How Buddhists Understand Nature By Professor Ron Epstein All life is interrelated and interdependent. Nature, or we could say our natural environment, is alive and at least partly conscious. It is neither sacred and perfect nor evil and to be conquered. The deep reality of Nature is not separate from our fully enlightened nature (Buddha-nature). Buddhists understand ‘Nature’ as a useful conventional designation without any unique, intrinsic reality of its own that absolutely distinguishes it from what is ‘not Nature’. In a less technical sense, it is the conditioned world prior to extreme human distortion of the patterns of interrelationship between humans and the rest of the living beings on the planet. It can also be understood as the living web that interconnects individual beings, both sentient and non-sentient, in interdependence. What is ultimately real about that web is its Buddha-nature, its Buddha-ness. That deep reality of Nature is not separate from our own fully enlightened nature. When we purify our minds, we experience the true nature of Nature, and then we see that we are actually living in a Pure Land or Buddhaland. That Buddhaland is not somewhere else, but right here. The Sixth Chan Buddhist Patriarch the Venerable Huineng quoted the Buddha as saying: “As the mind is purified, the Buddhaland is purified.” From the Buddhist viewpoint, humans are not in a category that is distinct and separate from other sentient beings, nor are they intrinsically superior. All sentient beings are considered to have the Buddha-nature, that is, the potential to become fully enlightened. Buddhists do not believe in treating of non-human sentient beings as objects for human consumption. Enlightened beings do not harm sentient life. If they did, they would not be enlightened beings. They have compassion for unenlightened beings, who are attached to our polluted world, filled with pain and suffering, and who do not experience themselves as living in a pure Buddhaland. By looking inward, within one’s own body-mind, one gradually realizes that there is no ultimate division between inside and outside, that the patterns of the natural environment are not separate from the patterns of our own body-minds. Experience of those patterns is not considered an ultimate truth or the goal of Buddhist practice, but awareness of them is an important aspect of the Path that leads to enlightenment.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 07:11:24 +0000
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