Is the religious community embracing environmental causes?
If not, why?
I’ve been asked to speak about green movements connected with Asian religions. My role here as a representative of Asian religions, particularly Buddhism, stems from my academic role as professor of Chinese Religions currently teaching a course on Ecology and Religion. However, I will also “out” myself as a long-time Buddhist practitioner, although some of what I say may sound critical of Buddhism.
I’ll be addressing what I see as significant differences between the trajectories of universalist religions, with Buddhism as the prime example, and current calls for a paradigm shift that supports green values. Both “universalist religions” and “green values” are problematically broad labels, but given the time constraints we’ll have to jettison nuances.
I see Buddhism, Christianity, and to some degree Hinduism (of the post-15th century bhakti devotional movements) as sharing features that allowed them to expand beyond their regional boundaries. There is much discussion in religious studies about the characteristics of universal religions, but here I want to emphasize three features:
1) Devotion to a salvific figure or figures who are not bound to a particular locale or kinship group.
2) A soteriology (salvational ideology) that allows for some degree of immediate personal access to a salvific figure that is not tied to a particular community.
3) Conceptualization of the absolute, God or universal principle, as transcendent or ultimately non-dual (neither transcendent nor immanent), but not embodied in this-worldly interactions.
In terms made explicit in the Christian Apocrypha (Wisdom of Solomon, cf. Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore, p. 165) , God is not in creation, and one should not be more attentive to his works (nature) than to the craftsman who made them.
In Buddhist terms, the absolute truth of emptiness is inseparable from the contingent truth of birth-and-death, but attachment to the things of this world blinds one to its illusory nature.
In both cases, I would argue, removing the ultimate from a particular ground and placing him/it into a higher or universal context makes for greater mobility, and engenders a drive for expansion of the faith. It also clears the ground, the earth, of the sacred entanglements that hinder progressive alteration of the environment.
Universalist religions provide intellectual and moral frameworks that are portable, allowing individuals to loosen their ties with demanding local networks. Pierre Bourdieu points out how much time and resources are necessary to maintain traditional region and kinship-based economies. Some degree of freedom from these networks, increased mobility, allows for flow of trade and information.
Both Buddhist and Christian monastic networks were instrumental in opening up new lands for development. Mahāyāna Buddhism in China was explicitly engaged in quelling local deities and spirits, compelling them to be subservient to the new order of universal salvation. Economically, monasteries had an advantage over kinship networks because their labor force was not encumbered by family support, their wealth was not dissipated in legacies to multiple siblings, and they accumulated capital in the form of pious donations. Monasteries in China functioned as some of the earliest banking institutions in the world: lending at interest, extending credit to traveling merchants, trading in products that had fluctuating market values. Thus, they had the labor and resources necessary to open up forested lands or mountainous terrains and engage in large-scale building projects.
Monasteries in China participated in a system of wealth creation that provided links between local communities and others at a distance. They created a kind of scaffolding “off the ground” through which money, goods, people, and ideas could travel. Throughout this network, key sacred mountains and temples functioned as significant nodes.
As in India, local sacred sites, kinship, and social hierarchies remained strong. However, Buddhism seems to have been more effective in incorporating these differentials under one umbrella. Moreover, India’s strong local traditions do not seem to have prevented industrial environmental exploitation.
In connection with green movements, notably Deep Ecology, Buddhism is often cited approvingly because of its emphasis on interdependence of all beings and universal compassion. It is true that Buddhism’s creed of not causing harm to beings does make it more compatible with emerging ecological sensitivities. However, it is important to bear in mind the ways that the doctrine of universal interdependence erases particular local networks: ties to family, region, and local history.
I am going to have to skip the phase of human history that usually gets the most attention, the universalizing claims and operations of so-called “modernity” and the reflecting/fracturing operations of “post-modernity.” I will simply reference Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern and Mark Taylor, The Moment of Complexity.
The question is, if powerful universalizing creeds, including liberalism and secularism, have been instrumental in creating networks liberating humans from local prohibitions against altering landscapes, are they going to be any good at reestablishing the entanglements and “deep attention” necessary for the sustainability of particular ecosystems, including urban ecosystems?
Can the processes of creation and expansion of anthropocentric universalizations be reimagined and redirected? Is it helpful to continue to try to hammer out universal ecological principles?
The relative inertia of religiously-oriented green actions is, I think, due to the underlying troubling association between local commitment and personal immobility. I think that we often have a deep unacknowledged ambivalence toward the indigenous and traditional communities who are held up as models of environmental stewardship.
In Bruno Latour’s terms, the separation of humans and non-humans, allowing domination of the former over the latter, has enabled emancipations from fixed kinship/regional, social, and gender roles, emancipations that we once believed all could enjoy. Now both domination and its twin, emancipation, are under continual interrogation. The material exploitations that seemed at one time to promise freedom now seem a kind of addiction --we don’t know how to stop without facing, paradoxically, both chaos and a return to bondage.
I am not yet involved in any Buddhist-inspired green movements in Asia. However, I have for some time been involved in various conservation groups on Maui, as I was born in Hawai’i and still have a home-base there. All of these groups reference native Hawaiian religion to some degree or another. I have noticed that the ones that attract the most funding, the largest groups of dedicated volunteers, and the greatest numbers of young volunteers, are those that combine references to native Hawaiian practices with an aggressively expansionist agenda. There are a handful of small local groups that have been engaged in caring for a particular valley or wetland for decades, but they do not get the press coverage or funding that the expansionist groups garner. And though expansionist green agendas continually references native Hawaiian practices and “local” identity, the underlying soteriology of ecological action is unmistakably universalist.
It seems to me that responsible long-term “action” and “stewardship” has to recognize the deeply antithetical nature of these two terms, while recognizing that both are necessary. We need to engage in both aggressive progressive alteration of the environment (like shifting from hi-tech petrochemical to hi-tech organic agricultural additives), and deeply conservative preservation of life-support systems (like watersheds).
Any program of action has to come to terms with the histories of exploitations enabled in both Asia and the West due to universalizing values. I am unabashedly a relativist, but I have an absolute conviction that relativism and ethical fidelity are interdependent, not antithetical. For me, this is one aspect that Buddhism can offer a new paradigm -- it has functioned quite well for centuries as a system recognizing the relative and culturally constructed nature of moral values. It has sets of precepts, not commandments, and good and evil both/neither exist nor do not exist. Buddhists have long grappled with the co-dependence between 1) the freedom of non-duality and universal networks, and 2) contingently constructed, limited bases for action and self-discipline.
This kind of relativism, I believe, is key in any meaningful paradigm shift. We need to be able to recognize the irresolvable tension between local commitments, entailing a certain lack of freedom, and the mobility and networks and expansions to which we are so passionately attached.
However, it is precisely the mediating and networking functions of universalist religions that make it so difficult for them to be critical of the dominant current paradigm, or to recognize their own collusion with programs of domination/emancipation. I do not say domination in the name of emancipation, for they are conjoined like the Daoist yin-yang symbol, each contains the seed of the other as they mutually turn into one another. Soteriologies of emancipation, whether Western or non-Western, religious or secular, are attempts to escape the demands of limits -- the limits of earth’s resources, of one’s social network and family connections, of one’s own body.
If any soteriology is to be helpful -- and in the current discourse of salvation, “material” and “spiritual” salvations are ineluctably entangled -- then acknowledgment of limits must be accepted on all levels. Social and gender disparities, material resource and information access differentials cannot be ignored in the name of ultimate emancipation. Understanding the history and consequences of claiming that disparities are not ultimate and therefore will be “cured” in some future realization of the current agenda is, I think, a modest first step in any real paradigm shift, whether avowedly religious or secular, humanistic or scientific. The recognition that commitments are constructed, contingent, impermanent, and yet binding demands a greater degree of moral fidelity than adherence to a universal creed, not less.
To throw yet another religion into the mix, this is the basis of the long-standing Confucian practice of careful study of historical precedents coupled with daily self-examination and reflection on the relative value of a course of action in a given situation. It may be boring, but it has proven long-term efficacy. It does not have a universalist agenda, but it has been relatively mobile in East Asian due to its perceived effectiveness in creating social stability (through hierarchy) and fostering noblesse oblige. I do not idealize Confucianism as a program for social policy in the way that it is once again being idealized in mainland China. One cannot ignore its political conservatism and subordination of women. However, as a model for personal social action, it has much to recommend it.
This presentation was given by Wendi L. Adamek, Professor of Chinese Religions (Barnard College) at The Interfaith Panel Discussion, Columbia University (February 26, 2009)
This event was organized by the Office of the University’s Chaplain, the Center for the Study of Science and Religion (CSSR), the Sustainable Development PhD Student Group, and the Student Environmental Coalition.
I see little value in attempts to attach "green policy" to the teachings of Buddhism. Attempts to do so just thicken the webs of delusion keeping sentient beings in Samsara. Please continue on the path to perfect enlightenment and refrain from attempts to rewrite the Dharma until the ultimate goal has been profoundly recognized.
Posted by: Aaron | Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 10:21 AM