The Sound of Liberating Truth by Paul Ingram Sallie B. King

Author:Paul Ingram, Sallie B. King [Paul Ingram, Sallie B. King]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781136821370
Google: vaG0AQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-10-23T04:52:37+00:00

Buddhist Practice in a Age of Environmental Degradation

In considering what a contemporary, environmentally sensitive practice of traditional Buddhism might involve, we must first acknowledge that it will offer no simple solutions, that it will in fact ultimately require nothing short of total self-transformation. The only true solution to the problem, in a Buddhist analysis, will be neither technological nor legal. It must be soteriological. It must involve the evolution of a significant number of us human beings to a higher level of awareness, to a higher ethical sensibility. This is not to say that efforts – both technological and legal—to safeguard the environment are pointless, only that they are at best a stop-gap measure, and not the ultimate solution.

On hearing this, one might be led to despair, thinking that this is far to much to ask. Surely there must be some more immediate solution – otherwise the environment and all of us therein are most certainly doomed. But this would not be a Buddhist response. It is a response arising from an overly fixed conception of human nature, a response that fails to recognize just how optimistic Buddhism is about the potential we have to evolve into a higher ethical sensibility. It is true that this will happen only as a result of concerted practice and discipline, but the whole of the Buddhist tradition consists precisely in a sustained effort to devise effective methods for undertaking this transformation. The task is immense, in the Buddhist perspective, but so are our resources, the tradition would point out – if only we muster the resolve, the energy in pursuit of the good, patience, the loving-kindness, the concentration, and the wisdom to bring those substantial resources to bear.

To conclude this chapter let us explore a single example of how each component of the threefold training might be undertaken by a contemporary environmentally sensitive Buddhist – Asian or Western, monastic or lay. Beginning with ethical conduct it is easy to see that the traditional list of five precepts offers many opportunities for cultivating a heightened ethical sensibility of the sort that will eventually express itself in a transformative (as opposed to simply intellectual) experience of inter-relatedness and its correlative of compassion. Consider voluntary simplicity as an expression of the first precept of non-injury for example. And to focus our inquiry even more we can take just one instance of voluntary simplicity: eating lower on the food chain. This Buddhist practice of voluntary simplicity in eating should not be confused with the Hindu practice of vegetarianism which is more a matter of cultivating ritual purity rather than a practice of non-injury. The Buddhist principle of non-injury recognizes that all samsaric life feeds on other life. Existing (for the present) as a human life-form one cannot avoid the necessity of causing some harm in the sustaining of one’s own life. What one can do is to minimize the damage by eating as low on the food chain as possible. The Buddha did specifically allow his monks

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