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Buddhism and the Environment
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DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.721
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Buddhism and the Environment
William Edelglass, Department of Philosophy, Malboro College, Barre Center for Buddhist
Studies, Emerson College
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.013.721
Published online: 28 June 2021
Summary
Buddhism is a vast and heterogeneous set of traditions embedded in many different
environments over more than two millennia. Still, there have been some similar practices
across Buddhist cultures that contributed to the construction of local Buddhist
environments. These practices included innumerable stories placing prominent Buddhist
figures, including the historical Buddha, in particular places. Many of these stories
concerned the conversion of local serpent spirits, dragons, and other beings associated
with a local place who then themselves became Buddhist and were said to protect
Buddhism in their locales. Events in the stories as well as relics and landscape features
were marked by pillars, reliquary shrines (stupas), caves, temples, or monasteries that
often became the focus of pilgrimage or considered particularly auspicious places for
Buddhist practice, where one could encounter buddhas and bodhisattvas. Through ritual
practices such as pilgrimage, circumambulation, and offerings, Buddhists engaged
environments and their local spirits. Landscapes were transformed into Buddhist sites
that were mapped and made meaningful according to Buddhist stories and cosmology.
Farmers, herders, traders, and others in Buddhist cultures whose livelihood depended on
their environments engaged the spirits of the land, whose blessings they needed for their
own good.
Just as they transformed the meaning of local environments, Buddhists also transformed
the material environment. In addition to building monasteries, stupas, and other religious
structures, Buddhist monastics developed administrative and engineering expertise that
enabled large-scale irrigation systems. As Buddhism spread through Asia, it brought
agricultural technologies that created the watery landscapes enabling rice production
and increasing the agricultural surplus that made possible large monasteries and
urbanization.
In the last decades of the 20th century and the first decades of the 21st, eco-Buddhist
scholars and practitioners have found resources in Buddhist traditions to construct a
Buddhist environmental ethic. Some have argued that concepts such as dependent
origination, the ethics of loving-kindness and compassion, and other ideas from classical
Buddhist traditions suggest that Buddhism has always been particularly attuned to the
environment. Critics have charged that eco-Buddhists are distorting Buddhist traditions
by claiming that premodern traditions were responding to contemporary environmental
concerns. Moreover, they argue, Buddhist ideas such as dependent origination, or its
more environmentally resonant interpretation as “interdependence,” do not in fact
provide a satisfying grounding for an environmental ethic. Partly in response to such
critics, much scholarly work on Buddhism and the environment became more focused on
concrete phenomena, informed by a variety of disciplines, including anthropology,
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archaeology, place studies, art history, pilgrimage studies, and the study of activism.
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.
Keywords: Buddhism, environment, eco-Buddhism, green Buddhism, place, sacred geography,

environmental activism, socially engaged Buddhism, pilgrimage
Subjects: Buddhism
Buddhist Environments and the Propagation of the Dharma in India
From the very earliest years, and then wherever Buddhism spread in Asia, the lived
environment was made meaningful as a Buddhist environment through practices, doctrines,
and stories. In the Mucalinda Sutta, for example, shortly after his awakening, the Buddha sits
in meditation in Uruvelā, by the shore of the Nerañjarā River, under the shade of the
Mucalinda tree. An unseasonable storm arises and for seven days the Nāga (serpent spirit)
King, Mucalinda, wraps himself around the Buddha and spreads his hood above, protecting
the Buddha from cold winds, rain, and insects. When the storm is over, the Nāga King takes
on the form of a young man and with palms together pays homage to the Buddha. Numerous
Indian Buddhist narratives tell similar stories of monks protected by snakes or dragons. Often,
the serpents and dragons are local deities, converted by the monks to Buddhism, who then
take on the role of protectors of the monks and, more generally, protectors of Buddhism in
1
their territory. And often, these local deities inhabited pre-Buddhist sacred sites of ritual-
ecological practice, places that were already venerated because they were thought to be
particularly powerful. Narratives of local deities and spirits of trees, animals, and other
natural beings converting to Buddhism and becoming protectors are thus stories of pre-
2
Buddhist environments becoming Buddhist.
Indian places also became Buddhist through association with events in the life of the Buddha
or other important Buddhist figures. These sites then became the focus of pilgrimage,
frequently marked by pillars, reliquary shrines (stupas), caves, temples, or monasteries. Two
pillars, with inscriptions attributed to the 3rd-century-BCE Mauryan emperor Aśoka, mark
early sites of Buddhist worship and pilgrimage linked to the Buddha’s biography. One was
associated with the birthplace of Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha, in what became Lumbinī,
in Nepal. The other, also in Nepal, was said to be the site of the reliquary shrine of a previous
Buddha, Konākamana. By the time of Aśoka, pilgrimage seems to have been a well-established
practice in Indian Buddhism. Some Indian Buddhist texts, such as the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra,
suggest pilgrimage to four sites important in the life of Śākyamuni: his birthplace, the place of
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awakening, the place of his first teaching, and the place of his death and final passing into
nirvana. Over time, Buddhist traditions came to identify these places of pilgrimage as
Lumbinī, Bodh Gāya, Sārnāth, and Kuśinagar.
In addition to these four locations, innumerable other places throughout the early Buddhist
heartland, the Middle Ganges region, were associated with the Buddha and became sites of
pilgrimage. A number of these sites had stupas said to enshrine the bodily relics of the
Buddha. Still more were places where the Buddha was said to have meditated, taught, or
marked his presence with a footprint, or where stupas might house his begging bowl or robe.
The Āśokāvadāna, a 2nd-century-BCE text, includes a pilgrimage narrative in which Aśoka
3
follows a ritual circuit that “maps the Buddha’s biography onto the geography of India.”
Buddhist pilgrimage practices and stupas, pillars, caves, temples, and monasteries made
visible the new Indian Buddhist sacred geography.
As missionaries brought Buddhist texts, teachings, and practices to other parts of the Indian
subcontinent, these new environments also became Buddhist environments. There is textual
and archaeological evidence of numerous Buddhist sites in Gandhāra and Kuṣāṇa, in
northwestern India (contemporary Pakistan and Afghanistan); stupas were built in places
where relics or objects of the Buddha were said to have been located. There were also sites
that became associated with stories from earlier lives of the Buddha. After some years,
narratives placed the Buddha himself in Gandhāra and Kuṣāṇa, far from the Middle Ganges,
4
thereby also making these environments Buddhist. Because discourses of the Buddha were
understood to be the very embodiment of the Buddha as dharma, Louis O. Gómez writes,
scripture “becomes a living relic of the Buddha, so that every place where the text is made
5
known becomes a sacred location, a reliquary, as it were.” Thus, as Buddhism spread in the
subcontinent and neighboring lands and Buddhists brought discourses and stories that
situated the Buddha in new places, these places themselves were transformed into Buddhist
environments.
As archaeologists and environmental historians have shown, early Indian Buddhist

communities transformed their landscapes in material ways beyond the building of stupas,
temples, and monasteries. Their work demonstrates that even in the centuries before the
Common Era, many monastic communities were already active in land and water
management. Buddhist monastic institutions thus served as repositories of technical and
managerial knowledge. At the early Buddhist site of Sanchi, for example, in the Indian state of
Madhya Pradesh, archaeologists have found dams almost twenty feet high and forty-six
6
hundred feet long, creating reservoirs just over one square mile. Buddhist water resource
systems—including large dams, spillways, sluiceways, and sluice gates—enabled the
collection, storage, and distribution of water to irrigate crops. Monks provided engineering
and administrative expertise to local people, thereby enabling a transition from subsistence
agriculture to the agricultural surplus and patronage networks required to support large
monasteries.
Developing complex water systems enabled Buddhist monks to address the immediate needs
of local people. Far from transcending the world around them, these monks were socially
engaged, providing technologies that helped the surrounding population to live with uncertain
drought. In responding to agricultural challenges, they transformed the socioecological
environment. And the transformation of the environment led to economic and social changes,
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including transformations in food culture and land tenure as well as increased population and
urbanization. The Buddhist monastic culture that developed in central India was made
possible by a predominantly rice-growing economy that itself was predicated on reliable
7
irrigation.
The watery world that resulted from monastic irrigation projects is represented in the plants
and animals that appear in early Buddhist relief sculptures, which are often aquatic species
(lotus, fish, turtles, and snakes). Julia Shaw suggests that this imagery both reflects the
watery environment that produced the resources necessary for Buddhist monuments and
symbolizes monastic capacities to live well with the natural world and to diminish the danger
and uncertainty of droughts. She characterizes the Buddhist environment created by the
8
water systems as a “hydraulic landscape.” Agriculture relied on monastic expertise and was
no longer dependent on rain-making cults and the unpredictable serpent deities they
propitiated. “Far from negating the eco-dharma model,” Shaw writes, “the history and
chronology of monastic landlordism and the archaeological evidence of the gradual
monumentalisation of Buddhist locales in the landscape support the idea of entanglement
between monks and their physical and built environment through ‘long term relationships of
material investment, care and maintenance’, the absence of which leads to decay and
9
disrepair.” With the decline of Buddhism in central India, dams, sluiceways, and sluice gates
at Buddhist sites were not maintained, and diminished irrigation resulted in smaller agrarian
production and thus decreased populations at some sites for many centuries.
The relationship between temples, monasteries, irrigation technologies, and agriculture is

found in the historical record throughout Buddhist Asia. As Johan Elverskog notes, “systems of
1
wells, tanks, and irrigation are found pretty much everywhere Buddhism became established.”
0
Buddhist monks brought irrigation technologies to the oasis towns on the Silk Road, which
“played a major role in establishing these cities as bastions of Buddhism in an otherwise
11
inhospitable landscape.” Archaeologists and historians have documented this relationship in
12
Burma, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and elsewhere. Some of these projects were massive, with
reservoirs covering thousands of acres and holding billions of cubic feet of water. All this
water enabled significant increases in rice production, which provided more nutrients than
wheat and made possible both a dramatic growth in population and the agricultural surplus
necessary to sustain Buddhist monastics who did not themselves do agricultural work. The
monastic code eventually contained suggestions for running a granary that could make a
profit. In addition to rice and the irrigation technologies on which its production relied,
Buddhists also transmitted sugar, cotton, and tea, further transforming socioecological
13
landscapes through agricultural expansion. The agricultural expansion, in turn, made
possible increased urbanization, which supported and accompanied the spread of Buddhism in
14
numerous places in Asia. From the early centuries on, then, Buddhism significantly
impacted the physical environment and its meaning.
Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist Environments
As Buddhism spread elsewhere in Asia, one can see many of the same dynamics that
transformed local landscapes into Buddhist environments in India: local deities and their
places were converted; Buddhist structures were built to mark the sacred Buddhist
environment; Buddhists brought agricultural technologies that remade local places; stories of
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buddhas, bodhisattvas, and eminent teachers and practitioners were embedded into the land;
even Śākyamuni, the historical Buddha, was said to have meditated and taught across Asia,
from Sri Lanka to Tibet and China, marking the environment and its historical past as
Buddhist.
According to tradition, when Buddhism was brought to the Tibetan and Himalayan regions, it
encountered autochthonous deities and spirits throughout the environment. As with the
serpent spirits in India, Buddhist stories tell how these deities and spirits were subdued and
converted and became protectors of Buddhism. The most prominent narrative of taming and
conversion of a local spirit in Tibet is supposed to have taken place in the 7th century under
the leadership of the Tibetan king Songtsen Gampo. When Songtsen Gampo set out to build a
temple in Lhasa, local spirits thwarted his attempts. Through divination, Buddhists discovered
that the land of Tibet was itself constituted by a great demon, lying on her back, unleashing
inauspicious forces and thereby undermining the work of spreading the new religion.
According to later stories, guided by geomancy, the Indian tantric adept and teacher
Padmasambhava had monasteries, temples, and stupas constructed on the limbs and organs of
the demoness—across the vast territory of Tibet, including two sites in contemporary Bhutan
15
—pinning her down and subjugating her wild and destructive energy. The supine demon,
tamed and converted, became a protector deity for Buddhism in Tibet.
The story of the supine demon provides an image of the very land of Tibet as it was integrated
into a Buddhist framework. Such integration took place throughout the Himalaya regions,
where tantric deities and buddhas were thought to permeate the environment. According to
oral and textual tradition, there are innumerable minor autochthonous spirits inhabiting the
environment. These beings reside in mountains, cliffs, caves, valleys, forests, trees, rocks,
cairns, lakes, streams, river bends, confluences of rivers and streams, springs, and other
16
natural features. Himalayan Buddhists employ architectural terms—“castle,” “tent,”
“palace”—to describe these landscape features as the residence of deities and spirits. For
Himalayan Buddhists, then, much of the environment is animate and, indeed, the beings who
animate the environment are thought to form the very landscape features with which they are
associated. Scholars refer to this integration of places and beings into one meaningful whole
in the context of tantric Buddhism as the “mandalization” of space, through which the
meaning of local environments is determined by the cosmology and practice of tantric
Buddhism.
In addition to landscape features regarded as abodes of beings understood in a tantric

Buddhist framework, particular places were also understood as powerful based on a prior
visitation of a significant Buddhist figure. Such a visitation, typically including meditation,
teaching, writing, or performing a miracle, could endow specific entities or larger regions
with powerful qualities. Some places were revealed as empowering through the subtle sight of
advanced practitioners, who are able to perceive sacred geographies invisible to profane
vision. (Sometimes, visionaries discovered whole hidden lands, auspicious places conducive to
17
practice and suitable for refuge. ) Reliquary structures, temples, shrines, monasteries, and
sky burial sites were often placed in these special places, further creating an environment
permeated by Buddhism. Moreover, these places are not just understood as passive
receptacles for objects and actions; rather, within this framework, it is the places themselves
who are active and agentive beings.
Page 5 of 21
One common way in which Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhists engage places and the particular
features of Buddhist environments is through pilgrimage practice. In this context, pilgrimage
18
is an embodied encounter with a living being, the gnas, located in a place. Thus, pilgrimage,
in Tibetan, is gnas-skor (going around a gnas) or gnas-mjal (encountering a gnas). It involves a
variety of mental and physical actions that build relationships with the being who resides at
an empowering place. As Toni Huber has noted, these include identifying oneself with the
gnas through visualization and meditation; “seeing (in both the sense of direct encounter (mjal)
and ‘reading’ and interpreting landscape, etc.), touching (by contacting the place), positioning
(body in relation to place), consuming/tasting (by ingesting place substance), collecting
(substances of the place), exchanging (place substances with personal substances/
possessions), vocalizing (prayers addressed to the place of specific formulas), and even in
19
some cases listening (for sounds produced by the place).” Encountering places in these
embodied ways, Tibetan and Himalayan pilgrims experience their bodies as transformed and
purified through the energy they receive from the place. In pilgrimage, then, one can see how
people and environments are in relationship, interacting with and engaging one another.
This interactive engagement between people and Buddhist environments is manifest in daily
life as well as in pilgrimage. Most people who lived in the broad cultural area of Himalayan
Buddhism were peasant farmers, nomads, laborers, pastoralists, merchants, traders, or others
whose livelihood depended on their environments. Their engagement with the Buddhist
environment was generally motivated by mundane concerns: a good harvest, health, fertility,
longevity, and wealth. To be successful in one’s endeavors, it was necessary to maintain good
relations with the deities with whom they shared their environments. This required creating a
wholesome “moral climate” by not polluting the dwelling of a deity through unwholesome
acts, such as disturbing springs, uprooting plants, hunting in close proximity to the deity, or,
20
in some places, cooking or eating particular kinds of foods. It also required ritual offerings
and experts who knew how to make them. For example, Himalayan Buddhists regarded the
weather as manifestations of benevolent and malevolent deities. Ritual specialists, monks who
were experts in controlling the weather, were required to preserve crops from hail, ensure
21
adequate rainfall, and prevent premature freezing or floods. For many Tibetan and
Himalayan Buddhists whose livelihood depended upon good relations with the local spirits,
they engaged the environment of their daily activities—and thus their survival—as a Buddhist
22
environment.
East Asian Buddhist Environments
The history of the propagation of Buddhism in East Asia is also a history of the creation of
Buddhist environments. Indian Buddhism spread to China in part through grounding the
Buddha himself in Chinese landscapes. Buddhists claimed to find traces of the Buddha,
especially footprints and handprints, at sites throughout China, which were interpreted as
marks of the Buddha’s travels and deeds. Stories of the Buddha’s activities in China were
mapped onto the landscape, manifesting the very land as Buddhist. Buddhism was also
grounded in China through the many classical Chinese Buddhist sources that claimed there
had been an earlier propagation of Buddhism in China. China, according to these sources, had
converted to Buddhism in an earlier golden age and belonged to the Buddhist empire of
Aśoka. These texts suggested that Aśoka—who is said to have established eighty-four
thousand Buddhist shrines—had distributed relics in China, which were then “discovered”
Page 6 of 21
across the landscape. Some texts go further, mapping stories of earlier buddhas and their
deeds in China. With enough faith, one could read the traces of these stories, or find relics
and stupas, in the Chinese environment. As James Robson observes, Buddhists in China
performed a “colonization of the past,” claiming the past as Buddhist as they grounded
23
Buddhism in the soil where relics, stupas, and stories were discovered. As in India and the
broader Himalayan region, then, Chinese Buddhists gave new Buddhist meanings to
indigenous sacred sites.
One of the characteristic features of East Asian Buddhism is the increased valorization of
mountain environments as places of practice and spiritual power. Already in India, mountains
were significant in Buddhist traditions. In Indian Buddhist cosmology, for example, it is a
mountain, Mount Sumeru, that constitutes the very center of the universe, with seven outer
mountain ranges defining the Buddhist world. According to classical sources, the Buddha
gave many of the most important Mahāyāna teachings at Vulture Peak (near Rajagriha, India),
where he and his followers often resided. Indeed, some sources suggest that the Buddha still
resides on Vulture Peak, continuously offering his presence and teaching. Moreover, Indian
Buddhists frequently built stupas and monasteries on hills and mountains. And while
Buddhism in India is historically intertwined with urbanization, canonical Buddhist texts often
recommend practicing in mountains and forests, far from the distractions of social life.
Practicing in seclusion was inspired by stories of the Buddha himself and also because it was
regarded as particularly conducive to encountering buddhas and bodhisattvas. At the same
time, Indian sources often describe Buddhist pure lands as flat, suggesting that mountains
and hills are imperfect and characteristic of saṃsāra. With Buddhism’s spread to East Asia,
mountains and their surrounding environments came to take on a much more prominent and
positive place in Buddhist thought and practice.
While mountains may have had an ambiguous status in Indian Buddhism, Chinese Buddhists
were inspired by Indian sources in the development of a Buddhist environment organized
around sacred mountains. Sacred mountains in India, such as Vulture Peak, were even said to
have flown to China, literally bringing with them the very sacred ground upon which the
Buddha taught. References to the land of the Buddha, and sometimes even the very
transplanting of that land, provided an authority that was then strengthened by engagements
with local traditions, each of which had their own ideas and practices regarding sacred
mountains. As in India and Tibet and the Himalayan regions, in China there are numerous
stories of eminent monks taming and converting local spirits, transforming indigenous
powerful places into a sacred Buddhist environment. Over time, particular mountains were
associated with the presence of buddhas and bodhisattvas. The most well-known of these are:
Hiuhua (home of Kṣitigarhba) in Anhui; Putuo (home of Avalokiteśvara) in Zhejiang; Wutai
(home of Mañjuśrī) in Shanxi; and Emei (home of Samantabhadra) in Sichuan. At these and at
many other mountains, practitioners were understood to be able to encounter and be
supported by the presence of awakened beings and protector spirits. Monks and pilgrims
traveled to mountain monasteries and hermitages to practice austerities, meditate, and
develop supernatural powers. Over time, the character for mountains began to appear in the
name of many major monasteries in East Asia, as the monasteries associated themselves with
auspicious environments.
Page 7 of 21
In China, sites that were often locally significant became meaningful as part of a larger
Buddhist network, as in Tibet and the Himalayan regions, enacting the “mandalization of
space.” To create a Buddhist environment required “new ways of reading the Chinese natural
landscape for Buddhist ‘signs.’ This process,” Robson writes, “involved claiming explicit
Buddhist meanings for particularly striking features of the natural landscape . . . it was
perceived that the natural landscape could speak a language of its own (engaging all the
24
senses), with special sites marked by particular smells, sounds, or visions.” These new ways
of reading the natural landscape and valorizing mountains and remote environments were
undertaken and accomplished by monks who began to actually live in the mountains and
remote environments. In place of an earlier aversion to remote forests and mountains, many
Buddhist writers and practitioners now praised these environments as places of practice,
places in fact conducive to progress on the Buddhist path.
The new ways of reading the landscape were manifest in the spread of landscape poetry and
landscape painting. Painters and poets went to the mountains for spiritual and aesthetic
inspiration and often understood their artistic activity as a form of spiritual practice. Buddhist
visualization and other meditation practices, as well as ideas of emptiness and the presence of
Buddha-nature in nonsentient beings, influenced the development of Chinese landscape
25
painting and poetry. Landscape paintings and poems now began to express Buddhist
teachings. Consider, for example, this poem by Su Shi (1037–1101), the great Song dynasty
poet, calligrapher, essayist, statesman, and Buddhist practitioner:
The murmuring brook is the Buddha’s long, broad tongue.

And is not the shapely mountain the body of purity?
Through the night I listen to eighty thousand gathas,
26
When dawn breaks, how will I explain it to others?
Su Shi wrote these lines after sitting through the night by a stream on Mount Lu, one of the
prominent sacred mountains in central China, not far from the Yangtze River. They express
the poet’s awakening experience. According to tradition, there are thirty-two major physical
characteristics of a buddha, including a “long, broad tongue.” Comparing the sounds of the
stream to the tongue of the Buddha, then, in the first line, is to suggest that the sound of the
stream is the very teaching, the discourse of the Buddha. Su Shi’s awakening is an awakening
to the mountain as the body of the Buddha. The “eighty thousand gathas” refer to the
teachings of the Buddha that reveal a truth that, as the poet suggests in the final line, is itself
beyond language. The poet’s awakening is an experience of the mountains and waters as the
Buddha preaching the Buddhadharma.
Su Shi’s poem is representative of much landscape painting and poetry as an expression of

the synthesis of Buddhism and the Chinese nature cult. It would be a mistake, though, to think
that this synthesis, and the corresponding landscape poetry and painting, indicated a wider
cultural and political affirmation of the natural world according to contemporary
environmentalist sensibilities. As Richard Elvin has pointed out, Chinese perceptions and
representations of the environment, as seen in landscape painting and nature poetry, do not
necessarily reflect actual environmental history. At some periods, the reverence for nature
was expressed most poignantly precisely when forests were being clear-cut, waters dammed,
27
and vast wild animal habitats were being destroyed.
Page 8 of 21
Many of the characteristics of Chinese Buddhist relations to the environment—the
mandalization of space, the sacralization of mountains, the appropriation of indigenous sacred
sites into a Buddhist framework, the synthesis of aesthetic sensibilities for nature and
Buddhist practice, and the association of local environments with India and the Buddha’s
biography—traveled with Buddhism from China to Japan and Korea.
In Japan, pre-Buddhist Shintō deities were reinterpreted to be buddhas and bodhisattvas who
had come from India. They were able to stay in Japan because they were said to have brought
their abodes with them, namely, the mountains. Some texts offer precise descriptions and
dates for the arrival of sacred mountains flying from India, temporarily alighting in China, and
then resting permanently in Japan. These include not just parts of Vulture Peak but also the
28
Pure Land of Avalokiteśvara and the place where the future Buddha, Maitreya, will appear.
According to some texts, the very ground of Japan itself was originally Mount Mitra, from the
2
northeastern area of Vulture Peak, which was transported and rose up as the islands of Japan.
9
As Allan Grapard notes, “mandalization of space was a vast historical process which aimed
at making all Japan a sacred site: that of the manifestation of the divine in its many forms and
30
the site of the practices leading to the realization of Buddhahood.” As in China, then,
mountain environments grounded Buddhism in Japan, gathering together the sacred land of
India and indigenous traditions and practices to form new environments conducive to
becoming a buddha and eventually reinterpreting Japan itself as a Buddhist sacred nation.
In Korea, too, the arrival of Buddhism remapped the environment with new meanings. “This
remapping process imposed new significance on the indigenous landscape,” Robert Buswell
31
writes, “endowing it with the sacred power of Buddhism.” By the 9th century, the Korean
peninsula had been reinterpreted according to the universal cosmology of Buddhism together
with historical landscapes from India and China. As in China and Japan, there was a
colonization of the past. For example, the “meditation stone” of Kāśyapa—the previous
Buddha who predicted that in a future lifetime Śākyamuni would himself attain buddhahood—
was discovered and became an important Buddhist site. The remapping of prominent Buddhist
sites in Korea—including Vulture Peak and the abodes of buddhas and bodhisattvas—meant
that Korean pilgrims no longer had to undertake dangerous journeys to India or China. The
Korean Peninsula itself became the land of the Buddha, transforming Korean places into
appropriate sites of pilgrimage. It was in part through localizing the universal cosmology of
32
Buddhism in Korean environments that a distinct Korean Buddhist identity developed.
Engaging with local environments as Buddhist was also widespread in Sri Lanka and the
Theravada countries of Southeast Asia, where many of the same phenomena are manifest as
33
in India, Tibet and the Himalayan regions, and East Asia.
Buddhist Concepts and Environmental Ethics
Regarding sparsely inhabited environments as conducive to practice; affirming the spiritual

significance of particular places; and synthesizing aesthetics, reverence for nature, and
spiritual practice inspired the development of Buddhist ritual-ecological practices in Asia and
beyond. As with earlier propagations of Buddhism, convert Buddhists and Asian heritage
Buddhists outside of Asia have built stupas and other Buddhist structures in the process of
34
mapping new places to be cared for and protected as Buddhist. Some scholars have pointed
Page 9 of 21
out that emphasizing that some environments are sacred goes hand in hand with the fact that
other environments might be neutral or even polluting. That is, while creating Buddhist
environments may be important for Buddhists, and may overlap with some contemporary
environmental concerns, it is in fact a very different project from creating a Buddhist
environmental ethic. However, in the last decades of the 20th century and the early 21st
century, much discussion of Buddhism and the environment focuses on doctrines employed
precisely to develop an environmentally friendly green Buddhism. Since the early 1980s, these
doctrines have been interpreted in the very contemporary context of the overlapping and
escalating environmental challenges of resource depletion, habitat and biodiversity loss, and
climate change and other consequences of pollution overload.
Foremost among eco-Buddhist doctrines is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), a

central teaching across Buddhist traditions that states that everything is dependent on
conditions, that nothing arises somehow autonomously or independently. This doctrine is so
significant that, according to the Majjhima Nikāya, it can stand for the Buddha’s teaching as a
whole: “One who sees dependent origination sees the Dhamma; one who sees the Dhamma
35
sees dependent origination.” Although earlier Buddhist thinkers interpreted dependent
origination as being primarily about conditionality, the Chinese Buddhist Huayan school
interpreted the idea of dependent origination as a radical and universal interdependence.
According to the Huayan interpretation, interdependence is like the Jewel Net of Indra, in
which each node reflects all the others. It is not merely that any one phenomenon is
dependent upon various conditions; every phenomenon is mutually dependent upon all other
phenomena. In developing a Buddhist environmental ethic, many eco-Buddhists have
understood the Huayan account of interdependence as articulating something like Aldo
Leopold’s view of “the land community,” the ecological interdependence in which any one
plant, animal, or ecosystem is itself interdependent with all the other members of the
community. Or, as Joanna Macy—perhaps the most prominent contemporary Western eco-
Buddhist—suggests, the Huayan understanding of interdependence is a form of “deep ecology
[that] helps us to recognize our embeddedness in nature, overcoming our alienation from the
36
rest of creation and regaining an attitude of reverence for all life forms.”
The Jewel Net of Indra implies a nonanthropocentric view, which for many Western
environmental thinkers has been regarded as a defining characteristic of an environmentally
appropriate conceptual framework. And there are other ways in which Buddhist thought has
been interpreted as a form of nonanthropocentrism. For example, according to Buddhist
cosmology, sentient beings transmigrate through six kinds of existence in the realms of
humans, animals, gods, demigods, hungry ghosts, and hell beings. This is why there are so
many stories of buddhas and bodhisattvas in various animal forms. A badger or crow or
salmon or mosquito could have been a human in a previous life and may very well be a human
in the next life and may eventually become a buddha. According to Buddhist traditions, there
are significant differences between the different realms of existence. Still, eco-Buddhists
argue that because sentient beings can migrate across the six realms of existence, humans
and beings in other realms all share the same nature as sentient beings. This, they argue, is a
nonanthropocentric view, a rejection of what Peter Singer calls “speciesism,” the unjustified
prioritization of the human in one’s thought and practice.
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Eco-Buddhists are inspired by another Buddhist doctrine that suggests a form of
nonanthropocentrism, namely the Mahāyāna idea of a pure Buddha-nature, or the seed or
womb of a buddha (tathāgatagarbha) in all—or for some thinkers, in most—sentient beings,
and in some traditions also in nonsentient beings. According to this doctrine, the most
fundamental nature of sentient beings is awakened mind, which is of unsurpassed value. Over
time, some East Asian Buddhists argued that grasses and trees also possessed Buddha-nature.
And eventually, drawing on the Huayan metaphysics of radical interdependence, some
Buddhists argued that all beings, sentient and nonsentient, possessed Buddha-nature. Here is
a passage from Zhanran (711–782), the sixth Tiantai patriarch: “The man whose mind is
rounded out to perfection knows full well that Truth is not cut in half and that things do not
exist apart from the mind. In the great Assembly of the Lotus, all are present—without
divisions. Grass, trees, the soil on which these grow—all have the same kinds of atoms. Some
are barely in motion while others make haste along the Path, but they will all in time reach the
precious land of Nirvāṇa . . . Who can really maintain that things inanimate lack
37
buddhahood?”
Humans are deluded, Zhanran believes, in thinking that they are exceptional. According to
this view, the more awakened one is, the more one recognizes how Buddha-nature permeates
all beings and thus the more one is aware that humans are not radically separate or different
from other beings, even nonsentient ones. The idea that the difference between saṃsāra and
nirvana is one of perception is one that permeates much of Mahāyāna Buddhism. This
understanding of the world as possessing value—indeed, possessing the highest possible value
of nirvana—has been interpreted as resonating with an ecologically friendly worldview.
In addition to resources for a nonanthropocentric metaphysics and ontology, eco-Buddhists

have also been inspired by Buddhist psychology. The most famous element of Buddhist
psychology is that sentient beings, including humans, are persons without selves. That is,
there is no substantial soul or essence or spirit behind the phenomena of one’s perceptions,
volitions, thoughts, feelings, and so on. Rather, humans are, like everything else, impermanent
and dependently originated, conditioned by innumerable other phenomena and personal and
social habits. Eco-Buddhists, such as Macy, contrast the delusion of a self that is somehow
separate from everything else and fragile and constantly in need of defense with an ecological
sense of self. Macy interprets Buddhist psychology as offering a compelling understanding of
an interconnected, ecological self. The pain people feel for the sufferings of others—human
and nonhuman—and for the extinction of other species and the loss of their habitats, all this,
according to Macy, is a manifestation of the ways people are fundamentally relational beings.
Buddhist ethics and monastic rules have also offered fertile resources for eco-Buddhists. In
Buddhist traditions, there is much analysis and critique of greed and the ways in which it
leads to one’s own suffering and makes one insensible to the sufferings of others. Greed is
also a driver of consumerism, which plays a significant role in pollution overload and resource
depletion. Buddhist ethical teachings on the importance of mindfulness, of acting in ways that
are responsive to the needs and sufferings of others, and of earning a living in a way that
decreases rather than increases suffering lend themselves to an ecologically oriented
Buddhism. And Buddhist ideals of universal compassion (karuṇā) and loving-kindness (mettā)
are so expansive as to include care for all sentient beings. Moreover, some monastic rules—
such as injunctions against felling trees, polluting waters, and eating certain kinds of meat—
Page 11 of 21
have been used to suggest a history of at least some Buddhists acknowledging that Buddhism
requires attention to the needs and value of the surrounding environment and its nonhuman
inhabitants.
In an age of climate destabilization, when it can feel as if one’s individual actions are
inconsequential even as everyone’s individual actions together are catastrophic, the
bodhisattva ideal has proved particularly inspiring for eco-Buddhists. The figure of the
bodhisattva, who is committed to working to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings, is a
model for maintaining a commitment of working toward what might feel like an impossible
goal through embodying the Buddhist path of ethical action, mindfulness and meditation, and
38
wisdom. “We are all bodhisattvas,” Macy writes, “able to recognize and act upon our
39
profound interexistence with all beings.” Macy and many other eco-Buddhist teachers and
practitioners have reimagined the bodhisattva ideal as an eco-sattva, committed to a path of
practicing environmental virtues in a Buddhist framework.
Approaches to Buddhism and the Environment
Eco-Buddhist interpretations of classical Buddhist ontology, psychology, ethics, and images

have been the focus of considerable attention from Buddhist teachers, writers, and
practitioners and also scholars in Buddhist studies. To order the vast literature on Buddhism
and ecology, some scholars have constructed a taxonomy of different approaches. Donald
Swearer, for instance, distinguishes five “suggestive rather than definitive” categories: eco-
40
apologists, eco-critics, eco-constructivists, eco-ethicists, and eco-contextualists.
Eco-apologists, according to Swearer, interpret classical Buddhist doctrines as inherently

holistic, nonanthropocentric, and environmentally attuned. And they see in Buddhist ideals of
living free from greed and the need to constantly acquire and consume things an appropriate
model for an era of pollution overload and resource depletion. This is a widespread view,
articulated by prominent Asian Buddhists such as the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh,
Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu, and Sulak Sivaraksa as well as Macy and many other Western eco-
Buddhists.
Eco-critics, Swearer’s second category, have charged that eco-Buddhists are projecting
contemporary environmental concerns onto a premodern tradition that simply was not asking,
or responding to, the kinds of questions raised by the modern ecological crisis. Moreover,
some argue, eco-Buddhism is informed by Western monotheism and romantic conceptions of a
wild nature that is to be affirmed and appreciated. Eco-critics, often focusing their attention
on early Indian Buddhism, argue that Buddhism is very much an anthropocentric tradition,
emphasizing individual liberation from nature. They point to Buddhist texts that are
ambivalent about the value of nature or hostile to wild lands and wild animals. Scholars have
observed that while there are indeed plenty of stories of buddhas and bodhisattvas in
nonhuman animal form, most Buddhists have regarded nonhuman animal existence as
unfortunate and, at best, an opportunity to be reborn as a human. Even if one accepts the
ecological interpretation of dependent origination, some scholars have argued that it doesn’t
provide a basis to distinguish between those beings and phenomena deserving respect and
protection (Atlantic salmon and vulnerable people, for example) and those one wants to fight
against (injustice and smallpox, for example). In addition, some have argued that the actual
Page 12 of 21
environmental history of Buddhism in Asia was far from environmentally benign, as Buddhists
played a central role in propagating crops such as cotton, tea, rice, and sugar and the
irrigation technologies they require, which resulted in massive increases in agriculture and
also urbanization as well as consuming and exploiting natural resources for large Buddhist
projects. For eco-critics, such as Ian Harris, eco-Buddhism is a manifestation of a globalized
modernity that spreads Western environmental discourse. Eco-Buddhism, according to Harris,
contributes to the erosion of distinctive local Buddhist traditions, displacing their ritual-
ecological practices with more abstract concepts. According to this line of argument, eco-
Buddhism is such a radical form of detraditionalization that it is best understood as a
phenomenon of the worldwide postmodern religious marketplace.
Swearer’s third category, eco-constructivists, includes those who acknowledge that

premodern Buddhist doctrines cannot simply be applied to contemporary contexts. Still, they
show that there are singularly Buddhist resources that can inform and inspire contemporary
thinking and individual and institutional practice to construct a Buddhist environmental ethic.
Eco-ethicists, according to Swearer, are those who want to emphasize the importance of
Buddhist ethical contributions, not just Buddhist ontology and cosmology. In particular, eco-
ethicists focus on Buddhist virtues such as humility, self-restraint, equanimity, nonviolence,
vigor on the path, and others that, taken together, present an ideal of human flourishing that
is both Buddhist and necessary for a life-sustaining society. Eco-ethicists, such as Simon
James, then, are interested in developing an environmental virtue ethic.
Eco-contextualists, Swearer’s fifth category, emphasize Buddhist thought and practice as

embedded in local traditions and communities. While it is informed by the rhetoric of
universal eco-Buddhist philosophical ideas, it is equally continuous with classical Buddhist
traditions that emphasize the importance of particular places in Buddhist practice. In the
1980s, for example, so-called environmental monks in Thailand began reframing the
protection of local forests in the context of Buddhist ethics. Restoring and protecting the
forests was directly tied to the well-being of local villagers, whose livelihood depended on the
trees, as well as those who lived downstream from the forests and suffered during droughts
and in the rainy season, when the forests were no longer absorbing and holding the water. In
the late 1980s, some Thai monks started performing rituals in which trees were encircled in
saffron robes and ordained, a practice that then spread to other Theravada countries in
Southeast Asia. These culturally specific rituals situated the protection of trees in a familiar
Buddhist context that was directly connected to the well-being of a particular place and its
human and nonhuman inhabitants.
In addition to tree ordinations, scholars have documented many other localized forms of
Buddhist environmental practice and activism both in Asian Buddhist societies and where
Buddhism is practiced elsewhere. These include protecting forests, bodies of water, and
agricultural areas from large-scale development projects and other harms as well as starting
sustainable agricultural projects and conserving land. Sometimes, as with the tree
ordinations, classical Buddhist practices have been reimagined and integrated into Buddhist
environmental activism. For example, Dhamma Walks (Dhammayietra), inspired in part by
traditions of pilgrimage, have been used to bring attention to vulnerable ecosystems.
According to some scholars, this integration of Buddhist practice and environmental activism
informed by Buddhist ideas in specific, community-based actions provides a model for how
Page 13 of 21
eco-Buddhism can actually contribute in concrete ways to the transition to a more life-
sustaining society. As Seth Devere Clippard proposes, a Buddhist environmental ethic should
“grow out of the context in which a specific Buddhist community is addressing specific
environmental problems. The response is likely to be a mixture of Buddhist thought, practice,
ritual, symbol, and discourse.” Such an approach, Clippard argues, will be “a more effective
and meaningful Buddhist environmentalism for the reason that it begins with the real
41
suffering of real communities and offers real action in response.”
Eco-Buddhism is now integrated into much contemporary Buddhist rhetoric. Many Buddhist
institutions understand their efforts toward sustainability, such as committing resources to
renewal energy production or producing their food in gardens on-site, to be a form of right
action in a time of ecological crisis. Integrating modern environmental practices of land
conservation and traditional practices that engage the land, Asian heritage and Western
convert Buddhists are creating new sacred Buddhist environments outside of Asia that are
being protected. Some Buddhist organizations, and associations of different organizations,
have made declarations about Buddhist responses to climate change. And some Buddhist
organizations, such as the One Earth Sangha, the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center,
Green Sangha, and others understand themselves explicitly as eco-Buddhist. The Sati Center
42
for Buddhist Studies offers a year-long program to train as a Buddhist Eco-Chaplain. In
these contexts, Buddhist practice is conceived to include living in ways that are appropriate
for and responsive to a time of ecological crisis. This reimagination is articulated succinctly in
the revision of the bodhisattva vow, traditionally recited in Zen rituals, by the poets Gary
Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Allen Ginsberg:
Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.

Consuming desires are endless; I vow to stop them.
Bio-relations are intricate; I vow to honor them.
43
Nature’s way is beautiful; I vow to become it.
Review of the Literature
The scholarly field of Buddhism and the environment is relatively recent, beginning—with
some exceptions—in the 1960s and 1970s. There is now a vast and diverse literature on
Buddhism and the environment that crosses a variety of disciplines, including archaeology,
sociology, anthropology, literary studies, art history, philosophy, pilgrimage studies,
psychology, environmental history, place studies, the study of activism, animal studies, and
more.
Early in its development, the most influential texts in the field were three edited volumes that
gathered the work of Buddhist teachers and scholars: Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in
Buddhism and Ecology, edited by Allan Hunt Badiner (1990); Buddhism and Ecology: The
Interconnectedness of Dharma and Deeds, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryūken
Williams (1997); and Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhism Environmentalism, edited by
44
Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft (2000). Together, these three anthologies engage many of
the views and practices of eco-Buddhists; Buddhism and Ecology also includes challenges by
scholars posing critical questions about the eco-Buddhist project. During the decade when
these three anthologies were published, Ian Harris sought to bring some order to the already
Page 14 of 21
substantial body of literature by offering “a provisional typology” of approaches to Buddhism
45
and the environment. Ten years later, building on Harris’s work, Donald Swearer developed
46
his own taxonomy of approaches to Buddhism and ecology. Christopher Ives has very
helpfully made his extensive bibliography on Buddhism and ecology easily accessible, updated
47
through March, 2020, when it included thirty-eight pages of entries. Ives himself has also
published a number of essays exploring the resources, challenges, and possibilities of a
48
Buddhist environmental ethic.
While much early work on Buddhism and the environment was focused on philosophical
interpretations of classical texts, from the 1990s onward, scholarship on Buddhism and the
environment has been very much informed by work in other disciplines and is often itself
interdisciplinary. Influenced by the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, starting
in the 1980s there has been considerable work on Buddhist practice and particular
environments, exploring pilgrimage, sacred mountains, Buddhist sacred geography, and the
49
power of place. Associated with this literature on place is scholarship on the relationship
between nature, particular environments, and art—especially landscape painting and poetry—
50
in classical Buddhist traditions. Informed by early-21st-century work in animal studies,
51
several scholars have produced significant volumes on animals in Buddhist traditions.
Much excellent scholarly work on Buddhism and the environment explicitly engages historical
or contemporary Buddhist environmental practice as well as paying attention to classical
texts. Julia Shaw’s writings, for example, are rooted in extensive archaeological work she has
performed at Indian Buddhist sites. Shaw shows how Buddhist monks were intimately
involved in transforming the environment through irrigation systems that reduced suffering
52
by providing increased agricultural yields. Her work demonstrates how archaeological
evidence is relevant to debates in Buddhist studies, Anthropocene studies, environmental
studies, medical humanities, and environmental history. Developments in environmental
history have enabled scholars to raise new questions about the relation between Buddhists
and their environments, looking at the actual consumption and exploitation of natural
resources that provide a different and helpful approach to the study of Buddhism and the
53
environment.
As part of the turn toward actual environmental practices, scholars have been working to
develop a Buddhist environmental ethic that is not based primarily on classical Buddhist
metaphysics. Instead, while informed by Buddhist ideas, such an ethic is grounded in the local
needs and practices of communities and draws significantly on fieldwork. Seth Devere
Clippard gives an excellent methodological defense of this approach, an approach manifest in
Susan Darlington’s influential works on tree ordination and other forms of contemporary
54
Buddhist environmentalism.
Another more concrete strand of work on Buddhism and the environment is seen in authors
who draw on Buddhist ontology, psychology, ethics, rituals, and images to address
contemporary challenges without focusing on specific, localized challenges. Gary Snyder, for
example, draws on Buddhist traditions to articulate a vision of living well in one’s place, a
55
kind of bioregional practice. Joanna Macy draws on the imagery and concepts of Buddhist
traditions to support a contemporary eco-friendly view and concrete practices to help build
Page 15 of 21
56
resilience for activists. And because consumerism and capitalism contribute in significant
ways to the ecological crisis, many authors have explored Buddhist resources for
57
relinquishing the grip of consumer culture and capitalist economics.
In the first decades of the 21st century, the study of Buddhism and the environment has
continued to grow and diversify. In particular, there has been much more interdisciplinary
scholarship as well as work that focuses less on universal ontological ideas from classical
Buddhist texts and more on concrete Buddhist engagements with particular environments.
Most importantly, in an age of climate destabilization, Buddhists will need to think deeply
about how to live in the contemporary world so that Buddhist institutions, communities, and
individuals can better realize the Buddhist virtues of non-harming and compassionately and
skillfully responding to present and future suffering.
Links to Digital Materials

One Earth Sangha <https://oneearthsangha.org/articles/resources/>: This Buddhist organization is
devoted to a Buddhist response to the climate crisis.
Yale School of the Environment:
This is the Buddhism page from the “Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology <https://fore.yale.edu/World-
Religions/Buddhism>,” an excellent resource including: an overview essay by Christopher Ives, a bibliography on
Buddhism and ecology, statements from Buddhist leaders on Buddhism and ecology, links to eco-Buddhist initiatives,
sacred Buddhist texts related to the environment, and links to videos of lectures relevant to Buddhism and ecology.
Further Reading
Badiner, Allan Hunt, ed. Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology. Berkeley,
CA: Parallax Press, 1990.
Clippard, Seth Devere. “The Lorax Wears Saffron: Towards a Buddhist Environmentalism.”
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 18 (2011): 214–248.
Darlington, Susan Marie. The Ordination of a Tree: The Thai Buddhist Environmental
Movement. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Elverskog, Johan. The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.
Harris, Ian. “Getting to Grips with Buddhist Environmentalism: A Provisional Typology.” Journal
of Buddhist Ethics 2 (1995): 173–190.
Huber, Toni. The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention of Buddhist India.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Huber, Toni, ed. Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture: A Collection of Essays.
Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1999.
Ives, Christopher. “Resources for Buddhist Environmental Ethics.” Journal of Buddhist Ethics 20
(2013): 541–571.
Page 16 of 21
Kaza, Stephanie, and Kenneth Kraft, eds. Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism.
Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000.
Macy, Joanna. World as Lover, World as Self. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991.
Robson, James. Power of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue
南嶽) in Medieval China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Shaw, Julia. “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice: Collective Responses to Socio-Ecological
Stress: Relevance for Global Environmental Discourse and Anthropocene Studies.” In Water
Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present. Edited by Yijie Zhuang and Mark
Altaweel, 223–255. London: University College London, 2018.
Snyder, Gary. The Practice of the Wild. New York: North Point Press, 1990.
Swearer, Donald K. “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy.” Harvard Theological Review

99, no. 2 (2006): 123–137.
Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and Duncan Ryūken Williams, eds. Buddhism and Ecology: The
Interconnectedness of Dharma and Deeds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School Center for
the Study of World Religions, 1997.
Notes
1. Andrew Rawlinson, “Nāgas and the Magical Cosmology of Buddhism,” Religion 16 (1986): 135–153.
2. James Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” in Early Chinse Religion, Part Two: The Period of
Division (220–589 AD), ed. John Lagerwey and Pengzhi Lü (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 1383.
3. Toni Huber, The Holy Land Reborn: Pilgrimage and the Tibetan Reinvention of Buddhist India
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 21.
4. Huber, Holy Land Reborn, 24.
5. Louis O. Gómez, “Language: Buddhist Views of Language,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade
(New York: Macmillan, 1987), 5309.
6. Julia Shaw, “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice: Collective Responses to Socio-Ecological
Stress: Relevance for Global Environmental Discourse and Anthropocene Studies,” in Water
Societies and Technologies from the Past and Present, ed. Yijie Zhuang and Mark Altaweel
(London: University College London, 2018), 242.
7. Johan Elverskog, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 91.
8. Shaw, “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice,” 238.
9. Shaw, “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice,” 250.
10. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 91.
11. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 91.
12. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 90–96.
Page 17 of 21
15. For interpretations of this story, see Janet Gyatso, “Down with the Demoness: Reflections on a Feminine Ground
in Tibet,” in Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet, ed. Janice Dean Willis (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion,
1987), 33–51; and Martin A. Mills, “Re-assessing the Supine Demoness: Royal Buddhist Geomancy in the Strong btsan
sgam po Mythology,” Journal of the International Association of Tibetan Studies 3 (2007): 1–47.
16. See Toni Huber, “Putting the Gnas Back into Gnas-skor: Rethinking Tibetan Pilgrimage
Practice,” in Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture: A Collection of Essays, ed.
Toni Huber (Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1999), 77–104.
17. Frances Garrett, Elizabeth McDougal, and Geoffrey Samuel, Hidden Lands in Himalayan Myth and
History: Transformations of sbyas yul Through Time (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2020).
18. Huber, “Putting the Gnas Back into Gnas-skor,” 83.
19. Huber, “Putting the Gnas Back into Gnas-skor,” 88.
20. Elizabeth Allison, “Deity Citadels: Sacred Sites of Bio-Cultural Resistance and Resilience in Bhutan,” Religions 10
(2019): 10.
21. Toni Huber, “Meteorological Knowledge and Environmental Ideas in Traditional and Modern Societies: The Case
of Tibet,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 3, no. 3 (1997): 577–597.
22. Karen Gagne, Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2019).
23. Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1360.
24. Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1376.
25. Miranda Shaw, “Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Landscape Painting,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 49, no. 2 (1988): 183–206.
26. Beate Grant, Mount Lu Revisited: Buddhism in the Life and Writings of Su Shih (Honolulu:
University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994), 125.
27. Richard Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006), xxiii.
28. Allan G. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness: Toward a Definition of Sacred Space in Japanese
Religions,” History of Religions 21, no. 3 (1982): 218.
29. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness,” 219.
30. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness,” 220.
31. Robert Buswell Jr., “Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Worldly and Otherworldly,” Journal of Asian Studies
68, no. 4 (2009): 1055–1075.
32. Buswell, “Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Worldly and Otherworldly,” 1055–1075.
33. See, for example, Donald K. Swearer, Sommai Premchit, and Phaithoon Dokbuakaew, Sacred Mountains of
Northern Thailand: And Their Legends (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm Books, 2004); John Holt: Spirits of
the Place: Buddhism and Lao Religious Culture (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009); and Alex
McKinley, “Plant Persons and Sentient Stones: Human Relativity in Buddhist Philosophies of Nature,” forthcoming.
34. See, for example, Sally McAra, Land of Beautiful Vision: Making a Buddhist Sacred Place in New
Zealand (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007).
Page 18 of 21
35. Majjhima Nikāya 28, “The Greater Discourse on the Simile of the Elephant’s
Footprint <https://suttacentral.net/mn28/en/bodhi>,” trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi, SuttaCentral.
36. William Edelglass, “Joanna Macy: The Ecological Self,” in Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, ed.
William Edelglass and Jay Garfield (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 435.
37. William R. Lafleur, “Sattva: Enlightenment for Plants and Trees,” in Dharma Gaia: A Harvest
of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, ed. Allan Hunt Badiner (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990),
137.
38. William Edelglass, “Mindfulness and Moral Transformation: Awakening to Others in Śāntideva’s Ethics,” in The
Bloomsbury Handbook of Indian Ethics, ed. Shyam Ranganathan (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 225–248.
39. Edelglass, “Joanna Macy: The Ecological Self,” 434.
40. Donald K. Swearer, “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy,” Harvard Theological

Review 99, no. 2 (2006): 124–125.
41. Seth Devere Clippard, “The Lorax Wears Saffron: Towards a Buddhist Environmentalism,”
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 18 (2011): 242.
42. “Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy <https://www.sati.org/buddhist-eco-chaplaincy-3/>,” Sati Center for

Buddhist Studies.
43. Stephanie Kaza and Kenneth Kraft, eds., Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist
Environmentalism (Boston: Shambhala, 2000), 444.
44. Allan Hunt Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology
(Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1990); Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryūken Williams, eds.,
Buddhism and Ecology: The Interconnectedness of Dharma and Deeds (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions, 1997); and Kaza and Kraft, Dharma
Rain.
45. Ian Harris, “Getting to Grips with Buddhist Environmentalism: A Provisional Typology,”
Journal of Buddhist Ethics 2 (1995): 173–190.
46. Donald K. Swearer, “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy,” Harvard Theological

Review 99, no. 2 (2006): 123–137.
47. Christopher Ives, “Buddhism and Ecology Bibliography <https://fore.yale.edu/sites/default/files/

files/buddhism_3-4-2020.pdf>,” Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.
48. See especially Christopher Ives, “A Mixed Dharmic Bag: Current Debates about Buddhism and Ecology,” in
Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, ed. Willis Jenkins and Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York:
Routledge, 2016), 43–51; Christopher Ives, “Resources for Buddhist Environmental Ethics,” Journal of
Buddhist Ethics 20 (2013): 541–571; and Christopher Ives, “In Search of a Green Dharma: Philosophical Issues
in Buddhist Environmental Ethics,” in Destroying Mara Forever: Buddhist Ethics Essays in Honor of
Damien Keown, ed. Charles Prebish and John Powers (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 2009), 165–186.
49. On pilgrimage, see, for example, Huber, Holy Land Reborn; on sacred mountains: James Robson, Power
of Place: The Religious Landscape of the Southern Sacred Peak (Nanyue 南嶽) in Medieval China
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Swearer, Premchit, and Dokbuakaew, Sacred
Mountains of Northern Thailand; on Buddhist sacred geography: James Robson, “Buddhist Sacred
Geography,” in Early Chinse Religion, Part Two: The Period of Division (220–589 AD), ed. John
Lagerwey and Pengzhi Lü (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2009), 1361–1407; Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers
Page 19 of 21
of Emptiness”; Buswell, “Korean Buddhist Journeys to Lands Worldly and Otherworldly”; on the power of place: Holt,
Spirits of the Place; and Toni Huber, ed., Sacred Spaces and Powerful Places in Tibetan Culture:
A Collection of Essays (Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1999).
50. Miranda Shaw, “Buddhist and Taoist Influences on Chinese Landscape Painting,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 49, no. 2 (1988): 183–206; Jason M. Wirth, Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary
Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017); Donald
K. Swearer, “Principles and Poetry, Places and Stories: The Resources of Buddhist Ecology,” Daedalus 130, no. 4
(2001): 225–241; and Joseph D. Parker, Zen Buddhist Landscape Arts of Early Muromachi Japan (1336–
1573) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999).
51. Geoffrey Barstow, Food of Sinful Demons: Meat, Vegetarianism, and the Limits of Buddhism in
Tibet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); and Reiko Ohnuma, Unfortunate Destiny: Animals in the
Indian Buddhist Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
52. See, for instance, Shaw, “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice,” 223–255.
53. See, for example, Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint.
54. Clippard, “Lorax Wears Saffron,” 214–248; Susan Marie Darlington, The Ordination of a Tree: The
Thai Buddhist Environmental Movement (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012);
Susan M. Darlington, “Buddhist Environmental Imaginaries,” in The Buddhist World, ed. John Powers (London:
Routledge, 2015), 433–452; Susan M. Darlington, “Contemporary Buddhism and Ecology,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism, ed. Michael Jerryson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 487–
503; and Susan M. Darlington, “Environmental Buddhism Across Borders,” Journal of Global Buddhism 19 (2018):
77–93.
55. See, for example, Gary Snyder’s essay collection, The Practice of the Wild (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1990); and his long poem, intended as a sūtra of Mountains and Rivers Without End
(Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 1996).
56. See Joanna Macy, World as Lover, World as Self (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1991); and
Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That
Reconnects (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2014).
57. See, for example, Richard K. Payne, ed., How Much Is Enough? Buddhism, Consumerism, and the
Human Environment (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2010); Peter L. Daniels, “Climate Change, Economics,
and Buddhism—Part 1: An Integrated Environmental Analysis Framework,” Ecological Economics 69 (2010): 952–
961; and Stephanie Kaza, Hooked: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume
(Boston: Shambhala, 2005).
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Buddhism and the Environment

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Keywords: Buddhism, environment, eco-Buddhism, green Buddhism, place, sacred geography,

Buddhist Environments and the Propagation of the Dharma in India

As archaeologists and environmental historians have shown, early Indian Buddhist

The relationship between temples, monasteries, irrigation technologies, and agriculture is

Himalayan and Tibetan Buddhist Environments

In addition to landscape features regarded as abodes of beings understood in a tantric

East Asian Buddhist Environments

The murmuring brook is the Buddha’s long, broad tongue.

Su Shi’s poem is representative of much landscape painting and poetry as an expression of

Buddhist Concepts and Environmental Ethics

Regarding sparsely inhabited environments as conducive to practice; affirming the spiritual

Foremost among eco-Buddhist doctrines is dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda), a

In addition to resources for a nonanthropocentric metaphysics and ontology, eco-Buddhists

Approaches to Buddhism and the Environment

Eco-Buddhist interpretations of classical Buddhist ontology, psychology, ethics, and images

Eco-apologists, according to Swearer, interpret classical Buddhist doctrines as inherently

Swearer’s third category, eco-constructivists, includes those who acknowledge that

Eco-contextualists, Swearer’s fifth category, emphasize Buddhist thought and practice as

Sentient beings are numberless; I vow to save them.

Review of the Literature

Links to Digital Materials

Yale School of the Environment:

Elverskog, Johan. The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia. Philadelphia:

Swearer, Donald K. “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy.” Harvard Theological Review

4. Huber, Holy Land Reborn, 24.

7. Johan Elverskog, The Buddha’s Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia (Philadelphia:

8. Shaw, “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice,” 238.

9. Shaw, “Early Indian Buddhism, Water and Rice,” 250.

10. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 91.

11. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 91.

12. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 90–96.

13. Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint, 96–98.

18. Huber, “Putting the Gnas Back into Gnas-skor,” 83.

19. Huber, “Putting the Gnas Back into Gnas-skor,” 88.

23. Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1360.

24. Robson, “Buddhist Sacred Geography,” 1376.

29. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness,” 219.

30. Grapard, “Flying Mountains and Walkers of Emptiness,” 220.

39. Edelglass, “Joanna Macy: The Ecological Self,” 434.

40. Donald K. Swearer, “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy,” Harvard Theological

42. “Buddhist Eco-Chaplaincy <https://www.sati.org/buddhist-eco-chaplaincy-3/>,” Sati Center for

46. Donald K. Swearer, “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy,” Harvard Theological

47. Christopher Ives, “Buddhism and Ecology Bibliography <https://fore.yale.edu/sites/default/files/

53. See, for example, Elverskog, Buddha’s Footprint.

Buddhism in Colonial Contexts

Buddhism and Biography

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