Buddhist Interdependence

Historical development

Buddhist texts teach about the treatment of animals, plants and water, and monastic rules protect trees and other living things. A systematic environmental ethic, though, is modern.

Early sources include Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching of “interbeing” and his engaged Buddhism from the 1960s, and Gary Snyder’s Buddhist ecological poems and essays (Turtle Island, 1974). E. F. Schumacher’s essay “Buddhist Economics” (1966, later in Small Is Beautiful) and P. A. Payutto’s Buddhist Economics (1992) founded an economics of sufficiency. Joanna Macy combined Buddhism, systems theory and deep ecology in what she calls “the work that reconnects”.

In Thailand from the late 1980s, “ecology monks” ordained trees to protect forests from logging, and Sulak Sivaraksa linked ecology with social justice. The Dalai Lama has spoken for universal responsibility and climate action since the 1980s. Two collections consolidated the field: the Harvard volume Buddhism and Ecology (1997) and Dharma Rain (Kaza and Kraft, 2000). Eco-dharma movements carry it on today.

Principal claims

• Everything is interdependent. Harming the world harms oneself, and the separate self is an illusion to be seen through.
• Every sentient being deserves compassion. Harming animals breaks the first precept.
• Craving and consumerism are the roots of suffering and of ecological destruction. Contentment is the cure.
• Right livelihood and an economy of sufficiency are better than growth and accumulation.
• Mindfulness and meditation sharpen ecological awareness. They are not a retreat from action.

Policy implications

Eco-dharma is more a way of life than a policy programme. In practice it supports forest protection, vegetarianism and animal welfare, limits on consumption, conservation by communities and monasteries, and campaigning on climate and biodiversity. Sufficiency economics has entered official policy in Thailand and in Bhutan, whose philosophy of Gross National Happiness draws on it.

Internal disagreements

The historian Ian Harris has questioned whether traditional Buddhism was environmentalist at all, or whether “green Buddhism” is a modern Western invention. Practitioners also debate how detachment from the world fits with engagement in it, and how individual practice relates to changing social structures. Because Buddhist ethics centres on sentient beings, it says less directly about plants and ecosystems, and how far concern should reach there is disputed.

Criticisms and controversies

Some scholars argue that classical Buddhism was ambivalent about nature and that eco-Buddhism reads modern concerns into it. Critics point to the environmental record of countries where most people are Buddhist. Social justice critics find the focus on personal change too weak as politics.

Defenders answer that traditions grow, and that applying the teachings on interdependence and compassion to ecology is a faithful use of them.

Relationships to other traditions

Buddhist eco-dharma is a major source of deep ecology, through Macy, Snyder and Arne Naess’s own debts, and of eco-spirituality. It is the religious ground of Schumacher’s appropriate technology and Buddhist economics, and a close relative of Jain and Hindu dharmic ecology. It sides with compassionate conservation on sentient beings and with degrowth on sufficiency.