Abstract
One of the most common and enduring stereotypes in environmental literature is the idea that Eastern religions promote a sense of harmony between human beings and nature. On the other side of the stereotype stand the religions of the West, promoting the separation of human beings and nature and encouraging acts of domination, exploitation, and control. Roderick Nash gave classic expression to this contrast when he said: “Ancient Eastern cultures are the source of respect for and religious veneration of the natural world” and “In the Far East the man—nature relationship was marked by respect, bordering on love, absent in the West.”1 Y. Murota drew a similar contrast between Japanese attitudes toward nature and the attitudes he felt are operative in the West: “the Japanese view of nature is quite different from that of Westerners... For the Japanese nature is an all-pervasive force... Nature is at once a blessing and a friend to the Japanese people... People in Western cultures, on the other hand, view nature as an object and, often, as an entity set in opposition to mankind.”2
Malcolm David Eckel, “Is There a Buddhist Philosphy of Nature?” in Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryúken Williams, eds. Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnection of Dharma and Deeds, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1997.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967): 20–21, 192–193.
Y. Murota, `Culture and Environment in Japan,’ Environmental Management, 9 (1986): 105112.
Lynn White, Jr., `The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,’ Science 155 (1967): 1203–7. Reprinted in Machina Ex Deo: Essays on the Dynamism of Western Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968): 75–94.
Masao Watanabe, `The Conception of Nature in Japanese Culture,’ Science 183 (1974): 279–82. S Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990): 10.
The words belong to Richard Gere, the Founding Chairman of Tibet House in New York, and appear in Marylin M. Rhie and Robert A.F. Thurman, eds., Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet (New York: Harry N Abrams, 1991): 8. The image of Tibet as the “lifeboat of civilization” has been widely remarked upon in Asian studies, notably by Peter Bishop in The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing, and the Western Creation of the Sacred Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
The Dalai Lama’s speech appears in Steven C. Rockefeller and John C. Elder, eds., Spirit and Nature: Why the Enviroment Is a Religious Issue (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
Rockefeller and Elder, Spirit and Nature: 114.
This formula for the expression of Emptiness comes from the Madhyamaka school of Mahayana philosophy, the school within which the Dalai Lama himself speaks. For a more extensive account of this concept and for references to further literature, see Malcolm David Eckel, To See the Buddha: A Philosopher’s Quest for the Meaning of Emptiness (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992; reprint ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
lo See, for example, Gabriel P. Weisberg et al., eds. Japonisme: Japanese Influence on French Art 1854–1910 ( London: Robert G. Sawyers, 1975 ).
Robert S. Ellwood and Richard Pilgrim, Japanese Religion: A Cultural Perspective (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985): 55.
Burton Watson, trans., Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the Tang Poet Han-shan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970): 67.
Gary Snyder has produced some of the most powerful translations of the Cold Mountain poems. See his Rip Rap and Other Poems (San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1982).
William R. LaFleur, `Saigy6 and the Buddhist Value of Nature,’ in Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought,ed. J. Baird Callicott and Roger T. Ames (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989): 183–209.
15 The Lotus Sutra,trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), chapter 5.
16 Allan G. Grapard, `Nature and Culture in Japan,’ in Deep Ecology,ed. Michael Tobias (San Diego: Avant Books, 1985): 240–55.
17 Stephen R. Kellert, `Japanese Perceptions of Wildlife,’ Conservation Biology 5 (1991): 297–308; `Concepts of Nature East and West,’ in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction,ed. Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995): 103–121. See also Yi-Fu Tuan, `Discrepancies Between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples from Europe and China,’ Canadian Geographer 12 (1968): 175–91.
18 Kellert, `Concepts of Nature East and West’: 107.
19 D. Ritchie, The Island Sea (Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1971): 13, quoted in Kellert, `Concepts of Nature East and West’: 115.
20 W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
21 “Distinction” (viveka) is one of the four “qualifications” for the knowledge of Brahman See Eliot Deutsch, Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1969), 105.
22 Lambert Schmithausen, `Buddhism and Nature,’ Studia Philologica Buddhica: Occasional Paper Series 7 (Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 1991).
23 For sources see Schmithausen: 15. The references to the “city of nirvana” come from texts that are somewhat late. An interesting echo of the metaphor in an early source is a reference to Suttanipata 3.109 to nirvana as a level piece of land (samo bhúmibhago).
24 Buddhist Mahayana Texts,trans. Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East, 49 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894; reprint ed., New York: Dover Publications, 1969).
25 Rockefeller and Elder, Spirit and Nature: 114.
26 Daniel H.H. Ingalls, An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965): 438.
27 Grapard, `Nature and Culture in Japan’: 243.
28 Riccardo Venturini, `A Buddhist View on Ecological Balance,’ Dharma World 17 (March—April, 1990): 19–23; quoted in Schmithausen, `Buddhism and Nature’: 17.
29 The lectures have been published in His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet, Tenzin Gyatso, The Dalai Lama at Harvard,trans. and ed. Jeffrey Hopkins (Ithaca: Snow Lion, 1988).
30 The classic account of the theory of pudgalavada is found in the Abhidharmakosa,trans. L. de La Vallée Poussin, Mélanges chinois et bouddhiques 16 (1971). A useful English translation of the section from the Abhidharmakoia that deals with this theory can be found in Edward Conze, Buddhist Scriptures (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959): 192–197.
31 Steven C. Rockefeller, `Faith and Community in an Ecological Age,’ in Rockefeller and Elder, Spirit and Nature: 139–171. For further commentary on the issues of “anthropocentrism,” see J. Baird Callicott, Non-Anthropocentric Value Theory and Environmental Ethics,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984).
32 Rockefeller: 143.
See chapters 8 and 9 of The Dalai Lama at Harvard. Sântideva’s own text is available in a number of translations, notably Stephen Batchelor, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life (Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1979).
Stephen Batchelor, `Buddhist Economics Reconsidered,’ in Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Allan Hunter Badiner (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990 ): 178–182.
Joanna Macy, `The Greening of the Self,’ in Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia: 53–63.
Etienne Lamotte summarizes Mahâyâna traditions about the throne of enlightenment (bodhimanda) in The Teaching of Vimalakirti (Virmalakirtinirdesa), trans. Sara Boin (London: Pali Text Society, 1976), 94–99.
37 Doug Cochida, `Zen Practice and a Sense of Place,’ in Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia: 106–111.
Erazim Kohâk, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984 ): 188.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Eckel, M.D. (1998). Is There a Buddhist Philosophy of Nature?. In: Cohen, R.S., Tauber, A.I. (eds) Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-4859-2
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-2614-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive