Figure 1. Three snow-leopard-skin backpacks (Bumthang, Bhutan, 1991).
Photo by author.
Everyone likes Buddhism.
—Donald S. Lopez Jr., From Stone to Flesh
The origins of this book partly reside in a matching set of backpacks that I came across in Bhutan in the early 1990s. They sat on the floor of a home next to a jug of chang, homemade millet beer. They were covered with the skin of a snow leopard, and I was shocked that Buddhists would so casually carry bags made from one of the most endangered animals on the planet.1
I had recently graduated from college in Berkeley, where the environmental movement was strong and the vision of Buddhism as ecologically principled was taken for granted. I had fallen for all of it. I still remember buying my copy of Allan Badiner’s Dharma Gaia at the Black Oak Bookstore on Shattuck Avenue and dutifully absorbing its collected wisdom about the intrinsic connections between Buddhism and deep ecology.2 Like other upper-middle-class white kids disillusioned with the “greed is good” ethos of Reagan’s America, I read Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and absorbed their romantic, pro-Buddhist orientation.3 These works drew me to the study of the Dharma, and, more specifically, to the Himalayan region, where I traveled after graduation.
The sight of these snow leopard backpacks caused no small amount of consternation since I believed that Buddhism was an inherently “environmental” religion. Everything I had read about the Dharma—especially its engagement with the natural world—had taught me that Buddhism was in tune with modern progressive sensibilities as well as deep ecology. When I saw this matching set of Louis Vuitton-like backpacks carelessly thrown to the floor, it forced me to rethink some of my basic understandings about Buddhism and what has conventionally become known as “eco-Buddhism.”4
The development of the idea that Buddhism accords with modern ecological sensibilities has a long pedigree and is part and parcel of what scholars nowadays call the “construction” of modern Buddhism, which began in the nineteenth century.5 This project to invent a new Buddhist tradition that was compatible with modern values had many disparate authors—from British colonial officials to Asian nationalists, German philosophers, and Russian Theosophists.6 In accord with their secular ideologies, they construed Buddhism not as a religion but as a philosophy or a spiritual path that was based on rationalism and thus compatible with scientific thinking. Shorn of rituals and abstracted from communal structures, modern Buddhism became a spiritual philosophy for a secular age. This line of reinterpretation continues today with the multi-billion-dollar industry of mindfulness.7
Over the last twenty years, postcolonial scholarship has amply documented how this modern Buddhism came about and in so doing has challenged many of the popular preconceptions about Buddhism.8 Contrary to the conventional view that Buddhist practice centers on meditation, scholars have shown that Buddhist practice has centered instead on rituals such as relic veneration, the transfer of merit, mortuary rights, and pilgrimage.9 Many modernizers also held the Buddha up as protofeminist, but a raft of books has argued that the Dharma has been—and continues to be—profoundly and disturbingly misogynistic.10 Scholars have also countered the popular notion that Buddhism is inherently rational and scientific (even in tune with modern theoretical physics) by pointing to Tibetan lamas, to take one example, who continued to insist well into the twentieth century, based on scripture, that the world was flat.11 Contrary to the common notion that Buddhism is focused on renunciation and antimaterialism, scholars have shown that monks and nuns were not only deeply implicated in the social and material world but also fabulously wealthy.12 But perhaps no topic has received as much reevaluation in this new generation of scholarship as the claim that Buddhists are pacifist or peace loving.13 Rather, Buddhist history has been revealed to be as soaked in blood as any other, and such violence continues today with the ethnic cleansing of Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka and Muslim Rohingya in Burma.14
And, last but not least, especially withering scrutiny has been brought to bear on the basic presumptions of eco-Buddhism. The idea that the Buddha—much less all of the teachings relegated under the category “Buddhism”—taught something akin to modern environmentalism has been shown to be deeply problematic, if not entirely wrong. In canonical Buddhist texts, there is virtually nothing that accords with modern environmental sensibilities. As one leading scholar has simply put it: “Buddhism … is not, in essence, an ecological religion.”15
How then did the idea of eco-Buddhism develop, and why is the new scholarly consensus about its inaccuracy not more broadly understood? The development of the discourse that sees Buddhism as a “good” religion is complicated. In part it derives from the classic orientalist paradigm whereby the West is male, active, and practical and the East is feminine, passive, and intuitive. Such binary thinking has been utilized to explain and justify Western domination with its presumed superiority. But at the same time certain Western intellectuals also used this same orientalist paradigm to criticize their own societies. The German Romantics and American Transcendentalists, for example, lauded Asian religions for being more in tune with the natural world than Christianity.16 Some Asian intellectuals, in turn, adopted this Western counterdiscourse not only to critique Christianity and European colonialism but also to recast their own traditions. This turn to nature reached its most consequential elaboration in the hands of Japanese ultranationalists, who, emulating Nazi preoccupations,17 promulgated the idea of an innate Japanese connection with nature.18 This nationalism rooted in nature has since been carried forward in the works of a wide range of authors, from Lafcadio Hearn19 to D. T. Suzuki,20 E. F. Schumacher,21 and Lynn White. In his seminal 1967 article “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” White drew this stark East-West distinction: “What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present eco-logic crisis until we find a new religion … [such as] Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very nearly the mirror image of the Christian view.”22 These ideas, which emanated from an imperialist romanticism, continue to shape the general understanding of Buddhism and its relationship to the environment.23
Such ideas are so pervasive that they often appear as a sort of common sense. In an attempt to tear down the human-animal divide, the ethicist Peter Singer resorts to the orientalist paradigm: “It is true that Western thinking emphasizes the gulf between humans and nature, and also between humans and animals, to a far greater extent than Eastern thinking.”24 Singer is far from alone. A prominent environmental historian has recently claimed, inaccurately, that ancient Asian religions “taught the oneness of life, and an ethic based on respect for all living things, and therefore seem to have encouraged the preservation of nature.”25 But perhaps no example can make my point better than the entry for “Buddhism” in the recent Encyclopedia of World Environmental History:
The basic precepts and philosophy of Buddhism tend to encourage a sensitive approach to the environment. The whole approach of Buddhism is designed to eliminate suffering, and hence Buddhism discourages any action that might harm living things. Buddhists tend to be mindful of their actions in the natural world, and so would not thoughtlessly saw down a tree or pull up plants without very careful consideration. They would be equally thoughtful with regard to animals, and would tend not to use resources from the natural world without careful thought. Indeed, Buddhists would normally only wish to use resources to the extent required to sustain life. The excessive use of resources, particularly to make money, would be regarded as a form of greed and desire. The Buddhist attitude would preclude excessive mining for minerals, the destruction of forests for building purposes, or the pollution of rivers with industrial waste.26
As The Buddha’s Footprint will show in detail, this description is thoroughly inaccurate historically. I quote it at length to emphasize how pervasive the eco-Buddhist discourse is. The world’s leading environmental historians who wrote and advised the Encyclopedia should know better, but somehow they do not.
Indeed, if the last fifty years of environmental history has taught us anything it is that humans exploit the environment for their own ends.27 As Yuval Noah Harari has succinctly put it: “The historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer…. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”28 In the face of our collective history, it seems irresponsible to suppose that Buddhists have been an exception, but the eco-Buddhist discourse does precisely that.29
When I first publicly presented some of my work on this topic—ironically enough in Berkeley—I was not surprised when a gentleman in the audience asked me: “Do you want to be the Grinch who stole Buddhism?” Although he asked the question with humor, he suggested that I was the first to challenge the popular image of the Dharma as inherently environmental and that, as such, I was robbing people of their comforting view of Buddhism. Yet, as I have noted, that is not the case. Scholars have made this argument repeatedly over the past twenty years, and yet unfortunately their work has done little to change popular perceptions of Buddhism. If we have stolen Buddhism, the Whos down in Whoville have not minded.
Although this critical reevaluation of eco-Buddhism is foundational to what follows, it is not the major thrust of The Buddha’s Footprint. I will not be arguing that Buddhism and environmental thought and action are antithetical or that Buddhism cannot be used to promote environmental action.30 Many efforts across Asia today show the opposite. Buddhism can clearly be mobilized to do good and important environmental work in the contemporary world,31 and I heartily applaud the work of contemporary Buddhists—as well as scholars, ethicists, and philosophers of all stripes—who marshal Buddhist teachings to promote an ecologically sound future.32 Yet, at the same time, these are contemporary interpretations that reflect the successful influence of modern environmental discourses on Buddhism and not vice versa. Ecological awareness is not inherent in the Buddhist tradition itself.33
And that is where the basic problem resides (or begins), since all too often it is these modern interpretations that are projected into the past and taken to represent the tradition as a whole. By projecting the modern eco-Buddhist discourse into the past, two problems arise. First, it obscures from our awareness the environmental consequences of Buddhist activities across Asia historically. Second, because ahistorical claims of eternal environmental awareness have been roundly disproven by twenty years of Buddhological scholarship, maintaining this eco-Buddhist fantasy diminishes the moral authority of contemporary Buddhist environmentalism. We need a better understanding of the Buddhist tradition’s historical relation to the natural world in order to make as powerful an argument as possible about future possibilities.34