If bodhicitta truly embraces emptiness, then there will be no difference discerned
between the living and the inanimate, and indeed, some deep ecologists have drawn
similar conclusions. Naess, for instance, believes that we can identify with mountains and
he claims, ―One may broaden the sense of ―living‖ so that any natural whole, however
large, is a living whole‖ (1985, 263). The problem is, of course, that Mahāyāna
philosophy gives us no grounds on which to discriminate, and to regard only mountains,
trees, and rivers as having Buddha Nature is as dualistic as regarding only animals with a
central nervous system as proper recipients for compassion or thinking that only human
beings can have a good of their own.
To sum up, bodhicitta involves the negation of all views and therefore the
bodhisattva is not tied to any particular thesis or claim. This has both constructive
implications for environmental Buddhism as well as disadvantageous ones. It absolves
the bodhisattva from the need to follow through all the logical implications of a universal
love and compassion, such as the belief that one must endeavour to ‗soften‘ the harsh
aspects of nature. Emptiness can also serve as a method of cutting through conventional
ideas, such as a rigid understanding of what constitutes sentience, and what sorts of
beings can be said to have interests and needs. However, the emptiness of all our
conceptions undermines our environmentalist beliefs, and this can result in nihilism. As
long as emptiness is understood as negation, a bodhisattva has no resources, other than
mere conventional ideas, for biasing her love and compassion in favour, say, of
indigenous species rather than exotic ones, to prefer endangered animals to pests, or to
regard a mountain as sacred, but not a landfill. If the duality between living and nonliving
beings is dissolved, then all sorts of undesirable things must be included in the
class of proper recipients of love and compassion. In short, basing Buddhist
environmentalism on the ideas of love and compassion, even when understood in the
Mahāyāna sense of bodhicitta, is less than perfectly cogent.
Summary
This section has compared the deep ecologist‘s notion of identification to the Buddhist
practice of generating love and compassion. I suggested that both amount to a way of
If bodhicitta truly embraces emptiness, then there will be no difference discerned
between the living and the inanimate, and indeed, some deep ecologists have drawn
similar conclusions. Naess, for instance, believes that we can identify with mountains and
he claims, ―One may broaden the sense of ―living‖ so that any natural whole, however
large, is a living whole‖ (1985, 263). The problem is, of course, that Mahāyāna
philosophy gives us no grounds on which to discriminate, and to regard only mountains,
trees, and rivers as having Buddha Nature is as dualistic as regarding only animals with a
central nervous system as proper recipients for compassion or thinking that only human
beings can have a good of their own.
To sum up, bodhicitta involves the negation of all views and therefore the
bodhisattva is not tied to any particular thesis or claim. This has both constructive
implications for environmental Buddhism as well as disadvantageous ones. It absolves
the bodhisattva from the need to follow through all the logical implications of a universal
love and compassion, such as the belief that one must endeavour to ‗soften‘ the harsh
aspects of nature. Emptiness can also serve as a method of cutting through conventional
ideas, such as a rigid understanding of what constitutes sentience, and what sorts of
beings can be said to have interests and needs. However, the emptiness of all our
conceptions undermines our environmentalist beliefs, and this can result in nihilism. As
long as emptiness is understood as negation, a bodhisattva has no resources, other than
mere conventional ideas, for biasing her love and compassion in favour, say, of
indigenous species rather than exotic ones, to prefer endangered animals to pests, or to
regard a mountain as sacred, but not a landfill. If the duality between living and nonliving
beings is dissolved, then all sorts of undesirable things must be included in the
class of proper recipients of love and compassion. In short, basing Buddhist
environmentalism on the ideas of love and compassion, even when understood in the
Mahāyāna sense of bodhicitta, is less than perfectly cogent.
Summary
This section has compared the deep ecologist‘s notion of identification to the Buddhist
practice of generating love and compassion. I suggested that both amount to a way of
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