Mississippi, is a specialist within religious studies on Buddhism, science, and the environment. With degrees from the University of Virginia and the University of Chicago, he has published the books Guru Devotion and the American Buddhist Experience and Learning Love from a Tiger: Religious Experiences with Nature as well as finished a forthcoming manuscript, Roaming Free like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World. Currently he is working on a research project regarding American Buddhist environmental ethics in space, as evidenced by his web site buddhismandspace.org.

Mississippi, where he teaches courses in Asian and comparative religion. He has published several pieces on Buddhism in the United States including the book Guru Devotion and the American Buddhist Experience.

No abstract

This study employs ethnographic field data to trace a dialogue between the self-psychological concept of the self object and experiences regarding the concept of "interbeing" at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery in the United States. The dialogue develops an understanding of human experiences with the nonhuman natural world which are tensive, liminal, and nondual. From the dialogue I find that the self object concept, when applied to this form of Buddhism, must be inclusive enough to embrace relationships with animals, stones, and other natural forms. The dialogue further delineates a self-psychological methodology for examining religions in their interactions with natural forms.

By exploring lived ecological experiences across seven Buddhist worlds from ancient India to the contemporary West, this book provides a comprehensive, critical, and innovative examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics. The book clarifies crucial contours of Buddhist vegetarianism or meat eating, nature mysticism, and cultural speculations about spirituality in nonhuman animals. Buddhist environmental ethics often are touted as useful weapons in the fight against climate change. However, two formidable but often overlooked problems with this perspective exist. First, much of the literature on Buddhist environmental ethics uncritically embraces Buddhist ideals without examining the real-world impacts of those ideals, thereby sometimes ignoring difficulties in terms of practical applications. Moreover, for some understandable but still troublesome reasons, Buddhists from different schools follow their own environmental ideals without conversing with other Buddhists, thereby minimizing the abilities of Buddhists to act in concert on issues such as climate change that demand coordinated large-scale human responses. With its accessible style and personhood ethics orientation, the book should appeal to anyone who is concerned with how human beings interact with the nonhuman environment.