Academic Schedule, June 15-27, 2025
Sunday, June 15: Welcome Reception, Introductions, & Orientation
Monday, June 16 – Traditional and Emerging Buddhist Perspectives on the Natural World
David Loy, “Is the Eco-crisis Also a Spiritual Crisis?” – The ecological crisis has many dimensions: biological, economic, political, technological… should we add ‘spiritual’? There are profound parallels between what the Buddhist tradition teaches about our individual predicament, and our collective predicament today. At the root of the problem, in both cases, is the delusion of separation between ourselves and others/the biosphere. But is there such a thing as collective enlightenment?
Karin Meyers & Bill Waldron, “Buddhist Perspectives on the Natural World” – This presentation by Institute co-directors, Karin Meyers and Bill Waldron will offer an overview of Buddhist perspectives on the natural world, from its origins in ancient India to contemporary Asian and American Buddhist teachers and thinkers who address the problem of climate change. They will explain, in particular, the transformation of Buddhist ideas from South Asia to East Asia, from the more anthropocentric and transcendent orientation that typically characterizes South Asian attitudes towards the natural world to the more holistic, interconnected visions that characterize East Asia, and which are mostly closely associated with contemporary Eco-Buddhist philosophies.
Tuesday, June 17- Foundational Concepts
William Edelglass, “An Introduction to Buddhist Environmental Ethics” – In his influential 1967 paper, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” the historian of science Lynn White Jr. argued that the ecological crisis results from our presuppositions about our relations with the nature world and therefore does not have a technological solution. White’s idea that how we think about nature and the place of humans in nature is both the underlying cause and a possible solution to the environmental crisis motivated much early environmental ethics. Eco-Buddhist interpretations of classical Buddhist ontology, psychology, ethics, and stories have been understood as providing an ecologically appropriate philosophy. In this presentation we will explore a multiplicity of ways in which practitioners and scholars have understood Buddhist thinking about the more-than-human world and the environmental ethics and practices that might follow. We will look at debates about whether some pre-modern Buddhists really developed an environmental ethic as well as Buddhist resources for constructing a contemporary ecological ethic. The intention of this presentation is to explore the terrain of Buddhist environmental ethics, situating it in relationship to broader conversations in environmental philosophy.
Bill Waldron, “Dependent Arising and the Web of Life: Foreshadowing 4E Cognition and Deep Ecology” – In this talk, Bill Waldron will delve into the Buddhist idea at the center of ecological modes of understanding: dependent arising. Although all Buddhist traditions view human life as embedded in multiple layers of dependence and interaction, they evaluate these dependencies in radically different ways. Waldron outline how Buddhist understandings of dependent arising foreshadowed or inspired important shifts in contemporary ecological thinking, in such works as Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (1972), and in the ground-breaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Embodied Mind, Verala, et. al. (1992), leading to contemporary notions such the idea of 4E cognition in contemporary cognitive science.
Wednesday, June 18 – Plants and Animals
Geoff Barstow, “How Precious is a Human Life? Rethinking Human Superiority in Buddhist Ethics” – Tibetan Buddhist lamas often claim that birth as a human is uniquely precious, largely due to a unique ability for critical thinking that allows humans—and only humans—to progress rapidly towards enlightenment. In this presentation I will first interrogate ways that narratives around the preciousness of a human birth contribute to a sense of human superiority over animals and the rest of the non-human world. I will then discuss ways that this assumption of human intellectual superiority conflicts with recent research on animal intelligence. Finally, I will suggest an alternate interpretation of the idea of a precious human body, interpreting this notion as a rhetorical attempt to encourage humans to practice, rather than a neutral ‘scientific’ description of the natural world. Interpreting the idea of the precious human body in this way, I suggest, opens room to look at other accounts of animal intelligence in Tibetan Buddhist literature, potentially finding resources for a less human-centric view of the natural world.
Janet Gyasto, “The Animal Speaks: Buddhist Resources for a Posthuman Ethics” – This paper will consider the current plight of animals in the global agro-industrial complex, and a range of Buddhist resources to develop committed social actions in response. It will focus on types of moral cultivation in Buddhist meditation and ethical reflection that might be mobilized in a more focused way to effectively ameliorate the plight of animals in our society today. It will consider traditions of bodily discipline as well as contemplative techniques to deliberately embed moral responsibility to nonhuman species in our way of being – and not be limited to theoretical discourse alone. It will also draw on Buddhist theories of perception and the relation of kinds of perception and attention to animal life that breeds moral commitment and circumspection around human privilege. More broadly, this paper aims to contribute to discussions on new visions of social life that protect natural resources and promote interspecies justice.
Karin Meyers, “From Borderline Sentient Beings to Buddha Bodies: Buddhist Perspectives on Plants” – This talk will explore Buddhist perspectives on plants from an early Indian ambivalence regarding their status as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration, later arguments against their sentience, Chinese debates over whether plants and other “insentient” beings have Buddha Nature, and how indigenous Asian animisms have influenced Buddhist ideas about plants, to how recent scientific inquiry into plant intelligence and sociability and the popularity of plant medicines are contributing to emerging forms Eco-Buddhist thought and practice today.
Thursday, June 19 – Buddhist Environments
William Edelglass, “Mountain Colors, Valley Echoes”: On the Practice of Buddhist Environments” – “Mountain colors, valley echoes,” the thirteenth century Japanese Zen teacher Dōgen writes, are the “voice and body of my beloved Śākyamuni.” From its very beginning, when the Buddha was protected by the enveloping limbs of the bodhi tree and called on the earth as his witness, Buddhist practice has been deeply intertwined with the lived environment. As Buddhism spread across much of Asia, Buddhist practices, doctrines, stories, and material interventions transformed the landscape into a Buddhist environment and Buddhist perceptions of the more-than-human world shaped practitioners. Together we will explore some of the common themes in the socio-ecological practices of Buddhist environments: the conversion of local deities and their places; the building of Buddhist structures; the mandalization of space and place; the engagement with landscape features understood according to Buddhist cosmology; and the administrative and engineering expertise of Buddhist monastics that enabled large-scale irrigation systems and agricultural surplus to support Buddhist monasteries and increase food security. Finally, we will also look at ways in which contemporary Buddhists in North America are creating Buddhist landscapes.
Susan Darlington, “Can Rituals Impact the Environment? Monks and Environmentalism in Northern Thailand” – While monks have increasingly engaged in using adapted Buddhist rituals to promote environmental protection in Thailand, often providing inspiration and models for Buddhists in other contexts, the question remains as to the effectiveness of their actions in the long term. This paper explores the effectiveness and approaches of monks who use rituals and Buddhist teachings to inspire environmentally conscious behavior among local farmers and influence local and occasionally national environmental policies. The primary rituals these monks perform are tree ordinations and long-life ceremonies for waterways. Based on over 30 years of ethnographic research in Northern Thailand, I conclude that the ways in which monks integrate rituals into environmental projects and programs lead to the greatest long-term impacts. The contexts in which rituals are performed and who the primary supporters are – villagers, non-governmental organizations, businesspeople, and/or government agents, for example – ultimately affect the degree of effectiveness of individual rituals.
Dan Smyer Yü, “Screening of the film Embrace & talk, ‘Buddhist Faces of Indigenous Ecologies in Highland Asia‘” – The film, Embrace, documents a ritualized relationship of people and the place of their dwelling and natural surroundings on the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Through the narrations of a father and a son, it illustrates the ecospiritual significance of Tibetan lhari or deity mountains. The intent of this film screening is to deepen the ongoing multidisciplinary inquiry and public debate about how ecological Buddhism is, and whether or not the faith-based claim of Buddhist ecology and the natural scientifically-conceived discipline of ecology communicate well and are mutually complementary with each other. Based on the filmmaker’s research among the Buddhist Tibetans and Dai people in the far-eastern Himalayas, this event offers an argument that Buddhist ecology from a comparative regional perspective entails a body of syncretized approaches to the relational entanglements of life communities. These approaches find their origins in indigenous ecological knowledges, the precept-centered Buddhist ethics, and modern secular environmentalist worldview.
Friday, June 20 – Field Trip – Green Gulch Farm and Muir Beach. In addition to a tour of the temple and grounds of a working Zen center, we’ll have lunch, an intro to Zen meditation, and a chance to work at the farm.
Saturday and Sunday – no formal program. Time to explore. MRC will provide information and loose coordination of shuttle day trips to Muir Woods, and hikes accessible via public transport from downtown Berkeley, including Tilden Park and University of California Botanical Garden (wheelchair accessible).
Monday, June 23 – Dialogue with Indigenous Traditions
Natalie Avalos, “Land-Based Ethics: Putting Tibetan Buddhist and Native/ Indigenous Approaches in Conversation” –Settler colonialism seeks to eliminate Indigenous populations to monopolize resources for the sake of capital. It operates through laws and racist ideologies, but also through conceptualizations of the natural world as white men’s for the human taking. If we want to understand how to effectively address environmental crises, then we must interrogate the logics of settler colonialism—racialization, white supremacy, and myths of development—as structural dimensions of modern life. The protest movement at Standing Rock in 2016 helped crystallize the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples in this country. The Indigenous stewards within this movement argued for the use of land-based ethics to avoid further ecological collapse. In this talk, I’ll tether these discourses to Buddhist teachings and the work of Buddhist allies acting in solidarity with this struggle to connect the dots between settler ideologies/praxis and the material dispossession of peoples/lands. I ask, how might this moment of political crises act as an opportunity to mobilize in the service of ecological wellness and collective liberation?
Guest speaker from Sogorea Te’ Land Trust
Evening: Public Screening and discussion of Dan Smyer Yü’s “Embrace”
Tuesday, June 24 – Chinese Perspectives on the Natural World
Leah Kalmanson, “The Extraordinary Natural World: Buddhist Encounters with Chinese Cosmologies” – The Buddha famously refuses to address certain “speculative views” debated in his lifetime regarding, for example, whether the universe is infinite or eternal. Many such theories posit two or more coeval cosmic fundamentals whose inherent natures might together account for all conditioned existence, such as atoms or other material substances, puruṣas or other spiritual selves, an Īśvara or supreme being, etc. Buddhism, especially Mahāyāna, rejects the claim that any “thing” has an inherent nature, from the smallest atom to the whole realm of prakṛti, from a single ātman to the greatest supreme being. For Mahāyāna Buddhism at large, the countless world-systems and universes are not made of “things” or “entities” at all but rather processes and relationships, namely, karmic processes and relationships. Likewise, preexisting Chinese theories prior to the arrival of Buddhism prioritize processual dynamics over substantive metaphysics in their accounts of cosmogony and cosmology; and yet, arguably, none evoke a theory of causality akin to the Indian concept of karma. This session will introduce the broad contours of Chinese cosmologies with an eye toward understanding the reception and later adaptation of Buddhism in East Asian contexts.
Eyal Aviv, “Finding the Way Up the Mountain: Nature as an Evocative Metaphor for the Buddhist Path” – In 1998, While hiking outside of Xian, near the slopes of the Zhongshan Mountains, I tried to find the Xiangji (Incense Amassed) Temple. In my path of discovery, I was following the footsteps of the Chinese hermit poet Wang Wei who, in the 8th century, described his attempt to locate the temple nestled in the wilderness as a metaphor for navigating the path toward awakening. He said:
“Not knowing of the Temple of Incense Amassed,
I went several miles into cloudy peaks.
Old trees – paths empty of people.
Deep mountains – somewhere the sound of a bell.
The sound of the stream chokes on sharp rocks,
And the color of sunlight chills in green pines.
At dusk, by the curve of an empty pool,
Peaceful meditation will control poison dragons.” (Paul Rouzer’s translation)
For Wang Wei and his contemporaries, natural landscapes were more than a backdrop; they were metaphors for the Buddhist path itself— tranquil, with hidden vistas, but also challenging and even dangerous at times. Why did they choose poetry? Why use nature? In our time together, I hope to explore the variety of ways Chinese poets and seekers used nature through the medium of poetry to reflect on their path — its challenges and triumphs.
Wednesday, June 25 – Poetry, Zen, and Ecology
Jason Wirth, “Mountains, Rivers, The Great Earth: Gary Snyder and Dōgen on the Natural World” – The poet and ecological activist Gary Snyder (b. 1930) trained in Japan in the Rinzai Zen tradition for ten years, but later benefitted profoundly from his discovery of the work of Dōgen (1200-1253). We will read selections from Snyder along with some fascicles by Dōgen to gain a sense of their transformative view of the natural world
David Loy, “The Ecosattva Path” – In response to our ecological situation today, perhaps the most important thing that Buddhism has to contribute is the bodhisattva path, with a few modifications. “Ecosattvas” follow a double path that focuses on both individual and social transformation, based on the realization that the three poisons (greed, ill will, and delusion) have been institutionalized. But there is the same emphasis on non-attachment to results.
Evening: Public Panel
Thursday, June 26 – Ecologically Engaged Buddhism Around the World
Hozan Alan Senauke, “A Retrospective on Engaged Buddhism”
Santacitta Bhikkhuni, “Aloka Earth Room: Healing Installations for Re-membering Earth Awareness” – Aloka Earth Room in San Rafael, CA, is a contemporary temple-space interweaving Dharma, Ecology & Art. It is a practice container for embracing descent and the fears of losing the comforts and securities promised by modernity. It is an incubator for sitting together at the liminal edge of what is to come and a space for traveling into a new paradigm with the support of community – past, present and future. There is nowhere to hide, we are seen and there is help all around us. In this session I will explore how turning towards the more-than-human world enables us to re-member what has been lost and thereby waking us up to sensing ourselves again as participants of a living intelligent Earth, who knows how what to do. Aloka Earth Room is inspired by Ajahn Buddhadasa Bhikkhu’s ‘Spiritual Theatre’ at Wat Suan Mokkh, Southern Thailand and aims to provide a regenerative environment for reframing climate collapse into an empowering cultural narrative of interdependence for linking arms and getting to work.
Dekila Chungyalpa, “Loka Initiative” – We are now at the very edge of a planetary precipice facing irreversible ecological and climate collapse. What do we and our communities need to be prepared for and how do we do so? Dekila Chungyalpa, the founding director of the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been developing answers to these questions for over 25 years. As part of her talk, Dekila will discuss how her vision of deep resilience — that inner, community, and planetary resilience are interdependent and must be pursued equally and simultaneously — emerged through her work in the last 15 years with faith leaders and culture keepers of Indigenous traditions around the world including Tibetan Buddhist monastics in the Himalayas, Evangelical pastors in the US, and Native elders and knowledge holders in Wisconsin. She will weave her personal story into the narrative, including growing up as the daughter of a Tibetan Buddhist nun and teacher in Sikkim, the lessons she learned working on conservation and climate issues around the world, and the realizations that led her to bridge the worlds of faith and science. She begins her talk with this question; what if the Earth is the original Bodhisattva and she is alive?
Friday, June 27 – Conclusion
Co-Directors review highlights of the program, followed by reflection and discussion with all participants
Closing brunch in Mangalam Dining Commons
Typical daily schedule:
8:30-9:00am – Optional morning meditation
9:00-9:30am – Coffee & Conversation in Mangalam Dining Commons
9:30-11:00am – Faculty presentation and Q&A
11:00-11:15am- Break
11:15-12:00pm – Summer Scholar project presentations & discussion
12:00-1:30pm – Lunch in Mangalam Dining Commons
1:30-2:00pm – Break
2:00-3:30pm – Faculty presentation
3:00-3:15pm – Break
3:15-4:45pm – Second faculty presentation or breakout sessions
4:45-5:00pm – Break
4:45-5:30pm – Optional meditation/Breakout sessions on days with 2nd faculty presentation
