Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2015

Department

Philosophy and Religion

School

Humanities

Abstract

In current debates about Buddhist approaches to the non-human natural world, studies describe Buddhism variously as anthropocentric, biocentric or ecocentric. 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 ecocentrism 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.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Contemporary Religion on 12/2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13537903.2015.986976.

Publication Title

Journal of Contemporary Religion

Volume

30

Issue

1

First Page

53

Last Page

69

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