Johan Elverskog - The Buddhas Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia

ENCOUNTERS WITH ASIA

Victor H. Mair, Series Editor

Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road and all its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia, and also with societies beyond Asia.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

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.

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 Badiners 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. Like other upper-middle-class white kids disillusioned with the greed is good ethos of Reagans America, I read Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and absorbed their romantic, pro-Buddhist orientation. 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 Dharmaespecially its engagement with the natural worldhad 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.

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. This project to invent a new Buddhist tradition that was compatible with modern values had many disparate authorsfrom British colonial officials to Asian nationalists, German philosophers, and Russian Theosophists. 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.

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. 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. Many modernizers also held the Buddha up as protofeminist, but a raft of books has argued that the Dharma has beenand continues to beprofoundly and disturbingly misogynistic. 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. 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. 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. 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.

And, last but not least, especially withering scrutiny has been brought to bear on the basic presumptions of eco-Buddhism. The idea that the Buddhamuch less all of the teachings relegated under the category Buddhismtaught 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.