The below is a “behind-the-scenes” conversation between Kevin and Künsang.

Kevin: Hi Künsang, we’ve certainly had a lot of conversations about the environment and Buddhism leading up to Earth Day! Before we get started, why don’t you share a bit about yourself for our readers? And what’s on your mind?

Künsang: You forgot to introduce yourself!

Kevin: Haha, thanks, Künsang. I grew up with Tzu-Chi, a Buddhist organization that emphasizes volunteer work and has many initiatives centered around environmental stewardship. They are famous, for example, in Taiwan for engaging grandmas and grandpas in recycling, simultaneously taking care of the environment while building a sense of community and belonging for senior citizens. Outside of Buddhism, I love geeking about sustainable materials and asking basic questions like, “what does sustainability even mean?”

Künsang: Thanks, Kevin. I practice and study the Indo-Tibetan Buddhist tradition. I can guide nature and forest therapy, my way of Namjooning. It's influenced by shinrin yoku from Japan, Buddhism, and Jungian psychology. For me, Earth Day is like Mother's Day… I feel Earth like a mother, grandmother, as a sentient being. Sentient Day.

Kevin: I love that. "Sentient Day." I think that really gets at the core of the respect and reverence that we would like to give to Earth and its inhabitants. Although with all the strife and conflict that the world seems to be embroiled in, sometimes I wonder if people also struggle with the seemingly simpler (and hopefully uncontroversial) task of seeing fellow human beings as sentient beings worthy of respect. Maybe what we really do need is "Respect Day." Not necessarily respect addressed towards anything in particular, like most "Days" are. But simply a, "who/what have you forgotten to pay respect to lately?" kind of thing.

Künsang: You hit something with respect. How about Eco-Respect? Let’s begin with respect cuz RM and Suga of BTS are now rapping in my head. Philosophers RM and Suga rap in Respect, “It surely belongs to a higher tier than love. A higher tier, perhaps the highest tier…” The highest tier that is higher than love, to me, it’s respecting Mother Earth. By respect, I am intending the English root meanings in “re” and “spect”; to look again, look back again. Eco-Respect because of sensing the Eco-Sentient of Mother Earth.

Kevin: Definitely. Could you share a little bit about the forest therapy you mentioned?  I would love to hear more about this part of your life, as well as any other parts of your life or Buddhist practice that inform how you see the environment.

Künsang: Before I drink water or tea, interdependence with Mother Earth and the people and lands that touched what I am about to drink flash in my mind. I purify, transform, and increase it with an offering prayer within the Madhyamaka view of reality. Then, I offer it to sentient beings. I recite a foot mantra in Sanskrit and blow my feet and shoes before stepping outside. I say a prayer and blow on the insects I catch. Last year, I bought a bug-zooka to escort insects outside; it took too much time chasing and scooping them in zip-lock bags for many years. Today, I watched a 4K forest walk video while walking in place and stretched with awareness of sensations in my body. Next, I sat and watched a 4K video on nature in slow motion. Then, I meditated. Something else I do is at the end of nature and forest therapy walk, either I or the participants offer the first drops of tea to Mother Earth after sharing what is in our minds and hearts. When I guide Buddhists, I recall the Buddha placing his hands on Mother Earth as the witness to his enlightenment; in like manner, we did the same alongside offering the first drops of tea. Intention is important. My Buddhist tradition emphasizes intention at the beginning of practices. There is a particular way in the Madhyamaka view of how people, things, and nature all lack inherent existence and are dependently arisen. 

Kevin: Bug-zooka! I definitely could've used that with all the times I catch and release bugs. What really resonated for me was your description of all the ways you meditate on nature. It reminds me of how one of the things I was taught as a kid was to walk gently with every step, to be mindful of earth and all the little insects and blades of grass that I unconsciously tread upon. In college, my Buddhist chaplain led walking meditations, again with the idea of training our focus and intention. Similarly, I've heard of stories encouraging people to take care of their temples, communities, and home altars as ways of training the mind to take care of the environment.

On the topic of intention, one thing that fascinates me is the difference between what the word "karma" (kamma in Pali) means in popular usage (both in Chinese culture and in the West), and how it is used in sutras. For example, in the Nibbedhika Sutta, the Buddha directly says, "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect." Of course, this is just one of the many ways that the Buddha describes kamma. Kamma has many more dimensions to it, and this multifaceted nature underscores the observation that (good) intention is indispensable, but it is not enough! I think this is a big part of why it’s so hard to do “the right thing,” to do right by nature and all our fellow sentient beings. Intention doesn’t mean we won’t make mistakes nor that we will be faultless, but it does mean to persist through our stumbles and keep on walking on the path.

We had previously discussed many more connections between Buddhism and environmental care. What do you think are some particularly under-appreciated, under-discussed, or unheard topics concerning Buddhism and environment?

Künsang: Well, Buddhist philosophy teaches us about labels, imputing meaning, and conventional and absolute truths. Have conversations about climate change, deforestation, water, mitigation, and more with a Pacific-centered map view of land, nature, food, and cultures. Since the environment has been made political, listening begins with undoing the global standard of the world map, which is outdated, colonial, Western and white-power centric, and undoing the language of Global South/North and Global East/West. India, Cambodia, Kazakhstan…we have names, cultures, and languages. We are not the “Global East” for the convenience of white people who created this label, let alone being labeled the Orient and then Asia by Europeans. In the Pacific-centered map view, the land of collectivistic cultures are more prominent. The majority of the world’s population are from collectivistic cultures. 

Pacific-centered map view.

Source: https://simplemaps.com/resources/svg-world-pacific

Kevin: Great point on maps. Any 2-dimensional map, while expedient, will inherently misrepresent the world. In a fully 3-dimensional picture of Earth, there is no center (well, no one lives in the core of the Earth). If we start accounting for all living things, we’ll realize that 78% of animal biomass is actually in the oceans, spread around the Earth. Meanwhile, humans make up just 2.5% of animal biomass on Earth, and if we factor in plants, humans make up just 0.01% of biomass on earth. The rest of nature might be giving us a side-eye and asking, what ego drives the centering of humans? (I’m using mass here just to illustrate the scale, not that it’s actually a metric of worth).

The inadequacy of labels like East/West, North/South reminds me of a great quote from Treebeard the Ent, a tree giant from The Lord of the Rings: “…my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.” Treebeard reminds us of how precious our “real names” are, and just think about how much of our stories goes untold when we have to use short, pragmatic names and labels.

Kunsang: And nature has stories. Their stories will be untold when human access to nature is disrupted. Access to nature is something people don’t talk about much. City planning could do better. You need access to arrive at being with nature. And this affects someone’s attitude, interest, will, empathy, and more for climate change mitigation, for generative as opposed to harmful choices. I feel that my culture and access to nature at a young age influenced me greatly in adulthood. In some places outside of the U.S., it was easy for me to access nature in the neighborhoods I had lived in. The greenery at the apartment building, short bus/train ride to the mountain, parks within a short walking distance from the workplace and apartment. I lived in communities where many people walked around outside in the neighborhoods. It was easy to walk through a neighborhood in the evenings where many family members, teens, and elders socialized under trees. I have to put more effort into accessing nature in my American city. Then, there were places in the mountains where I stayed for a short time, and I had to plan around water access. For example, gathering water and then prioritizing what was more important each day when it had to be re-used three times. And what to do with biowaste when there was no water for days. When I look back, access to nature, being with nature, and living within my capacity for water access, influenced me greatly as years passed.

Being with nature, internalizing nature, and becoming deeply connected in a way that calls upon you to act for the land, water, air. I once read that Ashoka had said that the way humans treat or regard lives of animals and insects is how we treat people. Being with nature, restoring my relationship with nature, brought me closer to my culture and my spiritual ancestors from India and Tibet and expanded my meaning-making of the story of the world. Being with nature helped me cultivate compassion, and unveiled for me subtle and unconscious habits of binary attitudes, binary thinking, binary meaning-making. 

Lack of re-spect links with exploitation of nature and even of our human sisters and brothers. My relationship with nature guides my inner work toward cultural, racial, and ancestral healing. How can I do ancestral healing without restoring my relationship with nature when my spiritual, cultural, and familial ancestors’ lives survived, thrived, and were colonized because of it? Eco is not just this present life. We talk about the self-grasping self and the ego in Buddhism. From Ego to Eco is also about healing past lives and karmic imprints of ourselves, ancestors, and sentient beings. Mother Earth has been the witness through all these past lives.

Kevin: I miss my grandparents’ home in Taipei. I love that there was a community park just 2 blocks away, where my grandparents would go every morning, noon, and evening to stroll, to chat, to sit with their friends. After walking a few circles around the park we would sit on the benches in the shade provided by massive tree branches sprawling over our heads. My grandparents’ place was also close to the mountains, and a short 15-30 minute walk away was a hiking trail that we would visit. Being surrounded by both people and trees really was such a blessing, and that accessibility is something I definitely miss when I come back to the concrete jungle that is LA. Access to nature is not just about cultivating care for the environment; there is a felt reality that separation from nature, from its oceans and land, from plants and animals, leaves us feeling uprooted. 

Also, I don’t want to imply that nature has to equate to trees — there are rich natural ecosystems in all sorts of environments. Trees are just the side of nature that speaks to me most, but for someone else it might be the ocean, or the desert.

I’ll add that heading into nature with an appreciative mindset is not guaranteed — for many centuries and civilizations, nature was seen as both nurturing and dangerous. Focusing on the latter is probably correlated with many hostile attitudes that contributed to the exploitation that you talk about, and the somewhat artificial separate categories of “human” and “nature.” As Jeff Wilson reminds us, we are a part of nature. In short, the way you have come to see and experience union with nature is not to be taken for granted. You put a lot of time and intention into cultivating it.

Künsang: Humans are nature too. Are nature. How I came to seeing under-appreciated or less seen topics was through lojong (Tibetan བློ་སྦྱོང་). Part of it was analytical meditation applied with my limited capacity on the Madhyamaka view. Part of it was the logic from the basics of the Nalanda debate. Part of it was choosing to be in places beyond the U.S. as a lojong practice. Feeling the land. Feeling the seasonal food. Feeling a culture’s relationship with nature. Feeling in this way is limitless and gives me more understanding. Intellectual understanding is limiting. Going to places to touch, feel. To feel what it is like accepting, buying, and eating an imperfect fruit rather than looking for the “best” one at an American supermarket. To feel what it is like when I don’t get certain fruits and vegetables all year round, as we do in America. To feel what it is like when the climate affects or damages the food supply, and then changes my food choices for the week or month. To feel what it is like walking home from work, while eating cucumbers to help cool my body during a brutally hot day. Learning that a field of grass was intentionally placed facing the windows of a school in Asia to help reduce the temperature of the hot air that blows into the classrooms. I miss something when intellectually understanding interdependence. Noticing what is happening in your body and mind while meditating…you start to notice the subtleties. You start to sense the subtleties of your mind and what’s happening inside your body. That awareness gets transferred into daily life. So, then in daily life, you start to notice the less seen and less heard. When you sit with nature for a while and learn about the insects and migratory birds, you start to see how this one ant in your backyard is connected to everything that is happening with the environment in another land, another country. You start to notice how your breathing, your breath, is tied to everything too. What was happening inside transferred outwardly into awareness, choices, and actions. Slowing down. You can’t see what’s in motion if you don’t slow down.

Kevin: Slowing down. Unfortunately, it feels like not everyone has the luxury of slowing down, or of doing the “environmentally responsible” thing. In the US it is expensive to eat organic or local or any other food that is produced with more environmentally responsible practices. While urban growth brings people together, it often also means that access to nature is expensive and out of reach. For many countries, the fastest path to growth and escaping poverty is via fossil fuels. Doesn’t it feel like with the way our human-constructed world is set up, our immediate “human” needs are often misaligned with those of nature? In many ways, nature subsidizes and pays the costs of advancing human interests.

On top of all this, in general it seems to me that we live in a time full of anxiety, insecurity, desperation, loneliness, and separation. This kind of being and suffering leads to urgent impatience, which further works against the time and space that is necessary for wise action. 

Künsang: Imagine that…humans are nature, yet it is expensive to eat organic food in the U.S. Doesn’t this picture feel off balance? Our desire for organic food signifies a need to restore the human-nature relationship. I feel that labels like the Global South and Global North are harmful and would not have come to be if there had not been a colonial and extractivist view of nature and people living with nature. My relationship with nature improved when I reduced feeding competition.

Impatience, time, and space. Workplaces that describe themselves as fast-paced and multi-tasking work cultures, including environmental and contemplative organizations! Fast-paced and multi-tasking…aren’t these because of competition, whether a cause, condition, or effect? For the most part during the COVID-19 pandemic, I did not watch TV nor read magazines, and turned off ads. I reduced reading the news online probably by 80-90%. I reclaimed my mind space from competition to “clean house.” Competition of profit, work hours, consumer attention, consumer time, space, creativity, innovation, skills, education, appearance, and more. Competition of experiences. Competition is making people sick. Excessive and chronic competition makes Mother Earth sick. Competition is burning us out. 

Kevin: So, what are we to do? For as much as most people feel burnt out by competition, it can also feel intensely scary to leave it behind, especially when we have ingrained reflexes that to survive is to compete. 

And there are so many more problems. How do we ensure we take care of all the under-represented communities that might get lost in our fight against climate change? Can we decouple growth in well-being from environmental degradation, and move towards a more balanced relationship with nature? So many of these problems are systemic, and building a better system will need all of us to be together. The staggeringly complex environmental and societal problems that we face have exhausted and overwhelmed me many times, and I imagine the insecurity and uncertainty associated with pursuing these challenges probably scares many people, too. Even with the right intentions in place, there is so much work to be done and questions to resolve.

For me, Buddhism has provided a guide on how to face these grand challenges. First, observation and reflection, no matter how uncomfortable, is essential. Secondly, Buddhism suggests that the antidote to fear, cynicism, and nihilism lies in finding joy in others' well-being, today.

On that overly sweeping note, for Earth Day we wanted to close with our EcoDharma offerings. My prayer for everyone is the following: 

This Earth Day, may you find joy in tending to Earth and its beings. And in that joy may you find the courage to be with your fears, and better pursue love and wisdom for all.

How about you, Künsang? What is your offering for our readers?

Künsang: [Pausing in silence.]

Walk with the Earth of your ancestral land. Walk with the land, not on the land…with the land…and with the Buddhist teachings on the five skandhas, sense faculties, sense consciousnesses, and mind consciousnesses. Within your capacity and ability, walk with the Earth. Internalize the land into your intuition, nervous system, unconsciousness. Connect with the collective unconsciousness of the land. Feel this land, water, soil, the tree behind that bush, and this plant for healing… Feel how the size and taste of this vegetable is different from the inland fields because of the sea, wind, and sun on this land… If you feel this, then you may not label it with the word ecology. You may give it a name that your ancestors used. If you feel this, maybe you can understand how people are in relationship with nature… not because your teacher, the news, research, a chaplain, or an environmentalist told you so… because Mother Earth taught you.

Our ancestors handwove baskets from what Mother Earth offered, such as bamboo and certain kinds of grass and reeds. Listening to the stories, experiences, and ways of knowing from friends in our communities, we are hand-weaving this basket together…of what we are knowing now from our cultures, grandparents…lifelines that help me see from their eyes, restore my relationship to this land, undo my binary perceptions, see my ignorance, and see choices that I had not thought of before. Buddha Shakyamuni is our spiritual ancestor. He spent a lot of time in nature. We are already a Buddha trying to be us. You’re a Buddha trying to be Kevin. We have the conventional body and mind. And we have the subtle body and mind. The subtle mind is in a Buddha. Similarly, Mother Earth has a subtle body and collective consciousness. Buddhism is very advanced about the mind and consciousness. It took science nearly 2,600 years to build human-made instruments to study Buddhist meditation. Maybe it will take another 2,500-2,600 years to create instruments that can see the subtle body and mind of humans and Mother Earth. It is normal for me that some Tibetan Buddhists are in the Tukdam state after their final breath and the body does not decompose for a few days, and even up to a month. I saw one of my teachers in the Tukdam state. It is because the subtle body and subtle mind are active in meditation after the final breath. The five elements within the body have an interdependent relationship with the same in nature. My vessels are the water streams and rivers. My eyes are the sun and moon. When I drink, I fill the ocean inside me. My inner Mother Earth consciousness sits inside my subtle body and subtle mind. Where does your Mother Earth consciousness live and breathe inside you? This is my question for friends in our community. And what are you and Mother Earth consciousness going to do?