Learning Love from a Tiger: Approaches to Nature in an American Buddhist Monastery

Abstract

In current debates about Buddhist approaches to the non-human natural world, studies describe Buddhism variously as anthropocentric, bio-centric or eco-centric. These perspectives derive for the most part from examinations of philosophical and normative aspects of the tradition without much attention to moments when embodied practice diverges from religious ideals. Responding to the need for narrative thick descriptions of lived Buddhist attitudes toward nature, I ethnographically explore a Vietnamese monastery in the United States. There I find multifaceted Buddhist approaches to nature which sometimes disclose disunity between theory and practice. Philosophically and normatively, this monastery embraces eco-centrism through notions of interconnectedness, instructions for meditation, environmental lifestyles, and non-violent ideals. In practice, however, the monastery displays a measure of anthropocentrism in terms of rhetoric which values humans more than the rest of the natural world, human-centered motivations for environmental lifestyles, and limits on non-violence which favor human lives.

Notes

1. Following J. Baird Callicott (Earth’s, “Non-anthropocentric”) and Markku Oksanen I consider strong anthropocentrism to affirm intrinsic value for humans alone while valuing non-human elements of the natural world only instrumentally. Weak anthropocentrism somewhat endorses intrinsic value for non-human natural entities but assigns substantially greater intrinsic, rather than merely instrumental, value to humans. Alternatively, bio-centrism holds that living beings possess intrinsic value which is substantially similar to humans, while apparently inanimate entities like streams and stones retain only instrumental value. Then again, eco-centrism accords intrinsic value substantially equivalent to that of humans to all animate and inanimate non-human individuals, species, entities or eco-systems, including even lakes and rocks. It should be noted that David Cooper and Simon James question the common meta-ethical distinction between inherent and instrumental value found in this article. For Cooper and James, a virtue ethics approach helps to illuminate Buddhist attitudes toward nature, but they never reject outright the inherent vs. instrumental value distinction, as they choose instead to overlook it to create a “parsimonious” (139) approach to Buddhist virtue ethics. Further, one may question whether they create a genuine environmental ethic or whether they simply delineate some virtues regarding Buddhist environmental friendliness.

2. I am a Caucasian American associate professor of religion at a university which is located several hours’ drive from Magnolia Grove. While my research is primarily in Buddhist Studies, I am not a specialist in Vietnamese Buddhism. Moreover, I do not self-identify specifically as a practitioner of Plum Village network Buddhism.

3. Magnolia Grove lies outside the disjointed, so-called ‘Buddhist Belt’ which recognizes the concentration of Buddhist centers in California and the northeast. As such, Magnolia Grove is one motive force in the expanding Buddhist presence in the deep south of the US.

4. Carl Bankston and Min Zhou join Paul Rutledge in offering discussions of how Vietnamese immigrants employ religion as a primary factor in forming an ethnic identity in the US.

5. Thiền Buddhism arises as an indigenous transformation of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism, much like the Japanese Zen of Daido Loori and Dōgen (Nguyen). Nhất Hạnh and Magnolia Grove practitioners often refer to Thiền simply as ‘Zen’ because of the familiarity of this word.

6. Following Jeff Wilson, the ‘birthright’ category here includes both Vietnamese immigrants and their US-born offspring (287).

7. With this term I refer to “Americans (regardless of ethnicity) who are not Buddhist by birth but who take up various forms of Buddhist practice without necessarily undergoing a dramatic experience that could be characterized as a religious conversion” (Gregory 242).

8. Nhất Hạnh’s social activism has been studied by numerous scholars, including Sallie King, Patricia Hunt-Perry and Lyn Fine, Christopher Queen, and John Chapman.

9. Because Nhất Hạnh has adapted his form of Buddhism in the light of Western ideas, elements of ‘Buddhist Romanticism’, as described by David McMahon, appear in Magnolia Grove Buddhism. One example of this is an innovative approach to walking meditation, which is described below.

10. There are many competing interpretations of the concept of pratītya-samutpāda. A substantial exploration of these interpretations would exceed the scope of this article so that I will focus only on Nhất Hạnh’s understanding of the concept. For a fuller discussion, see McMahon.

11. Monastics asked me specifically to remove the dogs for a couple of expressed reasons. Firstly, I had voluntarily shown the dogs kindness by giving them flea baths and some of the monastics who were genuinely concerned about the dogs’ future fate trusted me to care for them, as they told me that I was ‘good with animals’. Monastics also expressed that I was more likely to know of a good home for the dogs than they were because of my lay status.

12. Interestingly, no one mentioned the injunction against keeping pets by monastics (McDermott 277), perhaps because domesticated animals of various species are commonly found in Buddhist monasteries in Asia.

13. For a discussion of Mahāyāna compassionate killing, see Mark Tatz.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Capper

Daniel Capper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches courses in Asian and comparative religion. He has published on Buddhism in the United States including the book Guru Devotion and the American Buddhist Experience. CORRESPONDENCE: University of Southern Mississippi, 118 College Dr., #5015 Hattiesburg, MS 39406, USA.