Roaming Free Like a Deer

Abstract

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.

Buddhist environmental ethics and climate change

“…My thesis, which is in concert with that of Capper (2022), is difficult to demonstrate in this short essay because Buddhism is a diverse religious tradition and so are our possible interactions with the nonhuman world. Nevertheless, it may be useful to consider a story that involves the Chinese Buddhist master Zhuhong (1535-1615 CE).…”

“…Examples like this one help to fuel the nature‐friendly reputations not just of Zhuhong but also of Buddhism itself, because this story is not isolated. My own research shows that numerous animal‐protecting stories can be found across Buddhist worlds including within the Buddha's life, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, Japan, Tibet, and the contemporary West (Capper, 2022, pp. 1–11).…”

“…This strictness got passed on to Western forms of Buddhism through influences such as the America Zen teacher Philip Kapleau Roshi's prominent vegetarian book, To Cherish All Life: A Buddhist Case for Becoming Vegetarian (Kapleau, 1986). Kapleau's text provides one reason why Western Buddhism remains the most vegetarian type of the tradition (Capper, 2022, p. 197). But in East Asia, this vegetarianism is required only for monastics, so that meat eating among East Asian lay Buddhists remains common.…”

“…Buddhism, however, lacks such comprehensions exactly because it excludes other beings in order to focus moral value on sentient humans and animals (Capper, 2022, pp. 7–9).…”

Toward a Buddhist Ecological Ethic of Care

“…Of course, the interests of humans, nonhuman animals, and ecosystems can (and often do) come into conflict. Capper (2022) mobilizes this conflict towards a critique of the eco-Buddhist project and writes that a Buddhist environmental ethic cannot "attend to the complexities of ecosystems with many preying individuals" (p. 217). Again, I have responded to this critique in detail elsewhere (Simonds 2023c), but it is worth restating some of my response here.…”