Slowly, day after day, the ice is closing over the swift-running waters of the Zanskar River, transforming it into the Chadar: the frozen river.

During the harsh winters, this frozen river becomes the only way out of the mountains of Zanskar. In this short, beautiful documentary, we see what that journey is like.

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.

Totally focused on the specific, yet transported into the universal at the same time. This rapturous focus, in its sublime triple aspect, is the heart of human ritual experience.

One of Alak’s disciples, a 73-year-old ngakpa, explained in an interview the traditional (and previously pervasive) view about caterpillar fungus. He stated that the problem with collecting caterpillar fungus, from the Buddhist point of view, is that one cannot be sure when digging whether the caterpillar is actually dead or not. By killing the caterpillar, a collector may entail a breach of his or her vow to not kill any sentient being.

Tibetan villagers in Amdo balance their tantric Buddhist commitments—particularly the vow against taking animal life—with livelihood practices like caterpillar fungus collection that often involve killing insects. Through fieldwork and interviews, the author highlights the villagers’ religious lives, especially of women, and the moral negotiations they navigate in their daily survival.

The inconceivable qualities of this sacred place
I have sung in the form of a joyful song.
I have spoken of them as an oral instruction.

A song by Milarepa, praising the sacred place Kyangpen Namkha Dzong.

For many Mongolians, severing the nature-human relationship is seen as a source of disharmony and an abandonment of obligation, rather than a potential solution to any environmental issue.

In the course of the ritual, pardon is asked of the earth goddess, Nāng Thōranī, for despoil­ing her both in the collection of sand for the ceremony and during the agricultural season.

A discussion of the long history (and enduring present) of nature-focused ceremonies in Theravāda Buddhist traditions.

Even after leaving the forest, one man explained, Khmer tradition held that if one failed to make an offering of thanks, the spirits would seize and kill the ungrateful person.

the Western tradition of virtue ethics and an introductory sketch of how it might provide a foundation for ecology in Buddhism

For early Buddhism, I mediate between two polarized views: one promoting the idea of ‘eco-dharma’ as a reflection of Buddhism’s alignment with non-violence (ahiṃsā), and the alleviation of suffering (dukkha); a second arguing that early Buddhist traditions have been misappropriated by western environmentalism. I argue that the latter view subscribes to canonical models of passive monks removed from worldly concerns, despite archaeological evidence for socially-engaged monastic landlordism from the late centuries BCE. Others cite this evidence only to negate Buddhism’s eco-credentials, overlooking the human:non-human entanglement theme

Case studies include examples of Buddhist land and water management in central India, set within discussions of human v. non-human-centric frameworks of well-being and suffering, purity and pollution, and broader Indic medico-ecological epistemologies, as possible models for collective responses to environmental stress.

Nature is understood as a process of life, of which human beings are an immanent part. Returning to nature and remembering that we are nature is essential for health and wellbeing.

The symbolic ordination of trees as monks in Thailand is widely perceived in Western scholarship to be proof of the power of Buddhism to spur ecological thought. However, a closer analysis of tree ordination demonstrates that it is not primarily about Buddhist teaching, but rather is an invented tradition based on the sanctity of Thai Buddhist symbols as well as those of spirit worship and the monarchy. Tree ordinations performed by non-Buddhist minorities in Thailand do not demonstrate a religious commitment but rather a political one.

… this article explores how the early Buddhist teaching can challenge and enrich how we think of persons and bodies in relation to other beings and environments. Through a discussion of the powerful emotion of fear and the importance of vulnerability, the article develops thoughts on how Buddhist emotional practices as practices of care can inspire new approaches in today’s times of escalating ecological crisis and acute vulnerability in coexisting and intersecting human and nonhuman pluriworlds.

This article uses a Himalayan Buddhist lens to critically interrogate a fundamental premise of ‘the Anthropocene’—that the epoch commemorates a ‘newfound’ capacity of humans to mobilise Earth forces. Rather, Himalayan Buddhism has long held that humans wield geological agency, mobilised through relationships with territorial landscape deities, which inflict severe weather in retaliation for human moral infractions.

Offering an alternative model of anthropogenic climate change, Buddhist and Indigenous lifeworlds challenge Western convictions that ‘the Anthropocene’ is a novel planetary epoch. Since the term has gained a vibrant discursive life beyond geology, its cultural assumptions—rather than biophysical thresholds—are primarily evaluated, revealing an extension of Eurocentric colonial logic into this new planetary chapter. Alternatively, I suggest the Himalayan Buddhist term ‘kawa nyampa’ (degenerate era) better encapsulates our transition towards environmental breakdown. There was no need to ‘invent’ the Anthropocene as a new epoch of thought—it had long already existed.

… dependent origination in early Buddhism was transmuted from a causal chain binding beings to samsara—something to get free from—into contemporary interpretations of interdependence as a web of interconnected beings and events to celebrate, embrace, and become one with.

The early conception of dependent origination is first reframed in the Mahayana, through ideas such as interpenetration in the Avatamsaka Sutra and the reverence for the natural world in East Asia. The concept then picks up western influences from Romanticism, Transcendentalism, systems theory, deep ecology, and popular accounts of quantum physics. The recent synthesis of these elements is a hybrid concept of interdependence unique to contemporary Buddhism that combines cosmology and world-affirming wonder with ethical, political, and ecological imperatives.

Philosophically and normatively, this monastery embraces eco-centrism through notions of interconnectedness, instructions for meditation, environmental lifestyles, and non-violent ideals. In practice, however, the monastery displays a measure of anthropocentrism in terms of rhetoric which values humans more than the rest of the natural world, human-centered motivations for environmental lifestyles, and limits on non-violence which favor human lives.

The defining characteristic of the Saṁsthāva as a monastic organization is taking the texts seriously and trying to put them into practice. They profess a strict adherence to the Pali canon and the Theravada commentarial literature.

A look at the conservative, forest tradition of Sri Lanka as conservators not only of ascetic orthodoxy, but of the forests themselves.

Though I’m skinny,
sick, and feeble…

The article first identifies and assesses two different strategies used by advocates of Buddhist environmentalism in Thailand, one being textual and the other practical. Then, after laying out the deficiencies of the textual strategy, the article argues that the practical strategy offers a more meaningful basis for a discourse of Buddhist environmental concern.

The rain falls and the wind blows…

birth to even more goodness…

Now, what we can say is that, it is within these spaces of practices of mental cultivation that poetry, in the Buddhist world, takes its place, as well as being part of literary culture; as well as being part of religious culture. But, it has a central place in the practice of mental cultivation. 

In this lecture, Professor Charles Hallisey describes how Buddhism has historically used poetry as a vehicle for its teachings. Further, through various examples, he offers the idea that, in the Buddhist world, scholatiscism and poetry are forms of mental cultivation as much as meditation and ritual and have always been so. 

Remote jungle-thicket resting places in the forest are hard to endure, seclusion is hard to practise, and it is hard to enjoy solitude.

The Buddha explains the difficulties of living in the wilderness, and how they are overcome by purity of conduct and meditation. He recounts some of the fears and obstacles he faced during his own practice and how he overcame them all.

Even as groups like the International Network of Engaged Buddhists are attempting to frame a unified Buddhist position on environmental issues, Buddhists in different places are interpreting and adapting Buddhist teachings in ways specific to and meaningful in each society. Can the efforts of Buddhists to develop and implement an environmental ethic or activism in one location be translated into other Buddhist societies?

In this essay, I examine the intertwining concepts of merit, power, Buddhist virtue, and the moral rendering of the physical universe apparent in late nineteenth-century Khmer vernacular texts.

This article looks at Buddhist literature in nineteenth-century Khmer. It argues that the literature of this period was a direct response to French colonialism, and though modern Cambodians questioned religious traditions and cosmologies, the law of karma and the framework of a moral universe persisted.

Three touchpoints for ecological comparison emerge: Buddhist vegetarianism, the alleged practice of religion by animals and other natural beings, and nature mysticism.

A tour of different forms of Buddhism and how they relate to the environment through the lens of three common, Buddhist tropes.

A synthetic analysis of how Buddhism may help us move forward appropriately in the climate change age as well as a clear-sighted understanding of the limits of Buddhist environmental ethics.

Bhikkhus, based upon the Himalayas, the king of mountains, the nagas nurture their bodies and acquire strength.

You conquer it? Why this unfriendly feeling? Aren’t you glad the mountain could lift you up so high in the air, so as to enjoy the view?

… as valuable as the familiar theoretical and conceptual languages of Euro-American landscape geography are, they also risk concealing a range of different aesthetics, social formations, and experiences that unfold in the non-Euro-American landscape. They risk dissimulating the politics of places as they are produced and lived contextually.

In the paper I work this argument through a critical engagement of the landscape architecture of Sri Lanka’s most famous tropical—modernist architect, Geoffrey Bawa; I specifically focus on his favorite, intensely choreographed, view at the estate Lunuganga on Sri Lanka’s south coast. As I show, while tools from the new cultural geography and beyond can help us to read this view as a classically modernist and apolitical landscape, a work of ‘art for art’s sake’, it is only a radically contextual familiarization with Sri Lankan society, politics, and history that can also reveal the landscape’s more subtle instantiation of a spatializing Sinhala-Buddhist hegemony.

Whatever the hardship, one should never abandon their land or their animals.

On how the modernization of the Kashmiri economy is experienced as a moral disruption by the agropastoralists of Ladakh.

… people collected it and drank it and bathed in it and used it for their own purpose. Since that water was properly utilized, it’s used, not wasted.

In which the Buddha encourages us to take advantage of the abundance we’ve received.

The thing that first comes to mind is the Buddha’s immediate connection with trees, the fact that he was born under a tree, had an early spiritual experience under a Eugenia jambolala tree, became Awakened under a Ficus religiosa, and passed away between two Shorea robusta. But it would be a mistake to think that this was the most significant connection between the Buddha or Buddhism and trees.

This article briefly discusses the importance of trees outside of the usual incidents tied to the Buddha Shakyamuni’s life.

Buddhism consistently holds that liberation from suffering is achieved through awareness.

A large collection of writings (mostly from the North American, Mahāyāna tradition) on environmental ethics with an eye towards orienting spiritual practice towards confronting our contemporary climatic challenge.

the lazy frogs croak:
“Today isn’t the time to stray from mountain streams” …the River Ajakaraṇī delights me

These rocky crags delight me!

Read together with Thag 1.113.

in Rangjung Dorje’s poems, the environment is presented as a catalyst for seeing the enlightened “view”. This paper looks at the metaphorical landscape that Rangjung Dorje’s poems evoke, or, to incorporate a helpful term from contemporary literary studies, their “psychogeography”, their “sense of place”.

The authors recommend public education, particularly about invasive species, as a way to reduce the unintended harm to the environment caused by these practices.

… the Buddhist tale of the impure, disgusting, and violent female body and the suffering of the fetus within the womb, so seemingly negative toward women, in fact operated discursively and affectively to support premodern female Buddhist monasticism by helping to generate a moral-social imaginary in which female fertility and sexuality cannot be the highest good of womanhood.

The term enviromentalism does not appear in the sutras, but everywhere in the sutras you can see things related to environmntalism.

Ven. Master Sheng Yen explains the implicit understanding of environmental conservation in Buddhism.

Many people have this paradigm of seeing it all as natural, but…

Instead of focusing primarily on universal concepts found in ancient texts, scholars are just as likely to look at how local communities have drawn on Buddhist ontology, ethics, cosmology, symbolism, and rituals to develop Buddhist responses to local environmental needs, developing contemporary Buddhist environmentalisms

In this article, the author reviews various traditional aspects of Buddhism’s relationship with the environment as well as the current state of “eco-Buddhism”, providing some of the arguments for and against the idea.

This research highlights the contrast between religiously oriented understandings of the environment and Green Buddhist representations in their various guises, where they intersect, and how elements of Green Tibetan discourse are being articulated and reshaped in one rural locality.

The authors look at the indigenous environmentalism of rural Tibet through the lenses of local gods and spirits, karma, and sīla/śīla. The article also speaks to modern influences such as capitalist development and government policies.

The sāl tree played a significant part in the life of the Buddha as recorded in Pali literature, although its role has been overshadowed by the Holy Fig, the Bodhi Tree

This article briefly discusses the role of Sal trees in the life of the Buddha and their various mentions in Buddhist literature, versus the singular mention of the Bodhi Tree.

The Lalitavistara sutra is one of the central texts in the Mahayana tradition and it describes the life of the Buddha.

Deals with the various species of plants found in the Borobudur releifs, showing the care and detail taken in including aspects of nature in Buddhist reliefs.

This paper identifies and responds to the four main objections raised against Buddhist environmentalism.

Once upon a time, mendicants, a battle was fought between the gods and the demons…

Fleeing the demon host, Sakka’s chariot risks endangering the nests of little birds in the forest. Rather than render the birds homeless, Sakka instructs his charioteer to turn back, even at the cost of his life.

Friends I am here to modestly report
seeing in an orchard
in my town
a goldfinch

… his 1962–1966 memoirs and 1963 poem “Butterflies over the Golden Mustard Fields” set out what we call his ecological humanism: his paradoxical overcoming of self-alienation through a close rapport with relatively wild nature.

Includes:

• Preface by Bhikkhu Bodhi
• An Ethical Approach to Environmental Protection by H.H. the Dalai Lama
• The Buddhist Attitude Towards Nature by Lily de Silva
• Buddhist Philosophy as Inspiration to Ecodevelopment by Klas Sandell
• In Search of a Buddhist Environmental Ethics by Padmasiri de Silva
• Norwegian Ecophilosophy and Ecopolitics and Their Influence from Buddhism by Sigmund Kvaloy
• The Buddhist Perception of Nature Project by Nancy Nash

Woke feeling nauseous—my wife’s soft breathing
beside me. Outside the immense Sierra dark and silence,
a sky still glittering with a strew of stars

Given our present knowledge, is environmental concern to be seen as morally obligatory for a Buddhist or only a voluntary positive action?

Oh, when will I stay in a mountain cave,
alone, with no companion,
discerning all states of existence as impermanent?

Oh, when will I rise up,
intent on attaining freedom from death,
hearing, in the mountain cave, the cry of the crested peacock in the forest?

In that structure of feeling well, we had started taking acid…

A long and wide conversation on the author’s life and on our collective, possible futures.

Some people almost faint trying to climb up the mountain where I live.

A prose translation of Arahant Mahā Kassapa’s verses in praise of his auster home, Gurpa Hill.

Swaddled and sleeved in water,
I dive to the rocky bottom and rise

… in its profit-driven, medicalised, de-ritualized and patriarchal form, modern death care fundamentally distorts humans’ relationship to mortality, and through it, nature. In response, the New Death Movement promotes a (re)new(ed) way of ‘doing death’, one coded as spiritual and feminine, and based on the acceptance of natural cycles of decay and rebirth.

The numerous poetic descriptions of forests, parks and gardens in Sanskrit poetry hardly ever omit to mention bees and their humming

If you want to find a resting place,
Cold Mountain will keep you long.
A gentle breeze blows the hidden pines:
The closer you come, the better it sounds.

A corpus of over three hundred poems attributed to a legendary Tang (618–907) era recluse who took the name Hánshān (Cold Mountain) from the isolated hill on which he lived in the Tiantai 天台 range. In pre-modern times, editions of the collection usually included fifty-some poems attributed to Hanshan’s monastic companion, Shídé 拾得­ (“Foundling”) and two poems attributed to another monk, Fēnggān 豐­干. This translation contains the complete text of the earliest surviving edition.

All-knowing lords, buddhas of past, present and future
Bless this practitioner with thoughts of roaming abroad,

Even if a house is of inferior quality, if decorated with flowers, it will appear to be a bower. It will become the source of a ‘clear mind’

💐

People are so difficult to be with —
The good ones won’t lead the way, and the bad ones never stop.

Svā Kṣitigarbha, Essence of the Earth, you who nurture all beings

To formulate a viable, systematic Buddhist environmental ethic, they must clarify on Buddhist grounds what an optimal world might be

On mountaintops, in secluded forests and on islands and the like,
Places which are agreeable to the mind and well suited to the season

It regards our planet and the life upon it. It stands outside of historical time. To another race, it would communicate: This is what you would see if you came here.

~ From Roger Ebert’s review

Shrines in parks and woodland shrines,
Well-constructed lotus ponds:
These are not worth a sixteenth part
Of a delightful human being.

Whether in a village or forest,
In a valley or on the plain–
Wherever the arahants dwell
Is truly a delightful place.

Sakka asks what place is truly delightful and the Buddha replies.

… these delightful mountain solitudes,
Are like the family estate to the supreme guide’s heirs,
And, as the best of protectors himself has said,
To rely on solitude is indeed the pinnacle of joys!

… animals are not passive objects for humans to ignore or argue over–or collect–but “individuals with their own perspectives on life,” and members of communities with which our species coexists. That animals are in this sense political actors is an underrecognized and, to my mind, potentially powerful point

What can we learn, and what kind of world would we build, if we learned how to listen to animals?

… critics have highlighted a number of weak points in Buddhist arguments thus far about environmental issues. Nevertheless, Buddhism does provide resources for constructing an environmental ethic.

Such cultivation of mindfulness provides the foundation by establishing the balance within oneself that then enables helping others.

On how mindfulness can help us face climate change productively.

“Possessions, honor, and popularity are brutal, bitter, and harsh. They’re an obstacle to reaching the supreme sanctuary.
So you should train like this: ‘We will give up arisen possessions, honor, and popularity, and we won’t let them occupy our minds.’

In which the Buddha compares attachment to wealth to a dung beetle proud of her dung.

See also AN 5.197 for a discussion on the causes of the weather!

For a more detailed, comparative analysis including a practice guide, see Bhikkhu Analayo’sarticle: “Gradual Entry into Emptiness”.