Buddhism and a Sustainable World: Some Reflections Prof.

Geoffrey Samuel, University of Cardiff, Visiting Professor of Buddhist Studies, University of Sydney, 2010 This was a lecture given at the Seymour Centre, University of Sydney, on 20 September 2010, as part of the Sydney Ideas series. The text here has been revised and tidied up a little. The original lecture can be seen as a video podcast at http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2010/professor_geoffrey_samuel.shtml *** Its easy to think of Buddhism and sustainability as natural partners. The connection is almost a clich. Many people take it for granted that there is a Buddhist view on the environment, and that it teaches a benign, positive and friendly relationship of mutual respect between human beings and the world in which they live. If we wish to work towards a sustainable world, based around a sustainable planetary ecology, then Buddhism seems to be a natural partner in that enterprise, and perhaps the most ecofriendly religious tradition in sight. There are good reasons why people think like this. A whole series of major ecological writers and activists have been inspired by Buddhist thought. We could think of people such as the poet Gary Snyder or the ecological activist Joanna Macy. Snyder is a serious practitioner of Zen Buddhism who spent several years in Japan earlier in his life as well as engaging deeply with Native American spirituality. His poetry and writing refer frequently to Buddhism and have themselves been a major philosophical influence on the ecology movement. Joanna Macy, who has visited Australia on several occasions, is one of the central spokespeople for a move away from the excesses of a society based around industrial growth, and a move towards a more sustainable world. This is what she now refers to as the Great Turning. Macys work is also consciously and explicitly Buddhistinspired, particularly by the philosophy of interconnectedness and universal

2 interdependence associated with the Chinese School of Hua Yen Buddhism. This is an excerpt from a recent interview with Macy: Interdependence [. . .] invites us to see the web of life in which we cohere and to honour it, to live according to its laws, because there are laws. As we do unto others, so it is done unto us. And this isnt just some nice old wives axiom or moral. That is actually the way it works. It is the way an ecosystem works; what you do to others happens to you. [. . .] As living systems, we are in constant change, thanks to our relationships. There is a constant flow-through of matter, energy and information. [. . .] And we discover that we are conditioning each other all of the time. [. . .] Once we understand it, this has immediate psychological effects on our notion of self-interest. My self-interest cant possibly end with my skin. When we exterminate or contaminate places like the Amazonian rain basin or San Francisco Bay, we are doing that to ourselves. This is the heart of the spiritual, intellectual adventure of our time. We are waking up to the vastness of our mutual belonging, and the vastness of the mind that is available to us in that opening. 1 This is quite powerful rhetoric, and Macys kind of language is probably familiar to many of you. Macy tells us that we are not separate from our environment, we are part of the eco-system, what we do to it will come back to us. Once we wake up to an awareness of who we really are, we will realise the need to protect and look after the eco-system as a whole. In their turn, people like Macy and Snyder (who are now both in their eighties) have been a major influence on younger generations of ecological activists and thinkers. If you look at current ecological initiatives around the world, such as the various Green Parties or the Transition Town movement, you are more than likely to run into Buddhist practitioners and Buddhist sympathisers. Elements from Buddhist philosophy, and particularly the idea of the interdependence of all phenomena, have been an important source for many of these people. They have encouraged environmental awareness, for respect for other species and for the wider planetary ecology. Contemporary Asian Buddhist teachers, such as the Vietnamese Thich Nhat Hanh, have taken up these themes and encouraged their development among Western Buddhists.

From John Malkin, We are in the Midst of a Great Turning and it is an Auspicious Time to be Alive. Interview with Joanna Macy, Ascent magazine, 2008. Downloaded from http://www.ascentmagazine.com/articles.aspx?articleID=283&issueID=38, September 2010.

*** In many ways, I dont have any problem with the widespread view of Buddhism as a particularly eco-friendly religion. I believe that achieving a sustainable relationship with the planet on which we live is a central challenge of our time. Anything that helps to promote more awareness, and more informed action, is probably a good thing. Also, I have been studying Buddhism for many years as an academic scholar. Its good to find myself engaged with a tradition that appears to have something to say to the contemporary world on matters of real importance. If one starts to look at Buddhist traditions themselves in more detail, however, the case for Buddhism as an eco-friendly religion based around ideas of mutual interdependence starts to look shaky. There has been plenty written on this theme in recent years by Buddhist scholars such as Ian Harris, Donald Swearer and others,2 so I wont go into much detail here. Essentially, though, these authors have demonstrated that the kind of eco-Buddhism that I have been discussing is a modern invention, which owes more to Western (and possibly elements of Chinese) thought than to anything within the Buddhism that came from India. Traditional Buddhist thought in India was not particularly interested in the sustainability of the environment. In fact one could argue that sustainability in the sense of the onward continuity of everyday life is a problem for Indian Buddhism, not an ideal to be promoted. One of the central ideas of Buddhism, after all, is the cycle of continued rebirth into the world, driven by the ongoing processes of karma. This ongoing cycle of everyday life, samsara in Sanskrit, involves unavoidable suffering, and Buddhism teaches that it has in some way to be brought to an end. It is very definitely not a good thing as far as Buddhist thought is concerned.

See e.g. Ian Harris, How Environmentalist is Buddhism, Religion 21 (1991): 101-114; Buddhist Environmental Ethics and Detraditionalization: The Case of EcoBuddhism, Religion 25 (1995), 199211; Getting to Grips with Buddhist environmentalism: A Provisional Typology, J Buddhist Ethics 2 (1995): 173-190; Donald K. Swearer, An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy, paper for the CSWR-Dongguk symposium on Buddhism and Ecology, December 9-10, 2005. See also the essays in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams (Cambridge: Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions, 1997).

4 Interdependence is undoubtedly a key issue in Buddhist thought. However this, too, is a problematic support for an eco-philosophy. The processes of interdependence and mutual causation, for Buddhists, are the same processes that lead to suffering and to continued rebirth. In addition, a point Ian Harris made some years ago, its hard to see how total interconnectedness in the Buddhist sense can generate an environmentalist ethic.3 If our intentions and actions are entirely dictated by the interconnected matrix of surrounding causal processes, how can we as individuals start to change the world in a more sustainable direction? Its quite difficult to derive an idea of progress towards a better world out of basic Buddhism, which tends to a timeless or detemporalised view of existence in which things just keep on repeating, causing more and more suffering. The aim of the tradition is to extricate oneself from the whole mess, not to improve it. Its difficult too to see either how interconnectedness might imply any particular respect for those parts of the natural environment that ecological thought tends to celebrate and might hope to preserve. We are as closely connected to the hydrogen bomb as to the rain forest, as intimately involved with cancer or the HIV virus as with a threatened butterfly or flower. Perhaps they are all equally worthy of our love, but if so that leaves us with little ground on which to make choices. So Indian Buddhist philosophy provides little support for an eco-friendly perspective, and, in fact, traditional Buddhist societies do not seem to have been deeply sympathetic to other species or to the environment. Most Buddhists in the past lived in peasant societies. Their historical experience had more to do with survival in often harsh and difficult conditions than with compassion for other species or feeling for the natural world as a whole. Being kind to animals was a luxury. Buddhism today is often associated with vegetarianism, but most Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia historically were not vegetarian. Above all, preserving the ecosystem was not a conscious goal of Buddhist thought, and would hardly have made any sense to pre-modern Buddhists. Even today, while there are certainly contemporary Asian Buddhist teachers who refer to environmental
3

Ian Harris, Buddhism, Causation and Telos: the problem of Buddhist Environmentalism, Journal of Buddhist Ethics 1 (1994) p. 4659.

5 issues, especially while addressing Western Buddhists, ecological awareness remains marginal in many Buddhist societies. Where it is beginning to grow, it has been more a response to recent ecological problems and disasters than something that grows out of the intellectual heritage of Buddhism itself. The real roots of eco-Buddhism are to be found more in the West, in the 19th century reaction to industrialisation and all that grew out of it,4 rather than in the Buddhist world. To the extent that there was a significant Asian component, it seems to have derived more from East Asian Chinese and Japanese - nature mysticism rather than Buddhism. Even that was hardly an authentic traditional Asian product, since it had been extensively reworked by the time it arrived in the West by modernist Chinese and Japanese thinkers reacting to the impact of modernity on their own societies Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki (1870-1966), a key influence on the early growth of Zen in North America, is a classic example.5 Now all this doesnt mean that we should dismiss eco-Buddhism, or that it might not on balance be a good thing for the world, but it does suggest that we cant derive it very plausibly from traditional Indian Buddhism. There are various responses to this kind of critique. One could point out that the sustainability of the natural environment was not a significant issue for early Buddhists because, for the most part, it was not an issue for anyone at the time. In the light of historical hindsight, we can certainly point to the growing effects of human activity on the ecology at that period, but it would have been hard to see them as a problem at the time. Very few people then were living in an environment where ecological deterioration caused by human beings was a real and visible issue. One could nevertheless point to Buddhist texts that show a concern for ongoing viability of the environment. There are a number of Mahyna sutras, important texts for some at least of the later Buddhist tradition, that speak of how in a kingdom run
4

Cf Catherine Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991. 5 In his discussion of humanity and nature, Suzuki takes Zen literature out of its social, ritual, and ethical contexts and reframes it in terms of a language of metaphysics derived from German Romantic idealism, English Romanticism, and American Transcendentalism. David McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 125.

6 according to Buddhist principles, where the Buddhist teachings are properly respected, the land will be naturally fertile and productive, natural calamities will be avoided, and so on.6 This might not imply that people saw a need to behave responsibly towards the environment in order to preserve it, but it does at least suggest an awareness that our lives are intimately related to the environment, and that human activity has an effect on that relationship. It has also been argued that if traditional Buddhist ethics of avoiding harm to other beings were thought through in relation to modern conditions, in the light of what we know today about the relationships within the ecosystem, then they would naturally lead to environmentalism. The British Buddhist writer Peter Harvey has presented a version of this argument,7 and I think that a reasonably good case can be made along these grounds. If the Buddha were around today, in other words, and knew what we know, he would be a Greenie. However, it would be more convincing if we could demonstrate that he had been one all along, or at least that Buddhism had more to bring to the party than some ethical support for a position that environmentalists have, for the most part, already adopted. I think that Buddhist societies of the past do in fact have resources that might be relevant to the ongoing reconstruction of our society towards a sustainable future, and that there are elements in traditional Buddhist societies that might contribute to ecological thinking and to human sustainability. I suggest, though, that we have been looking in the wrong place. Rather than looking for explicit elements of eco-doctrine or ecological ethics, we might be better off looking at ways in which ecological ways of behaving have become embedded in the practices of Buddhist societies.8 In the remainder of this lecture I will try to explain what I mean by this, with particular reference to Tibetan Buddhist societies, and I will talk a little about where it might take us if I am right.

6 7

E.g the Suvaraprabhsa Stra. Peter Harvey, Avoiding Unintended Harm to the Environment and the Buddhist Ethic of Intention. J. Buddhist Ethics 14 (2007). 8 Embedded here refers to Vijaya Rettakudi Nagarajans idea of embedded ecologies; see her The Earth as Goddess Bh Dev: Toward a Theory of Embedded Ecologies in Folk Hinduism. In Lance E. Nelson (ed.), Purifying the Earthly Body of God: Religion and Ecology in Hindu India, State University of NY Press, Albany, NY, 1998, pp.269-296.

7 * * * I will sketch two ways in which the practices of Tibetan societies might have something to say to the contemporary move towards a sustainable environment. The first is a kind of implicit ecological thinking that arises from the way in which the environment was, and still is, seen by Tibetan peoples in terms of spiritual forces, local gods and goddesses of the mountains, rivers and lakes. In many ways, what I am talking about here is a specifically Tibetan form of something that is not uniquely Tibetan or Buddhist. It has analogies in many pre-modern societies, notably including the pre-modern societies of Aboriginal Australia, and one can find elements of it in the European context as well. In pre-modern Tibet, then, as in many parts of the world until recent times, nature was not felt to be an inert mass of earth, rock and vegetation. The landscape was alive, and populated by countless gods and spirits of different kinds. These were a source both of danger and threat, but also of possible assistance. This is a model of thinking and feeling about the environment that is still quite real in many parts of Tibet. Illness is frequently caused by offended local gods. Misfortune of many kinds can be set off by polluting the environment in which spirits live. For example, one reason why Tibetans are still often respectful of rivers and watersources, and may be careful about what they put into them, is the belief that offended water-spirits can cause skin diseases and other afflictions. Many people who have spent time around Tibetan communities will have heard stories about boils and skin diseases caused by upset lu or water-spirits. A friend in Dalhousie, a small town in North India with a substantial Tibetan refugee population, used to hang out his washing on the railing around a large tree in the local school where he was studying. He developed a large and painful boil, and no medical treatment was able to shift it. Finally a lama realised that the tree had a lu dwelling in it, and the lu wasnt at all keen on the railing being used as a washing line. My friend sponsored a ritual to apologise to the lu, and hung his washing elsewhere, and the boil rapidly cleared up.

8 Tibetan villages were, and are still, periodically threatened with avalanches and dangerous showers of hail. Travel around Tibet, especially in pre-modern times, was itself risky, with high mountain passes, violent weather and bandits among the possible threats. In a world like this, staying on good terms with the environment was common sense rather than a philosophical ideal. The language of gods and spirits can be seen as a way of acknowledging the need to respect the environment. It recognises a commonality between human beings and the world around them. That world was alive and inhabited, and its inhabitants were part of the community among whom Tibetan villagers and pastoralists lived, and with whom they had to maintain good relationships. You will notice that the model here is not identity, as with the interconnectedness approach, but community. The gods and spirits are our neighbours, and we need to get along with them, especially if they are larger and more powerful than we are. Relationships with the spirit-world were kept up by a whole series of practices, some of them carried out on a daily basis, others seasonally or when the circumstances required. Many households made regular sang offerings, smoke-offerings of scented trees and herbs, milk, sugar and butter, accompanied by prayers to the local gods. Tibetan households generally incorporate small ovens in which to offer sang, as well as all kinds of other ritual devices to do with relationships to the surrounding spiritworld. Households, clans and lineages had inherited connections with particular gods. On the occasion of marriages, the new bride is ritually introduced to the household gods, and so on. Regular larger-scale sang offerings would be made at annual festivals. These generally involving the villagers as a group going to stone cairns or other constructions high up the mountainsides which were offering places for the gods. There might also be temples to the local gods within the village, and some communities had hereditary priests who were in charge of the offerings. They were also regularly given offerings in monastic ritual. Spirit-mediums acted as ways in which the gods could communicate their wishes and

9 needs to human beings, and certain kinds of illness or other misfortune would routinely lead to a consultation with a spirit medium. Spirit-mediums could also provide a way in which the gods could join directly in the local festivals and acknowledge the offerings made to them. I put all this in the past tense, since Tibetan religious practices, particularly in the Peoples Republic of China, have been prohibited at times in the recent past, and are still discouraged in various ways. Much of this however is still very alive, both in Chinese regions of Tibet and in those culturally Tibetan areas that form parts of India, Nepal or Bhutan. The high mountain passes that are a characteristic feature of travel in Tibet almost always have offering-cairns at the highest point. Tibetans will carry stones up the pass, add them to the cairn and shout out invocations to the local gods as they pass. In some areas, they will also scatter small paper prayer-flags in the colours of the five elements. There is a whole body of stories about these spirits and deities. You can find folk-tales about the relationships between mountain gods; two male mountain-gods in Rebkong were rivals for a female mountain-goddess, and fought a battle over her, the traces of which can be seen today on the mountainside. There are stories of the mountain gods appearing in battle as armed horsemen, fighting on the side of the local community against its enemies. There are also more recent stories of gods appearing in dreams to warn Tibetans fleeing from Chinese soldiers, or to welcome Tibetans returning to their homeland. While the prayers, prayer-flags and other elements of these practices usually included specifically Buddhist elements, you might want to say that all of this is more a question of folk religion and belief than Buddhism proper. In practice, this is not a very real distinction. Buddhism in Tibet has become deeply involved in the ways in which these spirits of the natural world are perceived and engaged with. The Buddhist lamas are the chief specialists in dealing with the powers of nature. The procedures which they use to interact with these personified environmental forces grows out of the wider technology of Tantric Buddhism, in which the ultimate compassionate power of the Buddha is accessed in order to keep the gods of the natural world in their proper place and to dissuade them from causing harm to humans. Again there is much

10 more that could be said about this, but it is worth pointing to how the experience of the environment as alive and the Buddhist practices that are built around interaction with that living environment reinforce and support each other. Each helps to make the other more real. Its striking how the Tibetan refugee communities in India, often in quite remote and unfamiliar environments for Tibetans, rapidly built up the ritual technology of engagement with the local gods and spirits. In one case I know of, in a Tibetan refugee settlement in a part of highland Orissa that the Tibetans saw as particularly remote, wild and inhospitable, the lama of the community encountered the local gods in a dream, was welcomed by them and subsequently created an offering ritual to them for use in the community. That, he told me, was the point at which people began to feel at home in their new world. If we look at practices of this kind, we find an ongoing acknowledgement of a mutual relationship with the environment. Could this relationship be the basis for action to protect the environment and preserve the vital links between humans and the world in which they live? There are signs of this happening in some culturally Tibetan communities, for example in relation to the big dam projects in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and more recently in Sikkim, a small Tibetan kingdom which now forms part of India.9 This raises a question, however, which I shall return to later: how real can this kind of argument be in the contemporary world? Can we recreate this sense of connection today, in a world in which local gods and spirits no longer have the kind of reality they did in places like pre-modern Tibet? * * * A second environmental aspect of traditional Tibetan thought is more explicitly Buddhist, and it is something I have been thinking about over the last few years, in the context of a group research project I have been directing on the so-called long-life practices of Tibetan Buddhism.10 These are yogic or meditational practices, taking
9

E.g. Vibha Arora, Text and Context in Sikkim, India. In Elisabeth Arweck and Peter Collins (eds), Reading Religion in Text and Context: Reflections of Faith and Practice in Religious Materials . Ashgate, Aldershot, 2006, pp.83-102. 10 See Geoffrey Samuel, 2010, Inner Work and the Connection between Anthropological and Psychological Analysis, in "The Varieties of Ritual Experience", ed. Jan Weinhold and Geoffrey Samuel, section of Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual, Volume II - Body, Performance, Agency

11 place primarily at the level of inner imagination, although there is an accompanying liturgical framework and there are also related breathing and dietary practices and other physical exercises involved. These practices are meant not just to extend life, but to restore energy, vitality and good health. I find the way in which they go about this very suggestive in relation to thinking about the environment. Tibetan longevity practices derived from Indian Buddhism but were developed and elaborated over the centuries in Tibet, and now form an important part of Buddhist practice. There are both practices that you can undertake for other people, and practices that you can do for yourself, though the basic techniques are much the same in either case. The central method involves visualising yourself as, and imaginatively identifying yourself with, a Tantric deity representing the power of long life. The idea behind this procedure goes back to the concept of Buddhahood as being ultimately identical with our true nature. Buddhahood is an awakening to something that at some level is already potentially present within us. Consequently we can access some of the power of the Buddha by identifying with a symbolic form that represents an aspect of that power. In the case of the longevity practice that our team was studying, a practice discovered by a visionary lama in the early 20th century but generally representative of a large class of such practices, the central symbolic form is a particular aspect of the deity Amityus in union with his female consort Caal. The particular form of sexual union in which the deities are displayed here, the so called yab yum or fathermother form, represents among other things a whole series of dichotomies which are transcended into a higher unity, including compassion (here a quality identified with the male deity) and wisdom or insight into the true nature of reality (here seen as female).

and Experience, ed. Axel Michaels et al., Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, pp.301-316; Samuel, 2012, Amityus and the Development of Tantric Practices for Longevity and Health in Tibet, in Transformations and Transfer of Tantra in Asia and Beyond (ed. Istvn Keul), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York pp.263-286; Samuel, in press, Panentheism and the Longevity Practices of Tibetan Buddhism, to appear in The Idea of the Divine: The Panentheist Model: The Divine as both Immanent and Transcendent (ed. Loriliai Biernacki and Philip Clayton), Brill, Leiden; Samuel, forthcoming, Tibetan Longevity Meditation: Technique and Structure in the Chi-med Srog-thig (Immortal Life-Essence) Practice, to appear in Dimensions of Meditation (ed. Halvor Eifring), University of Hawaii Press; Geoffrey Samuel and Cathy Cantwell, forthcoming, Seed of Immortal Life: Contexts and Meanings of a Tibetan Longevity Practice, with contributions by Robert Mayer and P. Ogyan Tanzin, to appear with Vajra Books, Kathmandu.

12

You could say that identifying with Amityus and Caal is a way of tuning the human bodymind complex into a particular mode of operating in which it can access its own healing and health-giving powers. Its difficult to talk about this kind of thing concisely without sounding as if one is drifting into New Age jargon, but I think that there are ways in which it is possible to make scientific sense of what might be going on in these practices within the framework of Western biomedicine. Thus, there is beginning to be a substantial body of recent research investigating the effects of Buddhist and other meditational techniques on brain activity and on the endocrine system. Scientists are also beginning to develop models of the brain that allow for a considerable degree of neuroplasticity in the adult brain, so the idea of these procedures as leading to significant long-term changes is becoming considerably more plausible.11
11

See e.g. Richard J. Davidson and Antoine Lutz, Buddhas Brain: Neuroplasticity and meditation,

13

In Buddhist thought, though, the individual mindbody complex is not separate from its environment. This is something that we met earlier on when I was talking about interdependence. The way in which this is taken into account in the practice is that meditators do not just identify themselves with the deity. They also imaginatively transform their environment into a transfigured universe that represents the world as it is perceived and operated on by that particular divine form. This is the famous tantric maala.

The photograph here shows a coloured sand maala, which represents the transfigured universe as seen in two dimensions from a point above the meditators head. It is a map, in other words, with the main deities at the centre, seated on a throne rising from the centre of a giant lotus blossom. Dots on the surrounding petals represent subsidiary deities through whom the central figures act. To put this somewhat differently, since self and other, individual and environment are not separate in this model, if the individual is transformed so is the environment. The model for its transformation is the maala. The transformation is not just a visual one: the meditator is directed to see all forms as aspects of the maala, but also to
IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 25, 1 (2008): 176, 172174; Beatrix P. Rubin, Changing Brains: The Emergence of the Field of Adult Neurogenesis, BioSocieties 4 (2009): 407-424.

14 hear all sounds as the voices of the deities in the maala, and to perceive all thoughts as the enlightened wisdom of the deities of the maala. This may sound somewhat over-literal, and in fact it is undercut to some degree by the specific philosophical background of this practice and many others from the same and related traditions. This is the so-called Dzogchen philosophy, which is itself a version of the standard Mahyna Buddhist assertion that sasra, the cycle of suffering intrinsic to the repetitive rebirth of cyclic existence, and nirva, the escape from that continuing cycle of suffering, are in some sense the same thing. (The idea of the Buddha-nature within all beings, which I mentioned a little while ago, comes from the same general philosophical background.) Since the world in its true nature is already enlightened, it is not actually necessary to transform or change it in any way. Thus the Tantric transformation of the longevity practice is really just a technique to assist the practitioner to a more direct and immediate access to Enlightened nature. The liturgical framework of the practice regularly reminds the practitioner of this deeper level, so that a detailed description of an elaborate visualisation description tends to be followed by a passage implying that the ultimate goal is a deeper and more direct engagement with the true nature of things. One way however of understanding the complex visualisations of the long-life practices, along with their associated breathing and dietary techniques, is to look at the change they are intended to bring about in how the practitioners see their relationship with the environment. As I described earlier, the environment can be seen by Tibetans as a constant source of spirit-threat, as a world of beings that can steal ones life-energy, deprive one of the protective forces that should normally shield and guard one, and inflict all kinds of illness and misfortune. There is a certain realism to this perspective. The Tibetan environment was dangerous. Illness and misfortune were an everyday part of life. However, constantly to see the environment as a source of danger and threat can also be a problem. The longevity practices work to recreate the relationship with the environment as positive and supportive rather than threatening. The world is imaginatively transformed in the practice into a pure maala inhabited by compassionate Tantric deities, and these deities are invoked to gather and restore the practitioners lost life-energy. Health and

15 vitality are replenished with the pure essence of the transfigured universe, ingested both in the form of breathing and through empowered liquids and other substances. As these transformations are repeated over and over again, the practitioners learn to feel and experience the universe as positive and supportive, and as a source of renewed energy and vitality. Tibetans believe that these practices can have a real and positive effect on ones health. This does not seem to me unreasonable. We are beginning to learn, after all, how much of the healing process even in conventional Western medical treatment is often due to the human mind-body, rather than to the doctors medicine or other intervention.12 However, the direct benefit to health is only part of what is, or might be, going on in these practices. Implicitly rather than through doctrinal or philosophical teaching, they allow the people who undertake them to see themselves as linked to an environment which is a source of positive support and regeneration, and to see the powers and forces, transfigured now as Tantric deities, that animate that environment as closely and positively connected with their own inner being. To put it very simply, the practice teaches meditators to feel at home in the world, and to see their environment as ultimately a good place, inhabited by friendly and supportive beings with whom they are intimately linked. * * * Most of us today live in a world which, for different reasons but in a comparable way to that of traditional Tibet, can easily be experienced as a source of danger and threat. The modern city is a particularly difficult place to feel at home. City living, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote recently, is a notoriously ambivalent experience. It attracts and repels. To make the plight of the city dweller still more harrowing and difficult to repair, it is the same aspects of city life that, intermittently or
12

Cf Daniel Moerman, Meaning, Medicine and the Placebo Effect, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002; Geoffrey Samuel, Healing, Efficacy and the Spirits. Journal of Ritual Studies 24,2 (2010): 7-20.

16 simultaneously, attract and repel . . .13 Urban life involves constant tension, threat and danger, often at a more or less subliminal level. Job insecurity is endemic and demands a constant reinvention of ourselves to fit the demands of the latest short-term working situation. Everything we eat seems to represent multiple hazards to our health. Even the air we breathe and the water we drink are polluted with dangerous chemicals. We feel increasingly unsafe about allowing children to play on the streets or in public places, but even if they stay at home, the internet is full of lurking threats. The social fabric is deteriorating; our neighbours may be criminals or terrorists. The threats are often real, and social and political action to restore our society is needed, but there is also here a problem of feeling and perception, and a need to restore a sense of security. Could the Tibetan embedded ecology, and the longevity practices I have been discussing, suggest ways in which we might be able to learn once more to be at home in the world, to feel ourselves as being supported and positively connected to our environment? I would certainly not argue that they could provide a total solution, but I feel that there are ways in which they might help to counter some of the more damaging features of our current predicament. I am not suggesting here that we seek to reinvent in the modern urban environment a world populated by spirits and deities. There are people who try to do just this, of course, including some practitioners of Western Buddhism and other Asian religions, as well as urban shamans and contemporary pagans of various kinds. These can be interesting attempts, and I have written a little about them elsewhere.14 We should also not forget that the ground on which we are today, here in Sydney, still has connections to a spiritually-inspired world view this particular place still has traditional owners, the Gadigal peoples of the Eora nation, as does most of urban Australia, and it retains some continuity with past modes of experiencing country that still have meaning for at least some of the people who live and work here today. For
13 14

Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Polity 2007), p.89 Geoffrey Samuel, 'The Religious Meaning of Space and Time: South and Southeast Asia and Modern Paganism.' International Review of Sociology 11 (2001): 395-418

17 most people in the modern city, however, reanimating the spirit world is unlikely to be a viable option, and accessing Aboriginal spirituality or its local equivalents difficult and inappropriate. I wonder though if there are ways in which we can take aspects of the urban environment and build on them creatively so as to make it easier for people to feel a sense of continuity and belonging. I will briefly mention two initiatives, one in which I have been involved myself in South Wales, and one here in Sydney, to give some idea of what might be done. Both of these are project that involve rivers. Rivers are interesting things to work with. Most cities are built on them, and they were here long before the city. Even though they may have been moved around, buried underground or otherwise changed, they present a physical continuity with the past. They also present continuity in space: rivers flow, and they connect peoples and places that can see themselves as very different. They are natural symbols for connection and integration. The Welsh project is centred around the main river that flows through Cardiff, the Taff. This river connects together three very different kinds of place. It rises in the Brecon Beacons National Park, which is prime tourist country, also used by the British army for military training. The mid-range of the Taff flows through Merthyr Tydfil and the South Wales coalfield, post-industrial areas of massive social disadvantage, before it reaches Cardiff and the Bristol Channel. Cardiff is a thriving modern city with a large immigrant population from elsewhere in the UK and beyond, largely disconnected from its hinterland, and the capital of devolved Wales the new Welsh Assembly building is close to where the river reaches the sea. The group with whom I have been working is particularly interested in the areas of social disadvantage in the mid-range. There is a cycle track that runs the entire length of the river, but substantial parts still feel like wastelands that have been virtually abandoned by the local communities. We have been working on ideas for large-scale cultural projects, for example at the ruins of a massive ironworks, once a key site for the Industrial Revolution and the growth of the British labour movement, and at a neglected hot water spring, traditionally a healing well. All this, I have to admit, is

18 still in fairly early stages, and while there have been a number of discussions and several funding applications, we havent achieved anything very material as yet. People have worked along these lines elsewhere, however, and I was impressed when I was in Sydney last December [2009] to find that a project of this kind was under way along the Georges river in Bankstown. This is the Cross-Currents scheme, launched in August 2009, which involves a series of artworks celebrating significant stories, events and experiences along the section of the river that forms Bankstowns western boundary.15 Some of you may well have visited some of these locations. The six art works so far pick up on themes such as the migratory bird species that flow through the area, local Aboriginal stories of environmental guardianship, cultural exchange between the Aboriginal people and early colonial settlers in the area, a young girl who survived a shark attack in the river in the 1930s, and the history of Bankstown Aerodrome during the second world war. I wouldnt say myself that they were all equally successful, and in fact its difficult to judge what impact something of this kind might have in the short term, but this is an interesting and promising initiative. There is a superficial similarity here to some of what goes on in the heritage and tourist industry, but initiatives like that at Bankstown are actually quite different. The aim isnt to produce a glossy image that will somehow convert Bankstown into a major tourist destination, but to build symbols of connection and groundedness for the large and heterogeneous community of people who now live there. These people have come from many different places around the world and dont necessarily feel a great deal of connection with where they now are. There have been a variety of place-based initiatives of this kind in Australia and elsewhere in the world. We can underestimate the significance of what these initiatives might represent. To the extent that they work, they can help to recreate the sense of place and of relatedness to the environment that I think is probably a basic precondition for any real movement towards a sustainable world. You have to care
15

See e.g. Crosscurrents - Georges River Art Walk, http://www.bankstown.nsw.gov.au/index.aspx? NID=629, accessed 13 Jan 2013.

19 about where you live before you start feeling that it is worth doing something to preserve it. As for the longevity practices, I dont imagine either that most citizens of contemporary Australian cities are likely to become practitioners of advanced Tibetan yogic or meditational practices in the near future, although there is more of this kind happening in Australia than most people realise. These days, when I give talks on long-life practices, there are usually some people in the audience who have done them. I wonder though if the principles that I have sketched behind the practices can in some way be translated so as to be accessible for a wider range of people. I have looked into this a little in the context of another research group to which I belong, on religion and people with autism spectrum conditions. 16 Many people with autism spectrum conditions find the world particularly threatening, confusing and difficult to make sense of. The order and structure of the maala would seem to be something that might well assist them in seeing the world as coherent and inhabitable. But this again is a project at a fairly early stage, and I mention it here mainly because I want to suggest that while the practices I have described in this lecture may seem exotic, the principles behind them are not necessarily so remote from our everyday experience. What Ive tried to show you today is that while the connection between Buddhism and ecology isnt perhaps as close or direct as it is sometimes assumed to be, there are in fact ways in which premodern Buddhist societies did recognise and work with their relationship to their environment. If we are to be successful in bringing about Macys Great Turning, and moving to a sustainable world, perhaps its worth seeing what we can learn from their experience.

16

Geoffrey Samuel, Autism and Meditation: Some reflections. Journal of Religion, Disability and Health, 13 (2008): 85-93