Green Dharma

1 2 Green Dharma Georg Feuerstein & Brenda Feuerstein TYS Eastend, Saskatchewan 2008 3 Published by Traditional Yoga Studies Box 661, Eastend, Saskatchewan S0N 0T0 Canada www.traditionalyogastudies.com — mailto:[email protected] ISBN-10: 097821384X ISBN-13: 978-0978213848 © Copyright 2008 by Georg Feuerstein and Brenda Feuerstein. Permission is granted by the authors for the free noncommercial reproduction of the PDF version of this book in unaltered form and on the condition that no profit is made from this book. If you wish to donate to Traditional Yoga Studies, we will use it to further our work on the worldwide environmental and social crisis. Traditional Yoga Studies is a Canada-registered company specializing in promoting traditional wisdom, particularly Yoga in its various forms and branches, through distance-learning programs, publications, and a web site at www.traditionalyogastudies.com. We encourage the formation of local action groups based on the books Green Yoga and Green Dharma. 4 Contents Preface 7 Chapter 1: Thunderous Silence 11 Chapter 2: Wilderness Within and Without 23 Chapter 3: Abiding Forests, Silent Dharma 41 Chapter 4: Another Kind of Extinction 61 Chapter 5: Troubled Waters 81 Chapter 6: Thought For Food 99 Chapter 7: Digging Deep 121 Chapter 8: A Gathering Storm 137 Chapter 9: Going Beyond the Great Denial 151 Chapter 10: The Dharmic Raft 169 Chapter 11: Greening Your Life 179 Afterword 205 Bibliography 207 5 PREFACE The present book grew out of the same environmental and social concerns that we raised in our previous and related work, Green Yoga. Because many Dharma practitioners still do not consider the Buddha’s teaching as a form of Yoga, which it is, they might also not be inclined to pick up Green Yoga. Therefore it seemed to us that a book specifically written for a Buddhist audience would be justified. Our intention behind writing this book is twofold: first, we wanted to paint in broad strokes a realistic picture of today’s environmental collapse, including the juggernaut problem of global warming; second, we wanted to highlight the important principles of the Buddhist teachings (the Dharma) inasmuch as they are especially relevant in dealing wisely with the environmental crisis. Amazingly, many well-educated people are still ill informed about the planetwide environmental devastation that is occurring as a result of human activities. We have had people assure us that they were familiar with “all” the details, but then their lifestyle suggested otherwise. We believe that anyone who truly understands what is unfolding before our eyes will radically modify his or her approach to life. We are living in a moment in history that is equivalent to war time, except that the future of human civilization, even the future of Earth’s biosphere, is at stake. While the present work reiterates some of the evidence mentioned already in Green Yoga, we also have included additional, often more recent and also more alarming evidence. Since writing Green Yoga, the enormity of the present environmental crisis has become more obvious. The situation is far worse than scientists thought even a couple of years ago. In their 2008 book Climate “Code Red,” published by Friends of the Earth, David Spratt and Philip Sutton have shown that we should treat global warming as a very serious emergency.1 We anticipate that this will soon become clear to everyone. As the title Green Dharma suggests, in looking at the situation, we are focusing on an exclusively Buddhist context. In particular, we have drawn from the sayings of the 6 Buddha as recorded in the Pali Canon, especially the Basket of Discourses with its five divisions, but also have cited his words as recorded in the Mahayana literature. Among the Buddha’s notable epigones, we have especially favored the Dharma presentations of old masters (in chronological order) like Shantideva, Atisha, Milarepa, Je Tsongkhapa, and Shabkar, as well as contemporary masters like H. H. the Dalai Lama, Chatral Rinpoche, and Thich Nhat Hanh. Because we wanted to make our book as accessible as possible also to relative newcomers to Buddhism, we have deliberately avoided burdening our presentation with technical matters and jargon and have banished references to the endnotes. We found it personally helpful to juxtapose the mostly alarming and even eerie scientific evidence on worldwide pollution, global warming, and the Sixth Mass Extinction against the clarifying wisdom of the Buddha Dharma. Anyone who truly understands the magnitude of the devastation happening around us today is prone to experience shock, anxiety, and perhaps depression unless he or she has a reliable spiritual compass. The Buddha’s Dharma points toward true north and in our own case has given us the kind of larger and deeper perspective without which we would feel lost in witnessing our modern civilization’s strange suicidal impulse that is leading us closer and closer to the brink of biosphere collapse. With this book, we wish to provide fellow Dharma practitioners with a necessary and sobering overview of the fateful developments of our troubled era and to encourage and indeed urge them to adopt a truly sustainable lifestyle as part of their Dharma practice now. All too often, practitioners confine their Dharma practice to solitary, perhaps even self-cherishing meditation, turning a blind eye to ethical, socio-cultural, and political matters that affect them and everyone else. In this book, we are pleading for an urgent about-turn based on the teachings of the Buddha himself and of subsequent great Dharma masters. The Buddha was a great healer of human hearts and minds. If he were walking on the Earth today, he would unquestionably also have revealed himself to be a healer of our planet. He always regarded the Dharma as medicine. It still serves this noble function in terms of our individual suffering. We, furthermore, believe that even 2,500 years after its 7 appearance in the world, the Dharma can help heal our planet by providing moral and spiritual guidance. Today’s environmental crisis is so severe that we cannot disregard it if we want humanity and other species to survive or even if we simply want to forestall serious difficulties for ourselves in the years to come. Responding appropriately to the environmental crisis is a moral imperative, because our indifference or inadequate response would only increase the suffering of our fellow beings now and in the future. As we will show, there is no contradiction between contemplation and dharmically based social action. In fact, they form an integral interdependence. We are members of a civilization that has strayed from sound values, attitudes, and behavior. We cannot allow our lives to be governed by principles that, if we were to inspect them closely in light of the Dharma, we would find unwholesome, ignoble, detrimental, and not conducive to enlightenment. Ours is a crassly materialistic society, which is preoccupied with pleasure and wealth and gives moral values little more than a nod, if that. These two conventional goals dominate even much of the so-called spiritual sector, which has become an industry. No wonder, our contemporary civilization is riddled with social problems, and, despite all the comforts and luxuries with which we pad our lives, genuine happiness or its pursuit is rare to find. The unprecedented opulence of our civilization is maintained by an equally unprecedented ruthless exploitation of the natural environment, which is now in danger of collapsing. Our extravagant modern lifestyle, which in the span of just 150 years has had a devastating impact on planet Earth, is earmarked for failure. Some would argue that it is pathological. A radical turn-about is essential for the regeneration, indeed the survival, of the natural world and thus the continuation of our human species. If we, as Dharma practitioners, cannot live sanely, who will? And, more than ever, sane living is mindful, ecologically sustainable living, which takes great care of the Earth and all sentient beings sharing the same home world with us. As Dharma practitioners, we simply must find the will, courage, and compassion to voice the pain of billions of fellow sentient beings on this planet who are constantly deprived of essential life space and who are inexorably driven into oblivion. 8 This book, then, is looking at the environmental catastrophe from the wise perspective of the Dharma. At the same time, considering the environmental plight can sharpen our appreciation of the Dharma and spur our practice. We can only hope that our readers will consider the evidence and take appropriate action without further delay. We ourselves regard today’s planetary emergency as a great opportunity to renew and deepen our commitment to correct practice of the Dharma, which includes compassionate action for the benefit of all beings. Hopefully, many others will come to share this view as well. Georg and Brenda Feuerstein ENDNOTE: PREFACE 1. See David Spratt and Philip Sutton, Climate “Code Red”: The Case for a Sustainability Emergency (Fitzroy, Australia: Friends of the Earth, 2008). http://www.carbonequity.info/climatecodered/summary.html. 9 10 CHAPTER 1 THUNDEROUS SILENCE One day, as on many days, Gautama the Buddha sat with 1250 disciples in a shady mango grove near the town of Rajagaha, the capital of ancient Magadha, which existed in the area of the modern Indian state of Bihar.1 He and his disciples enjoyed sitting in what we would now call wild forests. They were quietly meditating. You could hear a pin drop. For the Buddha this was simply a natural expression of his supreme enlightenment. For his disciples, it was an opportunity to be spontaneously drawn into the master’s extraordinary state of consciousness. The mango grove’s owner was one of the Buddha’s wealthy lay disciples, Jivaka Komarabhacca, who was a minister of King Ajatasattu Videhiputta.

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