The Buddha's Footprint: An Environmental History of Asia

By Johan Elverskog

A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion

In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources.

Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment.

Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812296709

Book preview

The Buddha’s Footprint

ENCOUNTERS WITH ASIA

Victor H. Mair, Series Editor

Encounters with Asia is an interdisciplinary series dedicated to the exploration of all the major regions and cultures of this vast continent. Its timeframe extends from the prehistoric to the contemporary; its geographic scope ranges from the Urals and the Caucasus to the Pacific. A particular focus of the series is the Silk Road and all its ramifications: religion, art, music, medicine, science, trade, and so forth. Among the disciplines represented in this series are history, archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. The series aims particularly to clarify the complex interrelationships among various peoples within Asia, and also with societies beyond Asia.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

THE BUDDHA’S FOOTPRINT

An Environmental History of Asia

Johan Elverskog

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1  3  5  7  9  10  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Elverskog, Johan, author.

Title: The Buddha’s footprint : an environmental history of Asia / Johan Elverskog.

Other titles: Encounters with Asia.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: Encounters with Asia | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019035099 | ISBN 978-0-8122-5183-8 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Buddhism—Asia—History. | Human ecology—Asia—History. | Nature—Effect of human beings on—Asia—History. | Environmental ethics—Asia—History. | Asia—Civilization—Buddhist influences.

Classification: LCC BQ4570.E23 E47 2020 | DDC 294.3/377095—dc23

LC record available a https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035099

For Sebastian

Contents

Preface

Introduction

PART I. WHAT THE BUDDHA TAUGHT

1. The Buddha

2. Buddhism(s)

3. Buddhists

4. Wealth

5. Consumption

PART II. WHAT BUDDHISTS DID

6. The Spread of Buddhism

7. The Commodity Frontier

8. Agricultural Expansion

9. Urbanization

10. The Buddhist Landscape

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Figure 1. Three snow-leopard-skin backpacks (Bumthang, Bhutan, 1991).

Photo by author.

Preface

Everyone likes Buddhism.

—Donald S. Lopez Jr., From Stone to Flesh

The origins of this book partly reside in a matching set of backpacks that I came across in Bhutan in the early 1990s. They sat on the floor of a home next to a jug of chang, homemade millet beer. They were covered with the skin of a snow leopard, and I was shocked that Buddhists would so casually carry bags made from one of the most endangered animals on the planet.¹

I had recently graduated from college in Berkeley, where the environmental movement was strong and the vision of Buddhism as ecologically principled was taken for granted. I had fallen for all of it. I still remember buying my copy of Allan Badiner’s Dharma Gaia at the Black Oak Bookstore on Shattuck Avenue and dutifully absorbing its collected wisdom about the intrinsic connections between Buddhism and deep ecology.² Like other upper-middle-class white kids disillusioned with the greed is good ethos of Reagan’s America, I read Beat writers like Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder and absorbed their romantic, pro-Buddhist orientation.³ These works drew me to the study of the Dharma, and, more specifically, to the Himalayan region, where I traveled after graduation.

The sight of these snow leopard backpacks caused no small amount of consternation since I believed that Buddhism was an inherently environmental religion. Everything I had read about the Dharma—especially its engagement with the natural world—had taught me that Buddhism was in tune with modern progressive sensibilities as well as deep ecology. When I saw this matching set of Louis Vuitton-like backpacks carelessly thrown to the floor, it forced me to rethink some of my basic understandings about Buddhism and what has conventionally become known as eco-Buddhism.⁴

The development of the idea that Buddhism accords with modern ecological sensibilities has a long pedigree and is part and parcel of what scholars nowadays call the construction of modern Buddhism, which began in the nineteenth century.⁵ This project to invent a new Buddhist tradition that was compatible with modern values had many disparate authors—from British colonial officials to Asian nationalists, German philosophers, and Russian Theosophists.⁶ In accord with their secular ideologies, they construed Buddhism not as a religion but as a philosophy or a spiritual path that was based on rationalism and thus compatible with scientific thinking. Shorn of rituals and abstracted from communal structures, modern Buddhism became a spiritual philosophy for a secular age. This line of reinterpretation continues today with the multi-billion-dollar industry of mindfulness.⁷

Over the last twenty years, postcolonial scholarship has amply documented how this modern Buddhism came about and in so doing has challenged many of the popular preconceptions about Buddhism.⁸ Contrary to the conventional view that Buddhist practice centers on meditation, scholars have shown that Buddhist practice has centered instead on rituals such as relic veneration, the transfer of merit, mortuary rights, and pilgrimage.⁹ Many modernizers also held the Buddha up as protofeminist, but a raft of books has argued that the Dharma has been—and continues to be—profoundly and disturbingly misogynistic.¹⁰ Scholars have also countered the popular notion that Buddhism is inherently rational and scientific (even in tune with modern theoretical physics) by pointing to Tibetan lamas, to take one example, who continued to insist well into the twentieth century, based on scripture, that the world was flat.¹¹ Contrary to the common notion that Buddhism is focused on renunciation and antimaterialism, scholars have shown that monks and nuns were not only deeply implicated in the social and material world but also fabulously wealthy.¹² But perhaps no topic has received as much reevaluation in this new generation of scholarship as the claim that Buddhists are pacifist or peace loving.¹³ Rather, Buddhist history has been revealed to be as soaked in blood as any other, and such violence continues today with the ethnic cleansing of Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka and Muslim Rohingya in Burma.¹⁴

And, last but not least, especially withering scrutiny has been brought to bear on the basic presumptions of eco-Buddhism. The idea that the Buddha—much less all of the teachings relegated under the category Buddhism—taught something akin to modern environmentalism has been shown to be deeply problematic, if not entirely wrong. In canonical Buddhist texts, there is virtually nothing that accords with modern environmental sensibilities. As one leading scholar has simply put it: Buddhism … is not, in essence, an ecological religion.¹⁵

How then did the idea of eco-Buddhism develop, and why is the new scholarly consensus about its inaccuracy not more broadly understood? The development of the discourse that sees Buddhism as a good religion is complicated. In part it derives from the classic orientalist paradigm whereby the West is male, active, and practical and the East is feminine, passive, and intuitive. Such binary thinking has been utilized to explain and justify Western domination with its presumed superiority. But at the same time certain Western intellectuals also used this same orientalist paradigm to criticize their own societies. The German Romantics and American Transcendentalists, for example, lauded Asian religions for being more in tune with the natural world than Christianity.¹⁶ Some Asian intellectuals, in turn, adopted this Western counterdiscourse not only to critique Christianity and European colonialism but also to recast their own traditions. This turn to nature reached its most consequential elaboration in the hands of Japanese ultranationalists, who, emulating Nazi preoccupations,¹⁷ promulgated the idea of an innate Japanese connection with nature.¹⁸ This nationalism rooted in nature has since been carried forward in the works of a wide range of authors, from Lafcadio Hearn¹⁹ to D. T. Suzuki,²⁰ E. F. Schumacher,²¹ and Lynn White. In his seminal 1967 article The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis, White drew this stark East-West distinction: What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the man-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present eco-logic crisis until we find a new religion … [such as] Zen Buddhism, which conceives of the man-nature relationship as very nearly the mirror image of the Christian view.²² These ideas, which emanated from an imperialist romanticism, continue to shape the general understanding of Buddhism and its relationship to the environment.²³

Such ideas are so pervasive that they often appear as a sort of common sense. In an attempt to tear down the human-animal divide, the ethicist Peter Singer resorts to the orientalist paradigm: It is true that Western thinking emphasizes the gulf between humans and nature, and also between humans and animals, to a far greater extent than Eastern thinking.²⁴ Singer is far from alone. A prominent environmental historian has recently claimed, inaccurately, that ancient Asian religions taught the oneness of life, and an ethic based on respect for all living things, and therefore seem to have encouraged the preservation of nature.²⁵ But perhaps no example can make my point better than the entry for Buddhism in the recent Encyclopedia of World Environmental History:

The basic precepts and philosophy of Buddhism tend to encourage a sensitive approach to the environment. The whole approach of Buddhism is designed to eliminate suffering, and hence Buddhism discourages any action that might harm living things. Buddhists tend to be mindful of their actions in the natural world, and so would not thoughtlessly saw down a tree or pull up plants without very careful consideration. They would be equally thoughtful with regard to animals, and would tend not to use resources from the natural world without careful thought. Indeed, Buddhists would normally only wish to use resources to the extent required to sustain life. The excessive use of resources, particularly to make money, would be regarded as a form of greed and desire. The Buddhist attitude would preclude excessive mining for minerals, the destruction of forests for building purposes, or the pollution of rivers with industrial waste.²⁶

As The Buddha’s Footprint will show in detail, this description is thoroughly inaccurate historically. I quote it at length to emphasize how pervasive the eco-Buddhist discourse is. The world’s leading environmental historians who wrote and advised the Encyclopedia should know better, but somehow they do not.

Indeed, if the last fifty years of environmental history has taught us anything it is that humans exploit the environment for their own ends.²⁷ As Yuval Noah Harari has succinctly put it: The historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer…. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.²⁸ In the face of our collective history, it seems irresponsible to suppose that Buddhists have been an exception, but the eco-Buddhist discourse does precisely that.²⁹

When I first publicly presented some of my work on this topic—ironically enough in Berkeley—I was not surprised when a gentleman in the audience asked me: Do you want to be the Grinch who stole Buddhism? Although he asked the question with humor, he suggested that I was the first to challenge the popular image of the Dharma as inherently environmental and that, as such, I was robbing people of their comforting view of Buddhism. Yet, as I have noted, that is not the case. Scholars have made this argument repeatedly over the past twenty years, and yet unfortunately their work has done little to change popular perceptions of Buddhism. If we have stolen Buddhism, the Whos down in Whoville have not minded.

Although this critical reevaluation of eco-Buddhism is foundational to what follows, it is not the major thrust of The Buddha’s Footprint. I will not be arguing that Buddhism and environmental thought and action are antithetical or that Buddhism cannot be used to promote environmental action.³⁰ Many efforts across Asia today show the opposite. Buddhism can clearly be mobilized to do good and important environmental work in the contemporary world,³¹ and I heartily applaud the work of contemporary Buddhists—as well as scholars, ethicists, and philosophers of all stripes—who marshal Buddhist teachings to promote an ecologically sound future.³² Yet, at the same time, these are contemporary interpretations that reflect the successful influence of modern environmental discourses on Buddhism and not vice versa. Ecological awareness is not inherent in the Buddhist tradition itself.³³

And that is where the basic problem resides (or begins), since all too often it is these modern interpretations that are projected into the past and taken to represent the tradition as a whole. By projecting the modern eco-Buddhist discourse into the past, two problems arise. First, it obscures from our awareness the environmental consequences of Buddhist activities across Asia historically. Second, because ahistorical claims of eternal environmental awareness have been roundly disproven by twenty years of Buddhological scholarship, maintaining this eco-Buddhist fantasy diminishes the moral authority of contemporary Buddhist environmentalism. We need a better understanding of the Buddhist tradition’s historical relation to the natural world in order to make as powerful an argument as possible about future possibilities.³⁴

Introduction

Buddhist societies and nations were quite far from being models of ecologically sensitive behavior.

—Francis Brassard, The Path of the Bodhisattva and the Creation of Oppressive Cultures

Buddhism is the only religious system that spread over all of Asia in the premodern period, from Sri Lanka to Siberia and from Iran to Japan. It dominated Asia’s religious, sociocultural, economic, and political discourses for almost two thousand years.¹ And yet the problem that Donald Lopez identified twenty years ago remains true today: historians of Asia know little about Buddhism, and scholars of Buddhism care little about history.² Yet to ignore Buddhism’s role in Asian history should be seen as the equivalent of a historian of the Mediterranean ignoring Christianity or Islam.

Historians of Asia, however, are not alone in their neglect of religion. The modern academy—built as it is on an edifice of secularization, modernization, and development theory—has itself struggled to take religion seriously.³ Persuaded by teleological notions of progress that consign religion to the past, scholars have neglected it.⁴ The historical profession has been especially delinquent. Even as recently as 2009 an American Historical Association survey confirmed that only 3 percent of professional historians in North America engage with religion as a component of human history.⁵ The profession’s history may explain why: it came of age during the nineteenth century and itself helped forge the narrative of the secular nation-state.⁶ Whatever the explanation, the neglect of Buddhism by historians of Asia is typical of the profession as a whole.

Map 1. Buddhist Asia, 500 BCE-1500 CE. Buddhist institutions were built in Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south.

The other half of the Lopez problemb is that scholars of Buddhism have too often regarded the tradition as being outside of history. Many factors have played into this ahistorical approach to Buddhism—such as the philological and philosophical orientation of much early Buddhological scholarship—but, regardless of the reasons, it is a profound problem. As recently as 2012, the noted scholar of Indian Buddhism Gregory Schopen felt compelled to argue publicly that scholars of Buddhism need to take history seriously, otherwise the field of Buddhist Studies will become an intellectual backwater.⁷

The Buddha’s Footprint seeks to resolve Lopez’s problem through an environmental history of Buddhism. It addresses the basic concerns of environmental history: the history of human thought about nature or the environment; the influence of environmental factors on human history; and the effect of human-caused environmental changes on human society. But to these I add the historiographical goal of integrating Buddhism more fully into the study of Asian history, and vice versa. Doing so requires a reconceptualization of the role of religion in history and a move far beyond the stereotype of Buddhism as an ascetic, apolitical tradition of contemplation. More specifically, this book addresses the question of how an eco-Buddhist discourse, which holds that Buddhism is inherently sensitive to environmental concerns, has distorted our understanding of Asian history.

I build on Max Weber’s insight in The Protestant Ethic that religious ideas drive human action. The ironic legacy of Weber’s revolutionary scholarship is that modern scholars embraced his theory of secularization while also neglecting his fundamental insight that religion is important in shaping human behavior. By bringing the role of the Dharma to the fore in Asian history, I want to show how central religion was in shaping human history in Asia so that we will understand both the Dharma and Asian history better. If we are to understand the remarkable success of the Dharma, we need to explore the ideas behind it, and, most significantly for my purposes, we need to appreciate the centrality of its prosperity theology. Therefore, in place of the popular view of Buddhism as centered on renunciation and antimaterialism, we need to substitute the recognition that Buddhism was in fact centered on wealth.

For Buddhists, wealth was a sign of positive karma, and supporting the Dharma was understood as a means to increase one’s material and spiritual wealth. For this reason, wealth promotion formed the architecture of Buddhism. Once we understand this dynamic, we will be much closer to seeing the Dharma as the expansive cultural system that it was—a cultural system premised on a prosperity theology that demanded the generation of wealth. During the period this book considers (500 BCE-1500 CE), that wealth was acquired through the exploitation of natural resources on the commodity frontier. Thus only when we comprehend why Buddhists acted as they did will we begin to understand how they shaped Asia’s environmental history.⁸

Unfortunately, questions about how Buddhists in particular transformed Asia’s environment have rarely been asked. Most work on Buddhism’s relationship with the natural world has focused on how the tradition understands or interprets nature. Some scholars have criticized eco-Buddhism for its ahistorical approach to Buddhist teachings or for cherry-picking passages from late Chinese and Japanese Buddhist texts, but a more trenchant critique of eco-Buddhism is that it ignores what Buddhists actually did. An environmental history investigates how individuals, institutions, and states interacted with and transformed the natural world, and The Buddha’s Footprint investigates how monks, the laity, and the Buddhist state did precisely this. Driven by the Dharma’s prosperity theology, these three categories of Buddhist actors moved out onto the commodity frontier and there drove the large-scale interlocking processes of agricultural expansion, marketization and commodification of the economy, urbanization, deforestation, landscape transformation, and the transmission of crops and diseases.

I borrow the term commodity frontier and its larger historiographical model from recent work on European imperialism and the history of global environmental change. Given its importance to what follows, allow me to quote at length William Beinart and Lotte Hughes’s explication of this model from their book Environment and Empire:

Metropolitan countries sought raw materials of all kinds, from timber and furs to rubber and oil…. An expanding capitalist economy devoured natural resources and transformed them into commodities. British and other European consumers and manufacturers sucked in resources that were gathered, hunted, fished, mined, and farmed in a great profusion of extractive and agrarian systems…. These modes of extraction underpinned deep structures in the architecture of the British Empire…. In many ways, such commodity frontiers and commodity chains give the Empire its character and unity. We use the term commodity frontier to suggest meanings that are spatial, environmental, and

Reviews for The Buddha's Footprint

[Yoyoyo Smith · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

At least the Buddha never said animals and other creatures were at human's disposal ( the bible)!
No system can please all: when you talk about impermanence, they say you nihilist and pessimistic, when you encourage the lay people to earn money, you are materialistic. Only the west is the best coz they have the freedom to shoot anyone in the street... to create fake news with its powerful English media to slander and stigmatize the countries and people they don't like ...