Political ecology and Buddhism: an ambivalent relationship

Lionel Obadia

great environmental questions of our time. Christianity and Islam joined this debate very recently The rst (ofcial) conference on environmental and are the latest traditions to invoke such reliprotection under the patronage and moral authority gious ecologies, which illustrate the vague desires of a Buddhist school in the of faith groups to convert Tibetan tradition was held in modern (secular) ecology Lionel Obadia is professor in anthropology Sarnath, India, in March using the prism of religious at the University of Lyon, France. He is 2009. This event led to the ethical positions. In this specialised in Buddhism (in the West and in Asia), religion, globalisation, and moderpublication of a guide polyphony of religious ecolonity and has published and edited a dozen to environmental protection gies, the Eastern traditions, books including LAnthropologie des reli(later made available on the and particularly Buddhism, gions (Paris, La Dcouverte, 2012) and The internet), intended for use by seem to have come off best. Economics of religion (Emerald, 2011 the monks of monasteries in Like other Asian religions, coedited with Donald Wood). He has pubthe karma kagyu-pa tradition lished around one hundred journal articles Buddhism may thus be seen and book chapters in different languages on and proposing a set of pracas a model to follow, just as, these topics. tices to reduce pollution in in the West, indigenous Email: lionel.obadia@univ-lyon2.fr monasteries and their envirpeoples and more local culonments.1 This document in tural and religious customs turn gave rise to a short text setting out a pro- are now regarded as embodying the lost harmony gramme of One hundred and eight things you can that societies of the old days once had with a nature do to help the environment, including Ten things as yet not entirely altered (on this see the work you can do to make a difference, aimed at a of Bron Taylor; notably, Taylor 2005). With its broader audience than that of the monasteries grounding in ideals of poverty and vegetarianism, alone. Among other things, these actions, vali- monasticism, and meditation, Buddhism promotes dated by reference to Buddhist spiritual principles, a lifestyle requiring comparatively little alteration call for moderation in eating, due consideration in of the natural environment. But while this may be relation to energy production, the prevention of true for the monastic elite, who represent a total 1 pollution to ecosystems, and ecological footprint per cent of the 400 million Buddhists, does it apply reduction through adoption of a vegetarian diet. to the latter? There is a gulf between religious Strongly promoted for a few decades now, the principles and their social application, and green principles of modern ecology the adoption of behaviours validated in the name of Buddhism are environmentally-friendly lifestyles, modes of also inuenced by non-religious references. For production, and consumption are bitterly debated example, vegetarianism is gaining ground among and regularly reclaimed by religious organisations, Western converts, notably in North America. These all of which assert that their doctrines and concep- people, already attuned to ecological issues tions of the world are able to provide answers to the (Coleman 2001), justify their practice through twin

Introduction

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references to modern ecology and Buddhism (Kaza 2005). Beyond these mixed repertoires of meaning and action, the relationship between ecology and Buddhism is also marked by a diversity of practices arising out of their ideological combination (protection of nature, transformation of lifestyles, diet and so on), the (social and cultural) contexts in which it emerges, and underlying (political) issues. In taking as its starting point the positioning of Asian traditions and Buddhism within current ecological debates, the present article seeks to introduce certain key elements of the debates around the (ancient) ecologism and (modern) ecologisation of Buddhism, and to emphasise the eminently political dimension of certain contemporary eco-Buddhist demands which, while unobtrusive, is nevertheless fundamental to this eld of thought.

The rise of Buddhist ecology

Does Asia offer a spiritual lesson concerning the environment and ways to preserve it? Asia shows us a mosaic of religious traditions, not all of which can be made to t into the same philosophical framework. Although often lumped together in the category of Eastern philosophies, the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism and, to a lesser extent, Confucianism, have ecological principles that allow for clear variations (Callicott 1987; Rolston 1987). Furthermore, what is true for small traditions (small in terms of their geographical extent) based on animist cults or described as ethnic, which are particularly vibrant because they maintain or reinvent rural ways of living, cannot simply be transposed to the great traditions, which often have urban origins. Among the diversity of these traditions, Buddhism stands out due to the space it occupies in debates around ecological issues. Many today maintain that Buddhism is naturally or fundamentally an ecological religion (such as Hunt Badiner 1990, p.xiv; Batchelor and Brown 1992, p.xiv) and there are many more who, while not precisely concurring with this view, nevertheless regard Buddhism as the possible source of a solution to todays global ecological problems. In 1973 the German economist Ernst F. Schumacher published a small book called Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mat-

tered, in which he set out a number of proposals drawing on Buddhist spiritual principles and seeking to render the global economy more humane. Following the publication of this much-discussed work, which launched a Buddhist economics, Buddhist revisions of the functioning of many other domains of industrial and post-industrial societies (business, politics, social solidarity, etc.) have been proposed. While economic Buddhism has not yet produced the expected revolution, green Buddhism seems far more attuned and connected to the current issues of the early twenty-rst century, all informed by the urgent environmental problems on which major international summits are regularly held. Can we regard this as evidence of a signicant connection between Buddhism and ecology (Da Silva 1990)? At rst sight perhaps. The fact is that ecological Buddhism began its current rise within Western urban societies, where it has generated a great deal of intellectual interest. Growing since the late nineteenth century, the movement was particularly marked by the counter-cultural movements of the 1950s and 60s, whose Beat and Hippie cultures drew heavily on the spiritual ideas of the East, transposing them to fundamentally Western concerns.2 The North American poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who drew on Buddhism to instigate ecological thinking in the 1960s, was a pioneer in this regard. The (Western) New Age movement and orientalism also coincide historically with the more recent origins of Buddhist environmentalism, for which, according to the theory of karma (every action is ontologically linked to its consequences), the solution to the ecological crisis will arise out of the sense of responsibility in relation to the world of which human beings are a part. This environmentalism is particularly well established in North America, starting quietly in the early twentieth century and fully emerging in the 1950s and 60s to become a theoretical eld in its own right in the 1980s and 90s (Johnston 2006). Since then, Buddhism has been involved in ecological initiatives in both Asia and the West, through a twin movement that is, on the one hand, secular, located in a civil society that directly challenges governance and the management of the relationship between human beings and the environment, and, on the other, religious, leading monastic orders to abandon their usual (normative) withdrawal from the world to take part in action to conserve and preserve nature.

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Is Buddhism an eco-friendly religion . . .

Of all the current candidates for the status of ecofriendly religion of which there are many Buddhism thus appears as one of the most serious contenders or at least the one that enjoys extensive media coverage. A brief overview of recent literature on this issue leaves little doubt as to the hopes of eco-Buddhisms supporters that it can respond to environmental challenges: British former Theravada monk Christopher Titmuss invokes the Green Buddha in his book of that title published in 1994, while Buddhist teacher Akuppa (from Newcastle, UK) is the author of essays soberly entitled Buddhist guide to saving the planet (2004) and Saving the Earth: a Buddhist view (2010). So it is hardly surprising that one often comes across this temptation, in the West, to include Buddhism among the new environmental philosophies. While Titmuss and Akuppa are themselves practising Buddhists, the eld is also enriched by works based on detailed scholarly readings of the corpus of Buddhist scriptures (Kaza and Kraft 2000; Tucker and Williams 1997). When it comes to comparisons between ancient texts and contemporary issues, Buddhisms contribution to ecology is most explicit in terms of its ethical resources (sila), and principally in contrast to monotheist traditions. Because they are dualist, the Judeo-Christian traditions are said to assume a dichotomy in the relationship between human beings and nature, while conversely Buddhism, as a non-dualist Eastern tradition, is said to be grounded in the continuity of this relationship. Where resources for an environmentalist ethics are concerned, Buddhist ecology (often confounded with Eastern ecology) differs from the monotheistic traditions in terms of the nature of the self, the ontology of the individual, and the relationship to the environment (not just to the natural) proposed by its religious philosophies. The Buddhist approach is described as holistic; two of its theological pillars are interdependence (pratityasamutpada) and altruism (karuna). Because it emphasises the interdependence (which has since become interconnection) of different elements of the world and realms of life, and particularly highlights compassion, non-violence (ahimsa), and respect for living things, Buddhism appears as a form of spirituality that is potentially at least environmentally-friendly. Buddhist non-duality is

said to be based on a principle of continuity between the self and the world, the individual and the cosmos, human beings and their environment, even if (or because) both are physical aggregates (skandha), the permanence and essence (atman) of which are illusory. According to Buddhist philosophers, notably those of Mahayana (northern Buddhism), all beings with the capacity to feel have the same sacred potential and this shared character means that individuals, society, and nature are all included in the same overall conception, all subject to the all-encompassing laws of the cosmos (dharma) (Kaza 2000). But the cosmos itself is changeless; it is for this reason that Buddhism, the quintessential religion of salvation, advocates an asceticism of wakefulness (bodhi) and retreat from the world (monastic asceticism). To this extent, if Buddhism has an ecological perspective, it primarily concerns a religious elite (ascetic monks, or 1 per cent of the total Buddhist population); it reects an aesthetics of existence (of detachment) conducive to ecological awareness and, to this extent, embodies moral and then social ecology rather than naturalism (physicalism). In this light the academic (and Buddhist activist) Johanna Macy has talked of the greening of the self in Buddhist practice, arising out of an intellectual realisation that one is part of a global ecology (Macy 1990). By characterising a Buddhist perspective on nature as ecocentric (respectful of the natural order), as distinct from a Western perspective said to be anthropocentric (privileging the human to the detriment of nature), writers such as the Sponsels draw a symbolic and geographic boundary: the former, Eastern perspective is said to be more conducive to the protection of biodiversity, while the second, Western perspective is said, conversely, to have been a factor in its impoverishment (Sponsel and Natadecha-Sponsel 1995). In the geography of good and bad students of responsible ecology, the Eastern societies thus come out on top, notably by virtue of the ecological potential of their religious systems.

. . . or a religion that has been ecologised?

Arising out of debates that have been current in intellectual circles for over fty years (Johnston 2006), this opposition, however attractive in its

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apparent clarity, nonetheless involves a set of background presuppositions that are integral to the orientalism that has coloured portrayals of the religions and cultures of Asia in the Western imagination for centuries, and through which the West maintains the illusion of its own identity. For it remains to be seen whether this ecological awareness has really been intrinsic to Buddhism since its foundation (in the fth century BC), or whether, conversely, its late emergence is related to its alignment with the ideological standards of the modern world, themselves initially forged in the crucible of the Western industrial societies. When it comes to deciding whether Buddhism is ecological by nature and tradition, or whether it has become so under inuence from the West and modern preoccupations, the jury is still out. For there is something eminently modern (both historically and ideologically) in the register of Buddhist ecologism, such its critique of industrial hyperproductivity and overconsumption and calls for human beings to behave responsibly in relation to the degradation of biotopes. Yet Buddhism remains a very odd reference for these arguments. First, because the all-encompassing category of Buddhism, itself of Western origin, covers a great variety of traditions which, while they share the same theological basis (the teachings of the historical Buddha, Siddharta Gautama Shakyamuni), have nevertheless developed their own separate philosophical systems (Chinese Chan, Japanese Zen, Tibetan Vajrayana, etc.) arising out of particular and different environments. So any analysis needs to take this plurality of traditions into account. Second, because, while Buddhism clearly offers symbolic resources to provide ecology with a spiritual underpinning, its accord with the principles of environmentalism appears primarily at the level of ethical and moral referents, rather than that of praxeological norms. All experts currently agree on the fact that nature (in the modern sense of the term) has no semantic equivalent in ancient Buddhist writings. This does not mean that ancient Buddhism, as represented by its scriptures, had no conception of nature, but it is distributed in the form of secondary references and metaphors, which do not confer the status of ecological philosophy on the doctrine as a whole. In addition, the mirror of contemporary ecologism primarily reects a certain monastical, doctrinal Buddhism, translated in the two different versions of ecological and ecologised Buddhism.

While Buddhist ecology is always grounded in the same register of reference (the symbolic resources of Buddhism, notably its ethical principles of respect for the environment, be it human, biotic, or symbolic), in practice this Buddhist ecology is always more or less based on scriptural conceptions, so on a learned Buddhism (the Buddhism of literate monks), at worst conned to textual traditions and at best to the everyday experience of a religious elite. But the fact that Buddhist ecologism has primarily scriptural roots and that there is a debate around its legitimacy does not mean it does not translate in practice into a project to transform the relationship of contemporary societies to their environment. In this regard questions must be asked about the concrete inuence of Buddhist values on actions to preserve the environment: for example, while Western Buddhists are particularly open to ecology, and attune many of their habits, notably in relation to eating, with its principles, this attitude is also motivated by dietary considerations that are not always either spiritual or about saving the planet. Furthermore, some sceptical voices consider that eco-Buddhism (the movement that comprises both ecologised Buddhism and Buddhised ecology) is simply a reinvented form of Buddhist traditions, which have been subject to terminological revisionism (Harris 1995, p.201) through the prism of Western environmentalism. So ecofriendly Buddhism still always appears as an ideal model, forged on the basis of religious texts, whose key concepts have undergone a resemanticisation, in other words a redenition of ancient cultural and religious conceptions, in the context of the twentyrst century ecological emergency. In this sense, it reects an alignment of Western traditions with a norm that has accents of colonialism, that of world ecology: without a modernist reinterpretation of its spiritual principles, and indeed the modication of its most traditional elements, Buddhism would have been unable to appear as an appropriate response to the current environmental crisis. In practice the emergence and rise of this ecoBuddhism (also known as green Buddhism and Buddhist environmentalism) has accompanied, rather than truly given rise to, the collective awareness in the North, and then in the South, of the disasters to which nature is subject due to industrial productivism. The question of whether or not Buddhism is an eco-friendly religion is thus far from settled. No

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consensus has emerged out of almost thirty years of debate on the subject, although at stake within it is the entire question of whether the West can draw on Eastern traditions in revising its relationship to the environment. This project encounters intellectual resistance and criticisms of the alterations that the ancient Eastern doctrine is said to have undergone in being made to t the mould of modern ecology. In reality Buddhisms naturalist dimension is primarily cosmological in nature and does not necessarily make it an ideology of the preservation of nature (Sahni 2008): such an ideology can be built on Buddhist foundations only at the price of a revision of the fundamental principles of Buddhism (non-action on the world), and projection through the distorting prism of a romantic vision of Buddhist societies in Asia as ecologically cleaner than those of the non-Buddhist West, which is far from evident. Furthermore, there is now a suspicion that the green Buddhism movement, like all other ecological movements, simply continues, in disguised form, the consumerist ideology that currently colours modern ecologies (Goleman 2009). In this context, Buddhism is seen not as ecological in itself (in terms of its corpus and practices), but as subject to ecologisation. Are we now seeing an Asianisation of environmental ethics to borrow the term used by Michael G. Barnhart (Barnhart 1997, p.427) and indeed a Buddhisation of ecology? Or, in parallel but conversely, the ecologisation of Buddhism? This reversible formula indirectly echoes another debate, in which Andrew Dawson (2006) and Colin Campbell (1999) adopt opposing positions concerning the inuence of Eastern religions on cultural and religious change in the modern West. Campbells metaphor (a West irrigated by the Ganges) left no doubt as to the inuence exerted by Eastern cultures and spiritualities on modern Western societies. But on the same question, Dawson offers a very different vision of things: to the extent that the cultural and spiritual traditions of the East are seen though the prism of Western ideologies, which colour them on their arrival in the West, one cannot really speak of an Easternisation of the West, so much as a Westernisation of Eastern cultures to the extent that they become integrated into the West, having been previously reshaped by and for modern Western societies. It is in this critical vein that we can understand the scepticism adopted by some academics

(such as Ian Harris 1995, and Donald K. Swearer 2006), who resolutely reject the condence manifested by others (such as Martine Batchelor and Kevin Brown 1992). Rita Gross, for example, although herself a fervent Buddhist and major gure of Buddhist modernism (and also ecologism) as it is developing in the USA and other Western countries, has no belief whatever in the durability of environmental leanings in Buddhism, or in any other non-Western indigenous traditions (Gross 1997). So, beyond the debate between the supporters of the ecological nature of Buddhism and those who uphold the idea of the ecologisation of Buddhism, this poses a different question altogether: whether Buddhism plays a minor or major role in the ideological currents and practical applications of modern ecology. In this formulation the model is not where it is generally thought to be, since here it is the ecological standards of the modern industrial West that, through their recent global expansion, have acted to reshape principles and modes of action in the world of Buddhism, which was initially foreign to ideas of preservation and conservation, but not to those of respect and care for the environment. In adopting the ideas (and practices) of these modern ecological standards of Western origin, Buddhism seems to have been ecologised rather than being truly ecological in itself (i.e., for our purposes, originally).

Nature and religion: the case of Asian societies

One important question is that of whether, on the basis of concrete evidence, Buddhist traditions are really more ecological than others and, moving on from there, whether they can really act as exemplary models to follow. For a (scriptural) ethics does not necessarily determine a (practical) norm, and it is the way that Asian societies have given concrete form to their Buddhist religious principles that gives a particular hue and, to some extent, specic scholarly orientations to their traditions. Here we are leaving aside ideologies exported from the West (secularism, rationalism, scientism and so on), which infused into societies and cultures during the period of the colonisation of Asia, and which it has not entirely shed in the process of decolonisation. The result is a complex situation in which the religious register combines with others

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to validate social behaviours reecting highly ambivalent relationships to the environment. A few examples taken (primarily) from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition will illustrate this point. In the speech he made after receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, the fourteenth Dalai Lama suggested making Tibet a neutral demilitarised zone, which would also act as a protected area for the fauna and ora of the Himalayas. This pious hope has not been realised. On the other side of the border, in Nepal, mass tourism has dramatically increased trafc on the mountain routes, so much so that (Buddhist) Sherpa villagers have started taking action to clean up the Himalayas (organising collections of the waste left by trekkers and climbers). This enterprise was undoubtedly secular in origin and motivated by highly pragmatic concerns: the villages and paths were littered with tons of detritus brought and left by visitors. In these same valleys of northern Nepal, where Tibetan monasteries are located, particular attention is paid to the biotic environment, suggesting that the principles and values of Buddhism are ecological in nature. When we were making our way along the mountain paths in the early 2000s, the young monk who was with me that day stopped by a rudimentary shing rod casually placed on a river bank by a villager in the hope of catching some tasty morsel to supplement the meagre and above all monotonous fare of these lean regions. The monk furiously made as if to grab the rod and break it in two, on the grounds of the harm it did the sh, causing them to die of suffocation. It took a little patience to persuade him not to follow through. In a completely different context that same monk, along with many of his colleagues at the monastery in the Nepalese foothills of the Himalayas, proved far less quick to respect the harmony between humans and animals that had motivated him before: the arrival from Tibet of a dried yak carcass generated signicant enthusiasm in the monastery, and monks of all ages happily gorged themselves on this resistant dehydrated meat, like children eating sweets. The monks diet sometimes admits such odd but tasty infringements. The monastery itself is a physical and social space that expands in accord with its demography and the needs of its residents. Because the monasteries of the Tibetans of northern Nepal are located on routes used by tourists and clandestine immigrants (Tibetan refugees), extensions are commonly built, to the detriment of the surrounding

forests. In areas already threatened by deforestation, the monasteries are no different from the villages (which are also expanding, taking advantage of the economic manna from the tourist industry) when it comes to respecting the natural environment. As the building of a monastery also involves digging into the ground to provide the edice with foundations, the monks spend long hours carefully retrieving worms and insects, to save them from being decimated by the building works. This is a paradoxical attitude, given that the imperatives of religious life of the community as a whole, including both monks and lay people requires, conversely, the destruction of part of the natural environment in order to provide for human needs through agricultural production (Paul 1979). So it is clear that, from the point of view of their everyday observation in Asian societies where Buddhism is widespread, cultural and religious traditions can easily use the language of the preservation and conservation of nature on the one hand, while, on the other, fostering its destruction (Obadia 2008). The particular case of this Buddhist region while undoubtedly not a priori extensible to others highlights Buddhisms ambivalent relationship to nature, which precludes the drawing of clear conclusions, at either the doctrinal or practical levels, as to whether or not it has an ecological dimension. It nevertheless remains an ideologically powerful reference in the form of ecoBuddhism in present-day religious ecologies.

A Buddhist political ecology?

Eco-Buddhism, also known as green Buddhism and Buddhist environmentalism, appears as an ideological hybrid with a variety of sources and manifestations. Its hybrid nature reects the different ideological registers that underpin it: the scriptural traditions of Asia, which provide its doctrinal content, the scientic traditions of Europe and America, which give it the veneer of objective reality appropriate to current debates around the measurement of human impact (or its absence) on nature, and lastly various references to the aesthetics of New Age spiritualities. The voluminous literature that has been published in the last twenty years on the question of the relationship between Buddhism and ecology clearly show that this is a theme far more resonant in Western academic

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circles than elsewhere or at least until very recently. It would seem that the West, a developed geocultural space, has proved more open to ecological issues than the developing East. Nevertheless, Asian nations that are industrially powerful and strong in terms of market economics are also seeking to invest ecological issues with spiritual content. We can see this, for example, in Japan, in the idea of mottainai a notion of Buddhist origin corresponding to the positive attachment to newly-acquired objects and the ambivalent feelings when they are spoiled through ill use. While this notion was rst formulated in the thirteenth century, and applied to daily life in the Edo era (c. 16001868), it was recently placed at the heart of debates around ecology by the former Minister for the Environment, Yoriko Koike. While it is true that the updating of concepts forged in other times and contexts to meet contemporary challenges could signify the return of tradition, it would seem that it is more indicative of an attempt by modern Asian countries to traditionalise ecology. The case of Japan is not unique in Asia and, most importantly, illustrates only one particular example of the phenomenon. State support for an alliance between ecology and religion is the exception, activism by non-governmental organisations the rule. In this regard the international report by the World Bank, Faiths and the environment,3 highlights the work done by local organisations in Asian societies (Mongolia, China, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos) in support of regional initiatives and national programmes to preserve natural spaces, and other activities such as staging international conferences on the environment and establishing organisations and ecological networks. These are all reections of an underlying movement in the eld of ecological intervention, in which Buddhism is widely involved, through both religious groupings and secular NGOs. In reality, underlying the involvement of Buddhist groupings in environmentalism no matter where it occurs is the desire to act on the (social, economic, and political) order of things, which is more than just a reconciliation of faith with ecology. To this extent, the involvement of Buddhism in ecology reects a movement and a moment that are in their nature political. In practice the green Buddhism movement, dispersed but nonetheless coherent, is underpinned by the far more visible movement of engaged Buddhism. In Asia (where it originated)

and the West (where it has taken root), this movement is led by new teachers and is generating a new hermeneutics, revising issues of gender, economic inequalities, political orders, and disorder. It is grounded in social activism and overtly seeks to effect social change. Green Buddhism is usually linked to engaged Buddhism and thus shares the latters supranational values (the preservation of ecosystems and social well-being) and transnational distribution of actors. The latter are primarily geographically scattered NGOs, linked through relations of exchange and collaboration and notably relying on the networks of engaged Buddhism (the Zen Peacemaker Order and International Network of Engaged Buddhists). One of the primary aspects of eco-Buddhism is its role in the globalisation of social activism underpinned by religion. But although this places the movement above nations and societies, integrating it into a global ecological culture, it always remains dependent on local conditions.

Religions and contexts for political ecologies

Whether the initiative comes from West or East (Pandey 2008), generally speaking it is the philosophical corpus alone that acts as the tradition of reference. Current debates reveal that this corpus lends itself to a variety of interpretations concerning the existence of an ecological ethics, with supporters of a substantialist conception (Buddhism is a spiritual ecology from the outset) opposing those who take a more instrumentalist view (Buddhism has recently, and strategically, taken up ecological issues). But the scriptural corpus does not represent the entire tradition and, in their empirical manifestations, the initiatives taken within this movement also reect cultural variations, linked to contexts and traditions and highlighting the need to understand Buddhist ecology as a plurality. To caricature things slightly, in both contexts (Eastern and Western) the eco-Buddhist movement is also led by intellectual gures of Buddhism who exert religious authority, such as Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand and the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, and also others who enjoy considerable inuence, notably in the West (the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh). But in the Western context North America, Western Europe, Australasia the concerns expressed are those of

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highly industrialised countries, often tied to the domestic economy or the economics of production. Asian eco-Buddhism meanwhile adopts forms that reect highly variable levels of socioeconomic development, differing widely between the countries of northern and southern Asia. It more explicitly challenges the (industrial, productivist) development model of the northern countries, as adopted in those regions of the world. Lastly, the ecology promoted by Asian movements describing themselves as Buddhist is not only naturalist or physicalist; it is also far more social, to the extent that action around ecological issues is also sociological, economic, and political in nature. Solving environmental problems demands a parallel transformation of inequalities in economic development and wealth distribution and the rebalancing between South and North of the means of industrial production and access to jobs, services, and education. While environmental problems may be understood theoretically through the prism of religion, religious traditions can in return offer answers and offer strategies of resistance to the economic, social, and of course ecological effects of the development models chosen by the Asian nations. Pollution, deforestation, and massive urbanisation, and the degradation of the living conditions of communities on the Indian sub-continent, the islands of South East Asia and, more generally, the entire continent, are all challenges arising out of economic transition, to which cultural and religious actors (notably the new generations of Buddhist intellectuals) have responded. These challenges are driven by global forces, but are dealt with at the regional level. The implementation of ecological policies in Bhutan (the small Buddhist kingdom of the Himalayas with fewer than two million inhabitants), with an economy based primarily on forests and agriculture, is different from, for example, that of Thailand (another Buddhist kingdom but with thirty-three times the population and eleven times the area), which is politically less stable and undergoing rapid industrialisation (Gosling 2001). The former has implemented a major plan to protect vast natural areas (72 per cent of its territory), notably through the establishment of a Royal Society for the Protection of Nature in 1987. The latter, a hub of mass tourism, is facing rapid deforestation (with the loss of half its forested areas in the last forty years) and alarming levels of pollution of its soil, air, and water. Underlying this movement, we can also see

logics of resistance to the ideological, political, economic, and cultural inuence of the West. The catalysts of Asian Buddhist ecology are thus related to an anti-colonialism that does not speak its name. The difculty of analysing Buddhism in terms of ecology and politics (as opposed simply to ecology and religion) resides in that of identifying precisely what it is that reects the politicisation of Buddhism as opposed to a Buddhisation of politics (ecology acting here as simply a support for the expression of religious positions). In calling for a decentred point of view that takes Asia as its starting point, Buddhists claim the anteriority of ecological concerns within Buddhism in relation to the various events and major conferences that marked the rise of ecological awareness in the twentieth century. It is comparatively easy to highlight the close relationship between early Buddhist communities and their environment: as groups of ascetics living in retreat from urban centres, they were surrounded by nature a tendency preserved in some traditions of South East Asia, such as the forest communities (Forest Sangha) of Thailand. But the expansion of Buddhism across Asia (and now far beyond) has also led to the colonisation of urban areas that have provided it with fertile ground. From this point of view we can identify not one but two ecologies: that of the rural life, organised around agricultural production and the village temple or monastery; and that of urban life, more fragmented across a highly anthropologised environment. While ecoBuddhism emerged in intellectual circles in the West and Asia, it is undoubtedly in rural Asia that it has found some of its most remarkable political expressions, notably including the rite of tree ordination.

Tree ordination: an instructive phenomenon

The ecological rites that can now be seen in predominantly Buddhist Asian societies are related to ceremonies which, while apparently religious at rst sight, can also carry an eminently political message. This is true, for example, of tree ordination, a rite celebrated in Buddhist areas of rural Thailand (and also in Cambodia and other places), in which religious status is conferred on a tree through a ceremony of ordination into the monastic order, metaphorically including the plant as a

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member of the human species. This practice, which is currently seeing major expansion in (Buddhist) continental South East Asia, is a strategic way of implementing programmes to preserve natural areas by means of religious legitimation. This rite is political at several levels. It delivers a political message, as a Buddhist response to the dangers faced by natural spaces in the context of massive, destructive economic productivity. It takes political forms, giving substance to the latent desires of the monastic orders of Theravada (School of the Ancients or southern Buddhism) to deal with societal problems, when the principles of Buddhist asceticism conversely call for withdrawal from the world. Lastly, it has political effects, contributing to a signicant transformation of the Buddhist ethic of renunciation into one of active participation, and consequently affecting the entire social organisation of Buddhism (Darlington 1998). The ordination of trees by Buddhist monks in Thailand is also political because it is not just about the consecration of plants in the local environment, but also fosters the appropriation of forested areas by local communities (villages and monasteries) and implicitly represents an act of resistance to the national government which, for its part, has adopted the international standards of economic productivism (Delcore 2004). This example, which clearly reveals the political issues underlying ecological action, also demonstrates the need for any analysis to recognise that the relationship of religions (even universal religions such as Buddhism) to ecology (universalised in the process of globalisation) is coloured by local or localised issues. It becomes clear that ecological Buddhism has a twin relationship to politics in the form of engagement in political environmentalist action on the one hand, and, on the other, environmental resistance to decisions taken by political rulers. Lastly, the ecologisation of Buddhism, be it explicitly political or not, goes hand in hand with transformations affecting Buddhism itself, its ethics and practices. On the one hand, dharma, ontologically supernatural because it is cosmic, is relocated in a physical naturalism that is tangible and worldly. On the other, the participation of monks (whether directly or by moral association), whose behaviour is normally constrained by the norms of austerity and moderation, clearly alters the nature of the relationship between Buddhism (and its principle of equanimity fostered by the prescription of retreat from the world) and the world (which becomes the

space and object of worldly activism). Is the image of the zealously militant, green monk demanding change replacing that of the contemplative sage indifferent to the vicissitudes of the world? In part. But, like engaged Buddhism, eco-Buddhism is fully involved in this politicist and ecologist metamorphosis.

Conclusion
Beneath its apparent homogeneity of ideas, Buddhist environmentalism is in reality an ideological and praxeological hybrid through which we can understand the impact of the globalisation of ecological ideologies and the implementation by nations of policies for preservation and conservation. In this regard, the (currently very noticeable) ecological orientations of Buddhist traditions highlight not only the diverse relationships between religions and nature, but also the modes of an activism that is political in both forms and goals, despite evident differences in context between Asia and the West. A discussion of the ecology of religions cannot thus avoid an exploration of the cultural forms that underpin those religions and the practical constraints exerted on them. In other words, while some elements of Buddhist scholasticism may give rise to ecologically-inspired interpretations, practical implementation proves more complex. In addition, the impact of Buddhisms ecological values on local and national modes of production, aside from those initiatives pursued by organisations with signicant social and political inuence, is far from being as great as the hope placed in it by eco-Buddhists suggests. As Harris (1995) well notes, the current status of eco-Buddhism, as a reinvention of the tradition in tune with global ideological orientations, but arising also out of local issues, thus reects a doubly political ecology. First, eco-Buddhism is shaped by ideological standards, the adoption of which is conditioned by political forces (North South relations, colonial and post-colonial relationships, integration into a global system, etc.). Second, it is itself a political movement (in the broad sense of the term), not only through the engagement of Buddhism itself, but also through the activism of actors that support it. Green Buddhism is thus at once a politicised and a politicising movement, while Buddhism paradoxically appears as a religion of renunciation, detached from the

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vicissitudes of time and worldly things. This is one of the paradoxes of its adjustment to what is conventionally called modernity. Lastly, the case of Buddhism invites us to maintain a degree of complexity in any analysis of the already ambivalent relationship between religion and nature. If there is a Buddhist attitude to environmental questions, it is the product of a reconstruction (based on an ancient corpus) that reects the challenges of recent years (empirically arising in the modern context). The ecological nature of Buddhism cannot be discussed without taking into consideration the religions internal variations (scholastic, sociological, praxeological, cultural, and so on) (Delcore 2004, p.6) and this diversity hinders any attempt to assert (or challenge) the existence of a single Buddhist ecology. This difculty is echoed by that of the contexts in which a demonstrably political ecology is expressed. In recent history it has been primarily Buddhist traditions (Southern and Northern, Eastern and Western, monastic and

secular, reecting modernist engagement and reclusive traditionalism, etc.) that have provided responses to ecological and political issues, shaped by forces at local, national, and global levels. For their part the Buddhisms of the West (in the Zen, Tibetan, or Cinghalese-Burmese traditions) are part of an eco-Buddhist movement within developed societies, but criticise those societies and advocate lifestyle changes initiated by lay people and individuals and primarily localised in private spaces (those of practice). Meanwhile the Buddhisms of Asia (Theravada in South East Asia and Mahayana in northern Asia) are involved in political resistance to massive programmes of industrialisation and deforestation, in which monks are engaged as actors in collective action in the public arena. These are two distinct, but not mutually exclusive ways of placing Buddhism at the heart of the defence of todays ecological values.
Translated from French

Notes
1. Source: http://www.kagyuofcefr.org/17e_karmapa/wp-content/ uploads/Guide.de.l.environnement. de.sa.Saintete.le.XVIIe.Karmapa.pdf. 2. For more information on this process in context, see my book published in 2007, Le Bouddhisme en Occident, Paris: La dcouverte. 3. Faiths and the Environment, World Bank Support 200005, 2006, The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development /The World Bank, Washington.

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