Pure Land Ecology

By Dr. Tetsuzen Jason Wirth | Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University

The Buddha Way is perhaps, of all traditions, the easiest to reconcile with science. It is a humble way—Jōdo Shinshū, for example, confesses that the practitioner is an ignorant and foolish person, a bonbu 凡夫​—and it attempts to be reality-based. At its best, it revises itself continuously in its practice of being mindful to things just as they are. The Buddha Way strives not to be at war with the world.

But things are not going well for the world.

To begin with the obvious, our Buddhist practices can no longer ignore our ecological situation. Climate change, overpopulation, the compromise of all known ecosystems, pollution, the Sixth Great Extinction, the acidification of the oceans, massive releases of methane from formerly frozen tundra, etc. are just some of the challenges that we are facing. And if we recognize that we do to each other what we do to the earth, we can also see that our systemic racism, economic exploitation, misogyny, heteronormativity, etc. are also part of the ecological crisis broadly construed. We can no longer take the longtime viability of our species for granted nor that of the many other forms of non-human life with which we share our earth, indeed, our very being. If ever we needed further confirmation of dependent co-origination (pratītyasamutpāda), we can see that nature is not the impersonal backdrop against which human affairs are conducted.

It is who and what we are. If it goes, we go.

We see clearly not only that we are earthlings (the earth and its ecosystems shape our interdependent being), but even more precisely that we belong to this current earth, to the climate and karmic background conditions that are conducive to human life and flourishing. The earth will still be the earth if we self-extinct, but it will not be an earth that fosters the current regimes of life, including our own.

This is a new way to understand the folly and madness of the ego: we see only ourselves, care only for ourselves, and in so doing, we destroy ourselves by destroying the conditions that support us. This madness is in part a challenge to appreciate that what the historical Buddha diagnosed as the first noble truth, duḥkha, a perpetual being out of whack, a lack of ease and balance with the way of things, is not merely a personal malady, but rather one that extends to our species as a whole.

But this may strike many as quite surprising. We assume that our technological prowess and our ability to re-engineer the earth so that it bends to our will testifies to our majesty as a species. If our technological footprint inflicts a critical wound on the bioregions that sustain us, well, that too is an engineering problem.

This is like asking the drunks to find a solution to their alcoholism.

Part of the problem of duḥkha is that we do not see it as a problem. Certainly, we like to complain and imagine that we are suffering, but duḥkha is not that we do not often get what we want. That we think in such terms is itself a symptom of duḥkha . Rather, it is rooted in our delusory mindset and we do not see who we are. The earth can show us that we are not the triumph of homo faber, but rather a species that will destroy itself while celebrating this as a triumph. This blindness is the central of the three poisons (Skt. triviṣa ) or unwholesome roots, namely ignorance or delusion, moha or avidyā. The latter is an inability to see, but in the extended sense that I also do not see that I do not see. I am blind to my blindness or delusional about my delusions. It is as if my mind is a dusty mirror that has no memory of ever having been without dust. No matter what the mirror reflects, it reflects it in a dusty way. Giving the mirror shinier or more expensive things to reflect cannot solve this problem; one must first find a way to wipe the dust off the mirror and to do that,

one must first somehow realize that the mirror of one’s own mind has been dusty all along

—no small feat since the mirror is too dusty to know that it is dusty. Or it is as if there is a piece of shit hanging from the tip of my nose: no matter what I am given to smell, I smell shit. In order to smell Zen’s infinite fragrance of the universe, I have to first wake up to the fact of my shitty nose and find a way to wipe it clean. Otherwise, I attribute the revolting smell of things to the world, not to my own failures. But from whence the dream of smelling the infinite fragrance of the universe when all that I know about my nose is that it is the vehicle through which I experience the relentlessly shitty smell that I attribute to my life and world? Duḥkha —the stress of life out of whack—is experienced not as the truism that everyone and everything suffers. It is suddenly experienced as an epiphany shattering the shitty and dusty common sense at the root of my experiences. The very desire to practice—to wipe the mirror clean and scrub the tip of one’s nose—is itself a great awakening Dōgen tells us.

This blindness creates the illusion that the Buddha Lands, or the Pure Land, is simply elsewhere spatially (some place else) and temporally (still to come). In the Vimalakīrti Sūtra, the Buddha declared that “when the mind is pure, the Buddha land will be pure.” But Śāriputra was confused: if the world must be purified, does that mean that it is originally impure—that the Pure Land is somehow originally impure? And given that the Buddha’s mind was pure, how could the world have been impure? The Buddha responded, “Are the sun and the moon impure? Is that why the blind man fails to see them?” Or as the Chinese tenzo [Zen monastery chef] famously clarified to Dōgen: everywhere, nothing hidden. Or as the poet and Zen practitioner Gary Snyder himself approvingly cited Dōgen to his friend, Wendell Berry: “when the ten thousand things come forward and verify you, that is enlightenment but when you go forward and verify the ten thousand things, that is delusion.”

In an ecological Buddhist sense, we can also see that tariki, other-power, cannot be separated from the pure land of the earth. When the great philosopher Keiji Nishitani gave some lectures on Buddhism to a Jōdo Shinshū audience toward the end of his life, he reflected that the Pure Land is also the other-power of the earth as it gives us fools our lives.

The tree is not the land, but it is inseparable from it.

“There is a borderline and yet at the same time interconnection. This basic form plays a role as a kind of membrane. A membrane both lets something in and shuts something out.” The tree is given its life, which is the possibility of it accepting its life. To live is an elemental expression of other-power, of the Pure Land. “And at the same time, the fact that it is allowed to live turns out to be the power through which it endeavors to live. These two things are united into one. Thus, through the soil there arises the great comprehensive power in all things.”

The ecological crisis is not only what clarifies our practice by revealing to us what we are, it is also the moment in which the heart awakens to its long-lost home—the Buddha Lands—and reaches out in compassion to all of it.