encironmental ethics FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF EARLY buddhism.pdf

A SUFFERING (BUT NOT IRREPARABLE)

NATURE: ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF EARLY

BUDDHISM

John J. Holder

Introduction: challenges to an early Buddhist environmentalism

In the last quarter century, concern for the environment has evolved from

the warnings sounded by a few to a globally shared awareness of environmental

problems. In the wake of this trend, philosophers and those studying or practicing

various religions have been seeking the ethical and spiritual resources that

are required to effectively respond to the various ecological crises. From the

beginning of this search for traditions that support environmental values,

Buddhism has stood out as especially promising. Numerous books and articles

have appeared that acclaim Buddhism’s strong support for environmental ethics. 1

For many of these authors, the Buddhist tradition offers an image of humanity

that is in a symbiotic or integrative relationship with the wider environment,

suggesting a less exploitative approach to nature than those found in other

religious traditions. Others consider the Buddhist ethical principle of ‘non-hurting’

(ahims ¯ ) and the naturalist aesthetics of Zen Buddhism as evidence that Buddhism

has an inherent environmental ethic.

In the past decade, however, Buddhist environmentalism has been called

into question by a number of scholars of early Buddhism. 2 For example, Ian Harris

and Lambert Schmithausen have argued that the central claims of those

promoting ‘Green Buddhism’ or ‘Eco-Buddhism’(as the blending of Buddhism and

environmental ethics has come to be called) do not hold up to careful scholarly

scrutiny, thus raising considerable skepticism about the prospects for Buddhist

environmentalism. 3 Most importantly, the skeptics point out that key claims of

Green Buddhism do not accurately reﬂect the doctrines of the early Buddhist

tradition as we have them recounted in the canonical sources such as the P ¯ li

Nik ¯ yas. 4 Let me brieﬂy recount some of the major reasons that have been

advanced for this skepticism regarding the connection between environmental

ethics and early Buddhism.

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

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/07/020113-130

q 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940701636091

114 JOHN J. HOLDER

First, Green Buddhists portray Buddhism as holding a very positive (some

might say ‘romantic’) view of the natural world. For proponents of Green

Buddhism, the natural world is something of obvious value that is worth caring for

and preserving. But, according to Schmithausen in his seminal essay ‘The Early

Buddhist Tradition and Ecological Ethics,’ early Buddhists placed no value on

nature, because the natural world was for them nothing more than a place

of ‘suffering, decay, death and impermanence’ (1997, 11). As Schmithausen

interprets early Buddhism, the natural world is fundamentally and irreparably

unsatisfactory (dukkha). For this reason, he asserts that ‘the ultimate analysis and

evaluation of existence in early Buddhism does not motivate efforts for preserving

nature, not to mention restoring it, nor efforts for transforming or subjugating it by

means of technology’ (ibid.; italics contained in original text). In opposition to

Green Buddhism, Schmithausen understands the goal of early Buddhism as

liberation from nature. No doubt, Schmithausen is right when he argues that early

Buddhism does not present a rosy picture of nature. But if he is correct that the

early Buddhist view of nature is fundamentally and irreparably negative, then it is

indeed difﬁcult to see how early Buddhism could offer much in the way of

resources for environmental ethics.

Aside from this negative evaluation of nature, the skeptics have noticed that

early Buddhism lacks (or outright rejects) certain other key elements that deﬁne

contemporary environmental ethics. For example, a contemporary environmental

ethic is typically based on the idea that nature has an ‘intrinsic value’; that is,

nature is valued ‘for its own sake,’ rather than having merely instrumental value to

human beings. 5 But the early Buddhist tradition is unlikely to adopt the view that

the natural world has intrinsic value because the notion of intrinsic value depends

on a metaphysical position that gives independent, self-subsisting, existence to the

beings or things valued. But such a ‘substantialist’ metaphysics, as this position is

often called, is precisely the kind of metaphysics early Buddhism ardently rejects. 6

Furthermore, there is hardly any hint in the canonical sources that the early

Buddhists had a preference for ‘intact’ nature or unpopulated wilderness, despite

the enthusiastic accounts of Buddhist conservation by proponents of Green

Buddhism in the West. The early Buddhists may have retreated to the forests and

mountains for their meditative repose, but the early texts give no special place to

wilderness as such. 7 Quite the contrary, the texts seem to show that early

Buddhists favored human society over wilderness as evidenced by the Buddha’s

itinerary and his establishment of the monastic and lay communities (the fourfold

Sangha). Failing to ﬁnd any evidence that, for early Buddhism, ‘intact nature and

natural diversity are accorded a positive value’ (Schmithausen 1997, 6) – factors

that some take as the sine qua non of an environmental ethic—the skeptics draw

the conclusion that early Buddhism cannot serve as a resource for ecological

ethics today.

Finally, it has been argued that trying to ﬁnd solutions to our contemporary

environmental crisis in early Buddhism is highly anachronistic. Surely, the early

Buddhists cannot have much to say directly about contemporary environmental

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF EARLY BUDDHISM 115

problems, because most of these problems have emerged only in the past several

centuries. Deforestation, water pollution, air pollution, the extinction of countless

species of ﬂora and fauna, ozone depletion, global warming (just to name a few)

are ecological problems that simply did not exist in the time of the Buddha (or, if

they did, they did not pose the signiﬁcant threat that they do now). Indeed, it

would be strange to think that the early Buddhist tradition would show concern

for environmental problems that would not surface for another two millennia.

So, no matter how ‘green’ Buddhism was in its time, one cannot expect the

tradition to offer speciﬁc solutions to the environmental crises we now face. On

this matter, the skeptics are certainly right to caution against the anachronism in

presenting early Buddhism as a direct response to the environmental challenges

we face today.

These obstacles, taken together, seem to indicate a serious mismatch

between early Buddhism and contemporary environmental ethics. Indeed, for

these reasons, the prospects look dim for drawing on early Buddhism as a resource

for environmental ethics. So long as environmental ethics requires making ‘intact’

nature an ultimate value and early Buddhism is seen as world-denying escapism,

the conclusions of the skeptics appear unavoidable. But I do not think this is the

end of the story. Rather, I think the case against early Buddhist environmentalism

given above is ﬂawed both in terms of methodology and doctrine. The typical

study of Buddhist environmentalism is methodologically ﬂawed because both the

skeptics and the proponents of Buddhist environmentalism start with a

contemporary way of framing environmental ethics and try to match that

particular approach to environmental ethics with the ancient texts, doctrines, and

practices of early Buddhism. But this seems methodologically backward. It would

be like looking for an ancient Buddhist system of measurement by searching for a

modern unit of measurement (say, a ‘meter’) in the P¯ li texts—ﬁnding none, one

can imagine the skeptics announcing that the ancient Buddhists therefore had no

system of measurement at all. Rather than start with a modern conception of

environmental ethics as a criterion for whether early Buddhism has environmental

resources, one should start with early Buddhism itself and see whether, in accord

with its own doctrines, the tradition places a positive value on the natural world

and gives human beings guidance on how to act in relation to that natural world.

In terms of doctrine, I think it is wrong to see early Buddhism as a program for

escape from the natural world. Using the ancient sources, one can demonstrate

that the natural world has a positive value in early Buddhism.

In this essay, I will attempt to lay the groundwork for early Buddhist

environmental ethics by correcting these two mistakes and thus avoiding the

skeptical arguments adduced above. The ﬁrst section of the essay is an exploration

of the relationship between human beings and the natural world posited in the

early Buddhist texts. I will argue that early Buddhism is best viewed as special type

of naturalism—an ‘emergentist’ naturalism. 8 Early Buddhism is a type of naturalism

because it explains all phenomena, including human beings, in terms of the causal

order of nature. For an early Buddhist environmental ethic, the important principle

116 JOHN J. HOLDER

that follows from this naturalism is the continuity of human beings with the natural

world.

But this human – nature continuity alone is insufﬁcient as a basis for an

environmental ethic; to frame an environmental ethic, it must be coupled with the

ethical principles that derive from the Buddhist focus on dukkha (suffering,

anxiety, or unsatisfactoriness). According to the skeptics, dukkha is the greatest

obstacle to realizing early Buddhist environmental ethics because it implies an

utterly negative evaluation of nature. In the main body of the essay, I will argue

that the skeptics have gotten this wrong: nature has a profound value in early

Buddhism, as it is through natural means that one makes spiritual progress in early

Buddhism. Early Buddhism disparages only the type of existence that is fraught

with dukkha, not the natural world per se. Hence, early Buddhism is not a world-

denying philosophy that recommends a program for escape from the natural

world.

Dukkha is also the rationale for early Buddhist interest in protecting or

preserving the natural world. What makes the natural world an essential human

concern from a Buddhist point of view is the fact that the spiritual therapy for

confronting dukkha has a ‘de-centering’ effect that identiﬁes human concern with

a concern for the suffering of all sentient beings (satt ¯, bh ¯ t ¯ ). Human – nature

continuity, which is the heart of Buddhist naturalism, thus has profound ethical

implications when, in the context of eliminating dukkha, it serves as the basis for

linking our own suffering and the suffering of other sentient beings.

In the last section of the essay, I will sketch in broad outline the general

direction I think an early Buddhist environmental ethics would take. What is clear is

that early Buddhist environmental ethics will have somewhat different priorities as

compared with contemporary (mainstream) environmental ethics, for it will derive

its moral principles directly (and indirectly) from the concern for the suffering of all

sentient beings and not from a concern for the ‘intrinsic value’ of an ‘intact’ nature.

The continuity of human beings with ‘nature’: emergentist

naturalism in early Buddhism

The conception of ‘nature’ (or the ‘natural world’) and its relationship to

human beings are the bases for any environmental ethic. Such matters ﬁgure

prominently in the skeptical arguments described above. Thus, the logical starting

point for a study of early Buddhist environmentalism is an analysis of the early

Buddhist conception of nature. Of course, the conception of ‘nature’ in the

modern scientiﬁc sense of the word is absent in the canonical texts. But there is a

broad conception of ‘nature’ or ‘natural’ in ancient Buddhism—covered by several

different words in P ¯ li 9 —that seems to be fairly close to our non-technical usage

today. Unfortunately, there are no discourses in the canonical literature that

expound a detailed theory of nature as such, at least not a theory with the kind of

generality one needs for articulating an environmental ethic. 10 But this is not an

insuperable difﬁculty. The Buddha gave accounts of many different types

ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF EARLY BUDDHISM 117

of phenomena, so it only takes a short step of generalization to say that, for early

Buddhism, all phenomena fall within the category of the ‘natural.’ As the early

Buddhist texts explain, each phenomenon, everything that exists, is an

impermanent, conditioned, changing, process that is identical with the interplay

of causal factors. This is the all-important insight that served as the catalyst for the

Buddha’s enlightenment; namely, the doctrine of dependent arising

( paticcasamupp ¯da). According to the texts, the various things or phenomena

that make up the real world are dependently arisen (and, therefore, impermanent).

Of course, dependent arising as it appears in the texts is used mainly to explain

(and so control) the arising and cessation of dukkha in human experience. 11 The

pattern for dependent arising typically involves twelve (sometimes ten) nid ¯nas

(causal factors) with ‘this whole mass of dukkha’ as the terminus of the causal

chain. But causal principles are also used to explain many other phenomena in a

naturalistic way, including such things as plants, animals, ﬁre, and wind.

Importantly, such is the limit of the ‘real world,’ as the Buddha deﬁned it in the

famous Sabba Sutta (‘Discourse on the All’). 12 The ‘all’ refers to the objects

experienced through the six modes of sensory perception. This puts the ‘real’

squarely among the ‘natural’ existents rather than among the purportedly

transcendent, non-empirical, and unchanging realities claimed by other traditions

(notably, Brahmanism). As everything that exists is inextricably bound up in causal

connections, lacks a permanent essence, and is experienced by sensory modes of

perception, the horizon of reality for early Buddhism is the natural world. 13

The main thrust of early Buddhism is to explain human personhood as a

natural process emergent from other natural processes, rather than as a

permanent essence or soul (e.g., the Brahmanical ¯ tman). The early Buddhists

demonstrated the naturalness of the human person through the well-known

Buddhist doctrine of the ‘ﬁve aggregates’ or ‘bundles’ (khandh ¯). 14 Human beings

are composed of a body, feeling, perceptions, dispositions to action and

consciousness (nothing more nor less). All of these aggregates are dependently

arisen, causally emergent, and therefore natural processes. Human existence is

thus a function of psycho-existential factors that fall within a broadly construed

understanding of nature. The Buddha’s aim (and the great achievement,

according to Buddhists) is the explanation of dukkha as the result of identiﬁable

causal processes in the natural world, without any need for transcendental

realities or a supernatural self/soul ( ¯tman). Even human consciousness (vi ˜ ˜ ¯na),

the most obvious candidate for ‘supernatural’ or transcendent status, is explained

in naturalistic terms in the early discourses. In the Madhupi n dika Sutta, for

example, the six modes of human consciousness 15 arise dependent on a

combination of a particular sense faculty and a sensory object. Consciousness is

thus not a supernatural intruder in a physical world, but a natural process that

arises under certain complex conditions.

Two cautions about early Buddhist naturalism are in order. First, by referring

to early Buddhism as a form of naturalism, one must be quite careful not to think

of this as reductive or eliminative materialism. Reductive materialism explains all

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