body, its sensations, its feelings, its immediate tactile
reality. Then its pleasures and its joys. Then our responses, and our understanding of
what is really going on. What are
bodies? There is so much here that
relates to our social relations, our sexuality, and our sense of community. Through
these things, nature provides gentle feedback that is humbling and humiliating. So it’s easy for us subtly, perhaps without
really noticing, to withdraw from its light.
For nature is so awesome in its diversity and its devastating
power. Its otherness transcends the
ordinary world even though it is none other than the ordinary world.
Nature is the reality of otherness. In the FWBO we talk a great deal about the
insight of transcending self and other. And
we talk about the Mahayana perspective of connecting with vast numbers of
living beings. We talk about creating Pure
Lands etc… yet it seems we tend to think
of all these living beings as human.
Sometimes we perhaps may think of them as angels. But certainly nothing much "below"
the human realm gets included. Our
imagination of the world tends to consist solely of humans and human
artefacts: human buildings, human
technology, human relations. Human art,
human culture. We know that animals etc.,
do of course come under the category of ‘other beings’, but when we think of
the Bodhisattva going around benefiting others, I reckon we think, mostly, of human
others. I wonder why, when there are so
many other others just as evident to our senses.
The standard answer there is, of
course, that human beings are in the best position to benefit from a
Bodhisattva's dharma teachings. Humans
are uniquely able to listen, understand and apply the teachings. Animals, insects and plants just don’t have
time, leisure and opportunity. Or the
intelligence, we like to think. But
their receptivity to us is hardly the point.
Their apparent lack of what we have is hardly relevant. Because there is such a thing as compassion,
empathy, and friendship. The point for a
practitioner is, surely, that they exist. Other beings do have a life, and they definitely
have needs. And in our society, for most
of the time, we don’t even know that they are there. This, for Buddhists, especially Mahayana
Buddhists, seems quite odd. No, it seems to me that we have a duty towards
our fellow beings, simply because they are there and have definite needs. Their apparent lack of intelligence is not
only irrelevant, it demonstrates the vulnerability we need to be aware of. And the fact that our present society is
systematically walling them up in a kind of tomb, covering over their existence
with concrete, and media culture, - that fact makes our duty as Buddhists even
stronger, it seems to me.
Buddhists are going to want to protect
the needs of their fellow beings. That’s
where our practice leads. I think we want
to be aware of others’ existence, and not behave as though our world
consists only of humans, or that it is appropriate to mistreat non human
beings.
No disrespect is intended here
towards humanity. There may seem to be a
conflict between the emphasis I’m making here, on our place in the overall community
of nature, and the emphasis in traditional Buddhism on the importance of human
birth and human enlightenment. But
there isn’t really a conflict – it’s just different for our time and culture. Traditional Buddhism arose within natural
cultures, societies in which everyone was well connected with nature. Our present society is, I think,
extreme. It seems to have become unusually
artificial, extraordinarily separated from natural realities. I imagine on the whole, much of society in
the Buddha’s day was the other way round.
Certainly there were far fewer people, and there was far more wilderness. Then, nature was unavoidable. And it was dangerous. It was overwhelming. Human beings clustered in towns for security.
But nowadays it’s the town that is everywhere, and there is virtually no wilderness anywhere. There are only ‘designated wilderness
areas’ - which seem rather like contradictions in terms.
Sometimes deep ecology is
caricatured as being against the human race, somehow, because humans are the
ones causing the ecological problems. I think this is a caricature, or an
extremist interpretation. Deep
ecologists do make the distinction that I described earlier, between
anthropocentrism - an overview of life that is human-centred - and ecocentrism,
a more objective overview that includes all points of view. But
the analysis is just operational, for understanding the situation better. Deep ecology is not really saying that anthropocentrism’s
bad, and ecocentrism’s good. It’s simply
pointing out that our human centred-ness poses certain ecological problems. We are far, far more powerful, and are
capable of far, far more greed and violence, than any other beings on the
planet. That capability has certain
implications. For one thing, it implies
that we should be responsible in our behaviour towards others. Even for our own good.
The reason that Buddhism puts so
much stress on the human state, as we know, is only because it’s us who can
talk and think about enlightenment. Buddhism
is not saying that other beings are unimportant, just because they can’t do
that. This is evident from the Buddha’s
own very respectful behaviour towards animals and other non human beings, and
his recommendations to his disciples.
Their capacity for enlightenment is
not the issue. The issue is that nonhuman
beings are aware in more or less the same way as we are. They have bodies that feel. They have eyes. They have ears. They have skin. So they feel pleasure. So they feel pain. They experience positive emotions and negative
emotions. They have likes and
dislikes. They get hungry, and they get
horny. They become sick, and pretty soon
they die. Just like we do. The objects and qualities of all these feelings
are different, but then their worlds are different. Just like ours, really. So I think we should reflect about the actual
reality of their awareness. We should not dismiss other beings simply because
they do not, apparently, have the capacity for enlightenment. Remember,
we aren't enlightened either. And they
are there. So for now, they are part of
our family and they deserve our respect, because they depend upon us, and because
we can learn from their very existence.
They can give us clues as to what
awareness is. They can teach us
something about our Buddha Nature. They
can also be our teachers when they hold a mirror up before us. If we see our own attitudes towards animals,
insects and plants, we can learn a lot about ourselves. If we are happy to treat any other
being badly - even a plant, or an insect - it is affecting our mind right now. Violence happens in the heart, and it’s a
painful obstruction. That's why it helps
us, as practitioners, to acknowledge attitudes we have towards the natural
world.
I would like to talk in this
context about community, and now I’m talking about human community, Buddhist
spiritual community. The way we live
together. The way we eat, sleep, work,
talk to one another. The way we love one
another; the way we reflect on one another, and even gain insight through our
awareness of one another. I have spent most of my 33 years around the
FWBO living in men’s Buddhist communities, and I am very grateful for that
opportunity. It was definitely what I
wanted, and I am sure I would not have continued my Buddhist life more than
just a few years without it. It is a very rare opportunity, indeed, even
in the Buddhist world.
Single sex communities have never
been socially acceptable in the usual sense.
I can’t see that they can ever be,
by their nature. It took Bhante’s particular
vision and encouragement in the first place to enable us to create single sex
situations. I think that was an
incredibly effective piece of Bodhisattva work. I’m very pleased to see that single sex
communities seem to be surviving our current
phase of re-evaluating what we do. I am
not really surprised, though. If it was
what I wanted as a young man, it’s likely to be what many other young people also
want for themselves. And we have
developed a lot of our FWBO culture on that basis. It is something very strong, and probably this
is also a factor in their survival. The
human bonds and the social habits we lay down in these situations impress themselves
deeply upon us.
There has been an underside to
this as well. It was from the underside
of the single sex ideal that we also evolved our own, probably unique, culture
of couples. I find it amazing that this came about in such
an underground way. We have virtually
no Dharma teachings, no Sangha teachings, for couples or for families – apart,
perhaps from Bhante’s 15 points for Buddhist parents. Couples and families have, on the whole,
excluded themselves, or felt excluded, from the FWBO mandala. We have virtually no mixed communities, so
far as I know, though there must be some; certainly there is no culture of
mixed community within the FWBO.
It’s interesting, then, that community
is one of the FWBO’s biggest successes.
Community is always very difficult to achieve, so there have necessarily
been many failures and mistakes over the years, but we’ve learned a lot and
succeeded much more than we’ve failed. I wonder if now we have the maturity to extend
that success into the area of couples, mixed community, and family. I feel that this would bring great benefits,
and also if we try at this point, then we are likely to maintain a spiritual connection
with more of us over the years.
Recently I was at Dharmavastu and
I came across an old, yellowing FWBO Newsletter clipping inside one of their
library books. It was a book review by
Bhante called ‘DH Lawrence and Spiritual Community’. Reviewing a biography of Lawrence, the
substance of Bhante’s commentary was about Lawrence’s failure to realise his
ideal of a community. Lawrence had
written about a new kind of relationship, which involved ‘some sort of
tenderness, sensitive, between men and men, and men and women – not the one up
one down, lead on I follow… sort of business’.
But he had totally failed to bring it about, and Bhante analysed this
and drew some very useful conclusions from it about how to make community work. Bhante has actually commented quite a lot on
community living over the years – he made quite a study of it in the eighties,
and his concern in this area is, I think, one of the principal things we can
thank him for.
In this review, which I think is
reprinted in one of Windhorse’s anthologies of his writings, Bhante comes up
with four principles of spiritual community.
They are, and I’m sure they are familiar to almost all of us:
What stands out from these, apart
from the very strong reference to the ‘couple’, is the clarity of Bhante’s insistence that one
must strive to be an individual in co-operation with others. A spiritual community is only such when its
members work on themselves and try to be, in his words, ‘self-aware, able to think for (themselves), emotionally
positive, creative rather than reactive in … attitude toward life, spontaneous,
sensitive, and responsible’. And the
spiritual community is the sum total of the non-exploitive, non-addictive
relationships between such people. If
its members don't work on themselves to become individuals in the sense
defined, what we have is not a spiritual community but merely a ‘group’. If one can’t relate to others as individuals,
one will do so in that ‘one up one down, lead on I follow’ sort of way that
Lawrence criticised. It may be that one
reason Lawrence’s community failed was because he felt he had to relate as a
leader, and no one wanted to relate to him like that. One of them responded by saying, ‘I think you
are asking what no human being has a right to ask another’.
I think its very good we have been
schooled so well in these inspiring principles; I think they certainly bear
looking at again. Especially the fourth
principle of spiritual community, that it ‘must have a common ideal and a
common method of practice’. We have all that. We have the meditation and ethical practices
of Buddhism, and the ultimate overview of dharma which enables them all to
become insight practices.
The second of Bhante’s principles,
‘the ‘couple’ is the enemy of the spiritual community’ has probably been
misunderstood. Indeed, I can’t see that
it can be otherwise when it’s put in those terms. The word ‘couple’ is in single inverted
commas to indicate it holds a very particular meaning. And this is, ‘two people, usually of the
opposite sex, who are neurotically dependent on each other and whose
relationship, therefore, is one of mutual exploitation and mutual
addiction. A couple consists… of two
half people, each of whom unconsciously invests part of his or her total being
in the other: each is dependent on the other for the kind of psychological
security that can be found, ultimately, only within oneself’.
It’s clear Bhante was referring,
not to each and every sexual partnership, but to a certain kind of
couple. Or perhaps to couples going
through a certain phase in their life together.
I suspect this particularly colourful analysis was very influential on our
sexual relations in the past, and that in some ways we continue and pass that
on to others. Whatever the effect, though Bhante’s motive
seems to be to get his readers to acknowledge the key problems in sexual
relationships, the very difficult energies that can be involved between men and
women. These energies can cause people
to lose their individuality and relate solely in terms of the group, or the
‘couple’, single inverted commas, which is a group of two.
This is presumably the underlying reason
why we, in the FWBO, have so far not encouraged mixed community in any form,
even though the great majority of us pursue one or another kind of sexual
relationship. Bhante had a point then;
has a point now. However, since the point is never going to
stop people having sexual relationships, I think it is a shame that we have so
far not tried to address that point positively. There is no ’15 points for Buddhist
couples’, or for Buddhist families. It
is clearly possible for a couple, or a family, to be less of a group and more
of a spiritual community, even allowing for the powerful energies involved in
sexual and family relations. The way
forward would be to make all this more conscious in actual living situations. I do think the time has come for some more
experimental kinds of community, mixed community living. Well, it’s very easy to say that since I
know of at least three such projects currently forming.
For myself, having learned much
from many years of single sex community living, and perhaps even more from
eighteen months of solitude, I find I no
longer want to live entirely alone; I find myself drawn to the challenge that
mixed spiritual community living represents.
But I would like it large and loose rather than small and intense. I feel this is what I need now, I know it is
what a lot of us want, and I also feel that if we can find successful ways to
do this, we will greatly enrich the FWBO mandala. I think it is my experience with Buddhafield
that has persuaded me that it’s possible for a group of men and women to become
a spiritual community under Bhante’s definition. It is clear from his fourfold analysis that a
single sex community is not by that fact a spiritual community. What counts is that it consists of people
trying to act as individuals, who therefore do not relate as a group, and who have
ideals and practice in common. I believe
many male and female Order members, and many others too, are now capable of
being that, and doing that, together in community.
There is no time to say more about
the many interesting issues that arise in this connection. To my mind, one important connection is that
of the view of deep ecology, and especially with its inspiringly positive vision of natural living. One
reason for creating mixed community is to use it as a basis for insight into
reality. I cannot imagine a mixed
situation working unless its members are committed practitioners. When committed practitioners come together,
there will be spiritual progress which means insight into reality.