Buddhism and a sustainable world: some reflections

It’s easy to think of Buddhism and sustainability as natural partners. The connection is almost a cliché. Many people take it for granted that there is a Buddhist view on the environment, and that it teaches a benign, positive and friendly relationship of mutual respect between human beings and the world in which they live.

There are good reasons why people think like this. A whole series of ecological writers and thinkers have been associated with a certain variety of Western Buddhist thought, and it has helped to inspire their work. We could think of people such as the poet Gary Snyder or the ecological activist Joanna Macy.

Snyder is a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism who spent several years in Japan as well as engaging deeply with Native American spirituality. His poetry and writing refer frequently to Buddhism and have themselves been a major philosophical influence on the ecology movement.

Joanna Macy, who has visited Australia on several occasions, is one of the central spokespeople for a move away from the excesses of a society based around industrial growth and towards a more sustainable world – what she now refers to as the ‘Great Turning’. Macy’s work is also consciously and explicitly Buddhist-inspired.

In their turn, people like Macy and Snyder have been a major influence on younger generations of ecological activists and thinkers. If you look at current ecological initiatives around the world, such as the various Green Parties or the Transition Town movement, you are more than likely to run into Buddhist sympathisers or practitioners. Elements from Buddhist philosophy, above all the idea of the mutual dependence of all phenomena, have been an important source for all of these people, and a resource for environmental awareness, respect for other species and for the wider planetary ecology.

Contemporary Asian Buddhist teachers, such as the Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hanh, have taken up these themes and encouraged their development among Western Buddhists. The tendency, perhaps rather misleading, to see Buddhism as a philosophy rather than a religion has also aided its acceptability in a contemporary Green context.

In many ways, I don’t have any problem with all of this. I believe that achieving a sustainable relationship with the planet on which we live is one of the greatest challenges of our time. Anything that helps promote more awareness and action is a good thing. Also, as a scholar of Buddhism, it’s encouraging to be engaged with a tradition that has something to say to the contemporary world on matters of real importance.

There are problems, however, when you start to look at Buddhist traditions themselves in more detail. For one thing, an important part of Buddhist thought has always been about escape from engagement with the phenomenal world, rather than commitment to it. The mutual dependence of all phenomena is certainly a key part of Buddhist teaching, but it is traditionally presented as a problem rather than as a positive feature. The processes of mutual causation, for Buddhists, are the processes that lead to suffering and to continued rebirth.

Also, living Buddhist societies do not always seem deeply sympathetic to other species or to the environment. Most Buddhists in the past lived in peasant societies, and their historical experience had more to do with survival in often harsh and difficult conditions than with compassion for other species or the natural world. Being kind to animals was a luxury. Most Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia historically have not been vegetarian. Preserving the ecosystem was certainly not a conscious goal, and would hardly have made any sense to pre-modern Buddhists.

Today, while there are certainly contemporary teachers who will refer to environmental issues, especially while addressing Western Buddhists, ecological awareness is still marginal in most Buddhist societies. Where it is beginning to grow, it has been more a response to recent ecological problems and disasters than a result of any specifically Buddhist initiatives.

There are, all the same, elements in traditional Buddhist societies that might be considered to contribute to ecological thinking and to human sustainability. My own work has been mostly on Buddhism in Tibet, and I will briefly outline two of these.

The first is a kind of implicit ecological thinking that arises from the way in which the environment was and still is seen by Tibetan peoples in terms of spiritual forces, local gods and goddesses of the mountains, rivers and lakes. The world of nature in Tibet is not inert. It is alive, and a source both of assistance, but also of danger and threat.

Illness is frequently caused by offended local gods. Misfortune of many kinds can be set off by polluting the environment in which spirits live. In fact, one reason why Tibetans are fairly respectful of rivers and careful about what they put into them is the belief that offended water-spirits can cause skin diseases and other afflictions. Villages were constantly threatened with avalanches and dangerous showers of hail.

Travel around Tibet, especially in pre-modern times, was itself risky, with high mountain passes, violent weather and bandits among the possible threats. Staying on good terms with the environment was common sense rather than a philosophical ideal. The language of gods and spirits also recognised a commonality between human beings and the world around them. That world is alive and inhabited, and its inhabitants are part of the community among whom we live, and with whom we have to maintain good relationships.

Some people might say that this is more a question of folk religion and belief than Buddhism proper. That is not a very real distinction, since Buddhism in Tibet has become deeply involved in the ways in which these spirits of the natural world are perceived and engaged with. The Buddhist lamas are the chief specialists in dealing with the powers of nature, and their engagement with these personified environmental forces grows out of the wider technology of Tantric Buddhism, in which the ultimate compassionate power of the Buddha is accessed in order to keep the gods of the natural world in their proper place and dissuade them from causing harm to humans.

A second environmental aspect of traditional Tibetan thought is something I have been thinking about and studying extensively over the last few years, as part of a group research project in which I am involved on the so-called long-life practices of Tibetan Buddhism. These are yogic or meditational practices, again deriving from Tantric Buddhism. They are meant not just to extend life, but to restore energy, vitality and good health. I find the way in which they do it very suggestive in relation to thinking about the environment.

As I have said, the environment can be seen by Tibetans as a constant source of spirit-threat, as a world of beings who can steal your life-energy, deprive you of the protective forces that should normally shield and guard you, and inflict all kinds of illness and misfortune. There is a certain realism to this perspective. The Tibetan environment was dangerous. Illness and misfortune were an everyday part of life. However, constantly to see the environment as a source of danger and threat can also be a problem.

One way of seeing the complex visualisations of the long-life practices, along with their associated breathing and dietary techniques, is that they bring about a change in how the practitioners see their relationship with the environment. The world is imaginatively transformed in the practice into a pure mandala inhabited by compassionate Tantric deities, and these deities are invoked to gather and restore the practitioner’s lost life-energy.

Health and vitality are replenished with the pure essence of the transfigured universe, ingested both in the form of breathing and through empowered liquids and other substances. As these transformations are repeated over and over again, the practitioners learn to feel and experience the universe as positive and supportive, and as a source of renewed energy and vitality.

Tibetans believe that these practices can have a real and positive effect on one’s health. This does not seem unreasonable to me. We are beginning to learn, after all, how much of the healing process even in conventional Western medicine is often due to the human mind-body, rather than to the doctor’s medicine or other intervention. However, the direct benefit to health is only part of what is, or might be, going on in these practices.

Implicitly rather than through doctrinal or philosophical teaching, they allow the people who undertake them to see themselves as linked directly to an environment which is a source of positive support and regeneration, and to see the powers and forces, transfigured now as Tantric deities, that animate that environment as closely and positively connected with their own inner being.

Most of us today live in a world which, for different reasons but in a comparable way to that of traditional Tibet, can easily be experienced as a source of danger and threat. Everything we eat seems to represent multiple hazards to our health. Even the air we breathe and the water we drink are polluted with dangerous chemicals. We feel increasingly unsafe about allowing children to play on the streets or in public places, but even if they stay at home, the internet is full of lurking threats.

The social fabric is deteriorating; our neighbours may be criminals or terrorists. Urban life involves constant tension, threat and danger, often at a more or less subliminal level. The threats are often real, and social and political action to restore our society is needed, but there is also here a problem of feeling and perception, and a need to restore a sense of security. Could the Tibetan longevity practices suggest ways in which we might be able to learn once more to be at home in the world, to feel ourselves as being supported and positively connected to our environment?