A Sustainable Enlightenment

(Eco Buddhism) It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing. Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Looking again and again at that which cannot be looked at,
Unseeable reality is seen just as it is.
Karmapa Rangjung Dorje, Mahamudra Aspiration Prayer

The first of these statements describes the apparent death wish of industrial civilization, while the second describes the deep meditative experience of a thirteenth century Buddhist master. We in the Ecobuddhism project understand the present as an historical period of ecological, existential and spiritual crisis: a time when such apparent opposites have something crucial to say to each other.

The rise and fall of western enlightenment

The “enlightenment” recognized by mainstream Western culture was a cultural shift in the seventeenth century—from belief in a Judeo-Christian worldview to one based in rationality, mechanistic science and secular humanism. Since then we have understood Nature and ourselves to be machine-like. The industrial growth society is a product of that Cartesian worldview. Over the last sixty years, a fetish of limitless economic growth has driven us faster and further than ever before. This is a society that cannot stop to ask sincerely where it is going.

At the end of the hottest decade on record, we are surrounded by unprecedented droughts, floods, crop losses and technological accidents. The mainstream media, still peddling “classical” economics, ignores either climate science or clean energy as legitimate subjects of interest. It fails to join up the dots for people on the most important issue of our time: the survival of life on Earth. Scientific findings and warnings are relentlessly subverted by fossil fuel corporations, who spend hundreds of millions of dollars to manufacture doubt about global warming, distort the democratic process and safeguard the very energy infrastructure that caused the crisis. It is beginning to look as if western enlightenment has run its course—that it will fail to prevent the collapse of global civilization.

A Great Awakening

In the 20th century, the Western world became aware of another type of enlightenment, the “great awakening” of the Buddha. Starting with one person, its sustainability became evident in methods of training, wisdom and trans-cultural influence that have endured for 2500 years. Many men and women across a variety of cultures have used this path and experienced their own awakening. Might they be able to help us overcome our collective malaise in the face of ecological chaos?

The Buddha had a deeply-felt understanding of limits. Happiness, he found, isn’t gained by trying to satisfy all our desires. In fact, a minimalist approach to possessions positively enhances long-term contentment. Meditation can sustain the process of personal transformation. The practitioner uncovers a deep interdependence between the self, the other and the context.

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