ABSTRACT
Buddhism is often presented, especially in more popular venues, as providing a moral outlook that is naturally sympathetic to environmental concerns. For example, Allan Hunt Badiner enthusiastically asserted, “Buddhism offers a clearly defined system of ethics, a guide to ecological living, right here, right now” (Badiner 1990b: xvii; see also the papers collected in Badiner 1990a, M. Batchelor and Brown 1994 and Kaza and Kraft 2000). Environmental ethics has been one of the fundamental concerns of socially engaged Buddhists and has been a central issue for each of the proponents of engaged Buddhism featured in Chapter 11. For instance, the Dalai Lama’s “Five Point Peace Plan” includes a provision for the “restoration and protection of Tibet’s natural environment” (Puri 2006: 192). In fact, there has probably been more written about Buddhism and environmental ethics than any other practical ethical issue. At the same time, in recent Western moral philosophy, environmental ethics has been among the most widely discussed topics in applied ethics. Obviously the Buddha and traditional Buddhist societies did not face the environmental problems that confront us today. Hence, they cannot be expected to have developed an explicit environmental ethic that addresses these problems in the way that those working in contemporary environmental ethics have done. Nonetheless, many contemporary Buddhists and scholars of Buddhism think that traditional Buddhist ethical thought has numerous and significant resources for the construction of such an ethic. According to Sulak Sivaraksa, “Buddhism has been concerned with caring for the natural environment for over twenty-five hundred years” (Sivaraksa 2005: 71). There are, however, some skeptical voices that have questioned the extent to which traditional Buddhist values and ideas have been relevant to and supportive of an environmental ethical outlook that meets the concerns of contemporary proponents of environmental ethics. As a result, there has been a scholarly debate about the relationship between Buddhism and environmental ethics (Tucker and Williams 1997 is a valuable collection of papers; for overviews of the debate, see Harris 1995 and James 2013).
