Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China

James Miller, Dan Smyer Yu, Peter van der Veer, James Miller, Dan Smyer Yu, Peter van der Veer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415855150
• eBook ISBN: 9781135008642
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate on how to create an ecologically sustainable future for the world's most populous country is shaped by its complex engagement with religious traditions, competing visions of modernity and globalization, and by engagement with minority nationalities who live in areas of outstanding natural beauty on China's physical and social margins. The book develops a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that goes beyond the tradition/ modernity dichotomy, and illuminates the diversity of narratives and worldviews that inform contemporary Chinese understandings of and engagements with nature and environment.

Part I

Ecology and the classics

1 Ecology and the classics

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim

The long-standing commitment to studying classical texts as part of a liberal arts education has had a distinguished history in the West. While this commitment originated with the Western classics it has also been extended to the Asian classics thanks to the pioneering work of Wm.Theodore de Bary and his colleagues at Columbia University. There the core courses on Western civilization and cultures now have their counterparts in courses on Asian civilization and cultures. With de Bary’s leadership and persistence, this Asian programme has emerged over some five decades with a remarkable translation of texts and a careful effort to shape and staff undergraduate courses.

In this chapter we are suggesting another phase of interpreting these texts is coming into being. They are being read not only as humanistic classics, but also as ecological classics. In this context they offer insight into views of nature and the cosmos in China as well as perspectives on human-earth relations. This chapter suggests ways in which these Chinese texts might be approached as ecological classics, with all the attendant challenges that implies. We recognize from the outset this is not a simple process but requires examination, discussion and contestation with careful attention to differences of time, place and circumstances. Moreover, we recognize that there is a vast gap between traditional texts and contemporary ecological problems.

The context for our discussions of the classics today is not only for personal self-cultivation, moral edification or social harmony. These discussions arise in a search for a larger sense of the common good for the earth community as a whole. Just as Columbia’s core curriculum arose out of key twentieth-century questions regarding war, peace and human rights, so now a reading of the classics in the twenty-first century requires us to respond to the global ecological crisis we are facing. For this is the largest crisis humans have ever had to face. Climate change, species extinction and massive pollution of our air, water and soil are threatening the viability of the very life systems of the planet. As some have observed, because of this crisis, civilization itself is at stake. We are the first generation of humans to wonder if we too are an endangered species.

What do the Asian classics have to say to this massive crisis that we cannot afford to ignore? Many are realizing that the ecological crisis is also a crisis of culture and the human spirit. They are asking what kinds of traditional values will shape ecological ethics in different cultural contexts? As China modernizes with an unprecedented rapidity, the destruction of the environment is becoming increasingly visible and ever more alarming. What kind of inspiration can be drawn from Confucian, Daoist or Buddhist classics for a Chinese ecological ethics? Can their texts be seen as ecological classics?

The timeliness of this question is evident as even the vice minister of China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection, Pan Yue, is calling for such ecological ethics to be identified from Chinese traditional thought. He writes:

Why is environmental protection considered a cultural issue? One of the core principles of traditional Chinese culture is that of harmony between humans and nature. Different philosophies all emphasize the political wisdom of a balanced environment. Whether it is the Confucian idea of humans and nature becoming one, the Taoist view of the Tao reflecting nature, or the Buddhist belief that all living things are equal, Chinese philosophy has helped our culture to survive for thousands of years. It can be a powerful weapon in preventing an environmental crisis and building a harmonious society.

(Pan, 2007: 185)

This interest in traditional values and ecological thinking is growing in many quarters within China. In fact, the Harvard volumes on Confucianism and ecology, Daoism and ecology, and Buddhism and ecology have been translated into Chinese and are published in China. This is also part of the revival of these traditions in China since religious tolerance was promulgated in the early 1980s. In particular, the interest in Confucianism has been strong and many of the writings of Tu Weiming and Wm. Theodore de Bary are being read in China and across the East Asian world. The revival of traditional thought within modernity is of growing interest in China. It is here where the Chinese classics have an important role to play.

In these considerations we prefer to use the term ‘ecology’ rather than ‘environmentalism’. The word environment can imply the study of the environment as an objective reality ‘out there’. It can refer to a strictly scientific investigation of the environment apart from humans. Moreover, the term environmentalism is often associated with activism or advocacy of particular positions regarding environmental protection or use of resources. Ecology, by contrast, is a broader and more inclusive term. It suggests the interconnected study of nature, species and dynamic ecosystems from a scientific ecological perspective. But it also embraces the study of human interactions with nature that we might describe as humanistic ecology. This broad area includes social ecology, cultural ecology and religious ecology. It also can refer to emerging fields in the social sciences such as ecological economics and green politics.

There are three possible approaches to studying the intersection of ecological concerns and classical texts. First, we can examine texts by individual religious traditions to understand their views of nature and human-earth relations. Second, we can make comparisons and contrasts across traditions, such as Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism in East Asia. Finally, we can also study texts by comparison across major civilizations such as Asia and the West. We can trace influences on key thinkers, such as the Hindu thought on Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Here we will highlight the first approach that we used in the Harvard research project. We will also suggest how the second approach could be helpful in the teaching of classical texts across traditions in East Asia.

The first approach, studying individual religious traditions, is what we used in the Harvard conference series on world religions and ecology from 1996–1998. Out of this arose ten volumes published from 1997–2004 and an international website constructed from 2001–2007 (w­w­w­.y­a­l­e­.e­d­u­/­r­e­l­i­g­i­o­n­a­n­d­e­c­o­l­o­g­y­) Over a three-year period with a team of area specialists, we brought together some 800 scholars and environmentalists in a ten-part conference series at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions. For this project we were influenced by earlier studies of the Chinese classics and by an appreciation of their contemporary relevance. This was fostered through the perspective of three remarkable teachers. A close reading of texts and traditions was encouraged by Wm. Theodore de Bary in the East Asian programme at Columbia. Without the broad understanding and careful training in the Asian classics that the Columbia programme fostered, the Harvard project on world religions and ecology would not have been possible. In addition, we were inspired by the concerns of the historian of religions, Thomas Berry, who was keenly aware of the looming environmental crisis, and especially its effects in China and India as they began to modernize. His interpretation of the religious traditions of Asia as relevant to modern problems was also indispensable. Moreover, we were moved by the Confucian scholar Tu Weiming’s call for a reinterpretation of the Enlightenment mentality through the resources of the world’s religions. His understanding of the reconfiguration of traditions within the context of modernity was helpful in our efforts at retrieval, reevaluation and reconstruction of religious traditions in light of the ecological crisis. All of these were major factors in formulating and guiding the conference series and subsequent publications.

The Harvard conference series tried to draw on a careful reading of texts and traditions, acknowledging that they were formulated in a different time, place and circumstance. The gap between traditional context and modern ecological problems was recognized. Moreover, there was no assumption that ideal views of nature, such as we see in many of the classical Asian texts, meant that the environment was not destroyed in Asia. The gap between theory and practice was acknowledged. Nonetheless, we assumed that we could draw on these classical texts because they reflect both timeless and timely concerns of the human spirit. They have been subject to scrutiny, debate and reinterpretation over time and across cultures for different values and interests.

It is also becoming increasingly clear that scientific, legal and policy approaches to the environmental crisis are necessary but not sufficient. James Gustave Speth, the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has indicated this in his new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (Speth, 2008). He spent his entire career in legal and policy debates around environmental issues, founding the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) and the World Resources Institute (WRI). In addition, he directed the United Nations Development Programme. Speth is calling for moral and religious approaches to be included in the search for solutions to the ecological crisis. This is where the classics matter.

The larger role of the humanities is now emerging in environmental studies. In literature this includes a renaissance of American nature writers and the emergence of eco-criticism. In history it includes environmental historians such as John McNeill, who wrote a comprehensive history of environmentalism in the twentieth century and William Cronon, who has written extensively of the complexity of human-nature relations. In philosophy there has arisen a robust 30-year discussion of environmental ethics led by philosophers such as Baird Callicott and Holmes Rolston. Since the Harvard conference series a new field of religion and ecology has emerged that has implications for policy. It acknowledges that a culture’s views of nature are most often shaped by their religious traditions and these are contained primarily, although not exclusively, in classical texts.

How can we study these texts across traditions attending to basic ecological themes? We can focus on human-earth relations under three topics: cosmology, nature and cultivation. While we will use examples from the key religious traditions of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, we acknowledge that these traditions are not considered radically separate traditions, as religions are seen in the West. In the Ming period, for example, there was a lively understanding of syncretism and exchange between and among traditions. This interaction led to a sense of shared yet differentiated values in East Asian religions.

The first way to appreciate these traditio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The diversity of eco-religious practice in China
• I Ecology and the classics
• 1 Ecology and the classics
• 2 Conceptualizations of earth and land in classical Chinese texts
• 3 ‘The Great Virtue of Heaven and Earth' Deep ecology in the Yijing
• 4 ‘Hard-hearted' and ‘soft-hearted’ ecologies A rereading of Confucian and Daoist classics
• 5 Gods and nature in Highest Clarity Daoism
• 6 When the land is excellent Village feng shui forests and the nature of lineage, polity and vitality in southern China1
• II Imagining nature in modernity
• 7 Finding nature in religion, hunting religion from the environment
• 8 Globalizations and diversities of nature in China1
• 9 Is Chinese popular religion at all compatible with ecology? A discussion of feng shui
• 10 ‘Ecological migration' and cultural adaptation A case study of the Sanjiangyuan Nature Reserve, Qinghai Province
• 11 Reverse environmentalism Contemporary articulations of Tibetan culture, Buddhism and environmental protection
• 12 Earthwork, home-making and eco-aesthetics among Amdo Tibetans
• Index