, ':~rt~- t;;;··~::: ··.:t'>~~h.~.1'~:!~~c... "_·cosp,·_ . r,'-I­~ _o~~~~-?~f~"""S.""ti~~k~~;~t~~:~7~";:'::O-,"-~-- A Publication of Fall, 1989 The Institute for Ecosophical Studies Vol. V, No. 3 BUDDHISM, EGO-SPIRITUALITY AND THE RELIGIONS We are fortunate in this issue to be able to offer a creative, informative study of Buddhism and its relevance for ecological thought and spirituality. Brian Brown presents us with both a scholarly reading of Buddhist history and sources and an ecospiritual framework for understanding all religions. Religious traditions, claims Dr. Brown, "must be interpreted as the self-articulation of a planetary consciousness, the earth a sacred presence to and of the Absolute" (p. 4). All religious traditions are called upon today to enter into "a genuinely planetary context ... to discover a common global concern that will creatively sustain future mutual dialogue" (p. 2). The desecration of the earth provides that common concern and raises questions that are fundamental to all traditions. Entering this global situation from the depths of their own traditions will transform and renew the religions' contact with the sacred as well as make them effective agents in redirecting the energies of human civilization. Guiding Brown's vision is an organic model of an evolving diversity-within­ unity. The various religious traditions, like so many organs, have historically established separate identities but must now, for their own continued vitality, shape a common body. This common life to whose welfare they will contribute and from which they receive a new vitality and meaning must be integral with the earth process. The various traditions must realize that it was the earth process itself that expressed its own spiritual riches in and through them and that now calls them to a new stage of differentiated unity and a new level of spiritual development. Buddhism, having been involved in a long meditation on "the processes and significance of the phenomenal world", (p. 2) will achieve a new understanding of its own teachings on the interrelatedness and "conditioned-co-production" of all beings, including humans. The human, for Buddhism, has a special role to play in this phenomenal world but not that of manipulator or exploiter. Rather, the human must come to realize itself as that "faculty through which the universe in all its variety is self-disclosed as the cosmic extension of the absolute" and through which the absolute comes to know itself "as the originative source and ultimate nature of that very universe" (p. 7). Dr. Brown's interpretive framework is seen, finally, to owe a lot to Buddhism itself, as well as to Brown's mentor, Thomas Berry. -- Don St. John Ii-f,., of the earth's own groping self-identity as BUDDRISl1 AND THE ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE a planetary presence of and to the Absolute. By Brian Brown The earth is a living psychic process; thus the profound subjectivity animating and Up to the present time, one of the most sustaining these more articulately conscious difficult problems to genuine mutual expressions of human religious traditions. understanding in trans-cultural religious Therefore, any insistence by any of the dialogue has been that of context. Each earth's religious traditions on entrenching tradition, while remaining faithful to its itself within the limited context of its own own unique articulation of reality has, at geographic-cultural sphere of influence could the same time, to exercise sensitive care have tragic consequences. against a distorted reception of the other's For, if, in the earlier stages of their equally unique world view. Undoubtedly, it history it was a natural and spontaneous is neither possible nor desirable to assume process of earth development for human the stance of the tabula rasa (the mind as a religious traditions to explicitate their clean slate) and to simply bracket one's own own unique understanding of reality, it is intellectual and spiritual heritage. The now no less natural and much more imperative history of the transmission of ideas from for them to enter the next phase of their one culture to another attests to the growth, in correlation with the evolutionary marvelously creative syntheses which have dynamics of the earth. To assume a evolved from the active translation and genuinely planetary context, albeit from the assimilation of novel thought into a native inner resources of their own unique consciousness. intuitions, will be to discover a common The twentieth century has clearly global concern that will creatively sustain witnessed to a dramatic mutual interest in their future mutual dialogue. This and dialogue among global religious planetary context will allow them to evoke traditions. Enormous strides have been made again from their own distinctive heritages, to distance the age of reciprocal symbolic expressions of and revelatory indifference and/or open hostility among encounters with the sacred, and thus, to adherents of different beliefs. Yet there renew their psychic-spiritual energy. are equally clear indications of popular Finally, to adopt a planetary context will retrenchment in fundamentalistic and represent a faithful response to the organic literal interpretation of and devotion to biosphere that is earth, presently imperiled one's own sectarian persuasion. In the face for want of adequate defense from the very of an increasing secularity and base religious witnesses that should be materialism, the value of such a trend might testifying to its inherent sacrality. be defended with forceful conviction. Undoubtedly one of the crucial factors in Nevertheless, a return to rigid the planet's contemporary degradation by denominationalism threatens us not only with technological profiteering is the failure of a regressive fragmentation in human global human religious traditions to elaborate an discourse, but signals the eclipse of those ecological philosophy, spirituality, and very religious traditions that revert to ethic that would not only forcefully convict such narrow parochialism. such behavior, but would persuasively In the earlier stages of earth history, educate human consciousness against its very the multiple expressions of human conception. spirituality which dramatically determined The . tradition of the Buddha, from its entire cultural patterns, developed and earliest inception to its later highly flourished as effulgent manifestations of sophisticated refinements, demonstrates a the earth's own interiority and as multiple singular concern for the processes and responses to the Mystery that called it into significance of the phenomenal world. The being as one organism. following study will identify and eluc.idate The distinctive doctrines and this continuous pattern of Buddhist scholastic elaborations, ritual enactments reflection out of which emerges an and symbolic representations of these ecological cosmology in which the reality of traditions were the differentiating phases each thing mutually participates in and Ecospirit 5:2 Fall 1989 2 'f' ')~l depends upon every other thing. The tendencies, volitions, strivings, impulses intuition which creatively sustained the and emotions. Finally, the fifth basic consistent focus for the development of so element is vijnana, or consciousness, as comprehensive a vision across the diversity either pure awareness or the process of of Buddhist thought and practice has been ideation and thought. succinctly phrased in the original Pali In the light of our purpose to term, Peticcasenuppsde , This is often delineate the value of Buddhist thought to translated as "conditioned co-production" or contemporary ecological concerns, two points "dependent origination." But a more literal might be noted thus far. First, there is rendition, "the-together-rising-up-of­ the insistence by the Buddha himself and the things," better conveys the notions that the Abhidharma schools of his followers that appearing and standing forth into being, the existence is a thoroughly contextual existence, of any particular thing is a process: no person or thing is an dynamic collaborative process of many other independent, self-subsisting reality, but things. No thing exists in and of itself, comes into being, persists, and de-ceases as but only as a context of relations, a nexus a given function of other factors. To of factors whose peculiar concatenation understand that life perdures only as a alone determines the origin, perpetuation or complex aggregation of multiple conditions cessation of that thing. A line from the is to indict modern technological-industrial Pali canon, revered by all the schools of pragmatism. The dictum of the Buddha, the Buddhist tradition as an original " ... from the aris ing of this, that statement of the Enlightened Founder arises ... from the ceasing of this, that himself, pithily formulates the fluid ceases ," ass umes a dire cogency when app1ied contingency which is the very nature of the to a mentality entranced by technical power phenomenal world: and heedless f the consequence of its destructive actions in a biosphere where all Imasmim sati idam hatij imassa life-forms are interrelated. uppada idam uppajjatij The second lesson to be drawn is based imasmim asati, idam na hatij on the Buddhist critique of the notion of imassa nirodha, idam nirujjhati. ego as the discrete, self-consistent, This being, that becomes, from the self-individuating and self-directing center arising of this, that arises; this not and end of all human activity. This becoming, that does not