In the third Turning, Buddhism encountered the sha-
manistic societies of the Himalayas and evolved into what is known as the Vajrayana — the Way of the Thunderbolt — with its dynamic techniques of visualization and medita- tion to create the mystic energy needed for inner awakening and transformation. A great text in this lineage is The Jewel Ornament of Liberation, by Gampopa in the 12th century. All these lineages and traditions have found their way to
the West. There are more than 600 Buddhist organizations and communities across Canada, and thousands more in the United States. You can find Buddhist groups all around the world; it is truly a global religion. But if you were to visit several of them, even in the same city, you would find that they may barely resemble each other in terms of what they think, say, and do.
Engaged Buddhism: a new
way Buddhism arrived in the West in the late 1800s, but it was not until the 1960s that Buddhism really entered into Western culture with lots of Western practitioners. This was a time of great social evolu- tion and civil rights move- ments, student protests, and openness to new ways of structuring our relationships. It was also a time of increasing secularization, as illus- trated by Québec’s Quiet Revolution. In 1950, Dr. B.R.
Ambedkar, who drafted India’s Constitution, and who was a co-creator of modern India with M.K. Gandhi, converted to Bud- dhism along with hundreds of thousands of Dalit (Untouch- able) class Hindu citizens in a non-violent re-visioning of Indian society. During the Vietnam War, a young
Vietnamese monk called Thich Nhat Hanh became involved in social activism and came to the West to promote another way forward based on Interbeing and deep ecology, known as Engaged Buddhism. His work and lineage have profoundly transformed all branches of Buddhism.
Green Buddhism Buddhism is fundamentally about seeing “reality” as it
really is. This may have been interpreted as an individual hero quest in the past, but for us — here, now — it encom- passes facing the climate crisis, extinctions, pollution, and destruction of our planet through our own misguided extrac- tivism, consumerism, and materialism. It’s an “all-hands- on-deck” situation.
Page 18 Photo by Sahil Pandita
Buddhist practice is an evidence-based investigation, a
systems approach that is entirely congruent with modern scientific methods, but without the naïve belief that sci- ence is always objective or that technology is the solution to all our problems. You could say that Green Buddhism is Engaged Buddhists’ response to the reality of planet Earth in the Anthropocene, looking for the causes of the suffer- ing and figuring out how to resolve them as expeditiously as possible. Indeed, Shakyamuni Buddha was frequently referred to as The Great Physician. The diagnosis: human overshoot has caused us to live
beyond our planet’s means. If you read Limits to Growth, by Donella Meadows et al. back in the 1970s, or if you’ve shown your students movies from the Story of Stuff Project by Annie Leonard, or if you’ve seen the art of Canadian photographer Edward Bur- tynsky, you knew this was coming. The remedy: Regenerative envi-
ronmental design and a sustainable socio-economic structure, based on a new value proposition. Back in 1973, Small Is
Beautiful: A Study of Eco- nomics as if People Mat- tered, by E.F. Schumacher, was the first popular book to present what Bud- dhist economics could look like in the modern era. In 2017, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st- Century Economist, by Kate Raworth, updates
Schumacher’s model with both overshoot boundar- ies on the outer edge and social equity shortfalls on the inner edge of our future safe zone. Neither of these authors professes to be a Bud- dhist, but their paradigms are entirely congruent with a Bud-
dhist perspective. As Buddhists have taken up the
challenges of the Anthropocene, their ini- tiatives have taken many forms.
What does Green Buddhism look
like? On a personal level, living a simple lifestyle and
eating as vegan a diet as possible have always been central to Buddhist practice. At the other end of the spectrum, in terms of political structures, the Buddhist kingdom of Bhu- tan has adopted a civic model of Gross National Happiness as its measure of civilizational success rather than Gross National Product and has become the first carbon-neutral country on the planet. His Holiness the Dalai Lama was the recipient of the
1989 Nobel Peace Prize based on his environmental work, and he has been a tireless advocate for the environmental
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