Thanissara - Time to Stand Up: An Engaged Buddhist Manifesto for Our Earth—the Buddhas Life and Message Through Feminine Eyes

Traditional Buddhism, like every other major religion, is patriarchal. There are reasons to think that Shakyamuni Buddha himself was not: after all, he created the bhikkhuni sangha, a community of female monastics, because he realized that women had the same potential to awaken as men havea truly radical idea in his time. According to the Pali Canon, he also imposed extra rules upon the women, which forever subordinated them to male monastics, but there are several reasons to doubt the historical accuracy of that account.

In any case, after the Buddha passed away the bhikkhuni sangha dwindled and largely disappeared. (My guess is that male monastics didnt like the competition.) Today developing gender equality remains one of the main challenges for contemporary Buddhism, if it is to fulfill its liberative potential in the modern world.

Yet that is not the only issue, as Thanissara explains. Patriarchy is just one aspect of a more general and pervasive dualistic understanding that devalues this world of samsara (infested with suffering, craving, and delusion) in favor of nibbana (the transcendent goal). For some Buddhist traditions, there is no reason to address the problems of this world, because the aim is to escape it. And since ones awakening is individual, ultimately my well-being is disconnected from your well-being.

The dualism between this lower world and a transcendent one (to which we aspire) became reproduced within us, between the higher part of ourselves (the soul, rationality) that yearns to free itself from the lower part that is of the earth (our physical bodies, with their desires and emotions). Much of the attraction of most religions, of course, is that they seem to offer an escape from mortality. Dread of death also helps to explain our fear and degradation of nature, animals, physical bodies, sex, and womenwho bleed and remind us that we are conceived and born just like other mammals. And that we die just like them. But we dont want to be earthlings: we want to be immortal souls that can qualify for heaven! Or to have a Buddha-nature that can attain nibbana.

Today we confront another version of this dualism: between our species and (the rest of) the natural world. We can see the same hierarchy of domination and privilege in the alienation between the collective ego (or wego) of our globalizing civilization and the rest of the biosphere, which is suffering the consequences of our institutionalized greed and exploitation. The environmental crisisno longer just a future threat, but something that increasingly impinges on our lives every daycalls upon us to work for a new relationship that acknowledges our nonduality with the earth and responsibility to the earth, which is not only our home but our mother. Wendell Berry says it well, in How To Be a Poet (to remind myself):

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

In short, the ecological crisis is also a crisis for Buddhism, as it is for all other religions insofar as they devalue this world in favor of some supposed higher and better reality. In response to our urgent situation, it is necessary to clarify its essential message. In this regard, Buddhismthe path of awakeningmust itself awaken!

As Thanissara emphasizes, this issue demands the best of all of us. In place of business as usual, life as usual, today we are all called upon to become bodhisattvasor ecosattvasand participate in what Joanna Macy calls the Great Turning. My thanks to Thanissara for this book, and for all her work to turn us in that direction.

David Loy

Niwot, Colorado

This is a book I would have preferred not to write. I would have liked to write something lighter, happier, and more innocent. I would have liked to walk you through a serene wooded landscape, but instead I ask you to look with me at a burnt and tortured Earth with its polluted rivers, dying oceans, razed forests, devastated wastelands, and its litany of extinct species. I particularly invite my Dharma friends to take this walk with me, especially those of us who would like our mindfulness and meditation practices to render us immune from the impact of a burning world.

However difficult the reality, at the end of the dayjust as the Buddha encouraged in his teaching of the First Noble Truth of the fact that human beings sufferits always better to face the truth of our precarious situation rather than avoid it. In doing so we can explore the causes of suffering and realize solutions, as in the Second and Third Truths, the simple truth that craving leads to suffering, and when we stop craving, our suffering ceases. We can also cultivate resilience while engaging an effective response, as in the Fourth Truth with its Right Action informed by wisdom, insight, mindfulness, focus, compassion, and skillfulness.