The 48 Vows of an Ecosytem

[Clark Strand]

I wonder if anyone else out there has had this idea that, in reading about Amida in the Pure Land sutras, we are actually being offered the portrait of a planetary ecosystem--a theory worked out some 2,000 years ago by people who had observed nature very closely and reinterpreted their basic Buddhist beliefs and teachings in light of it. If that is so, then Amida's vow to exclude nothing and no one from his Pure Land is, in fact, a mythic version of global systems theory. I'm making an effort to articulate that idea on my new blog WholeEarthGod.com, but I find myself wanting to discuss it pretty much anywhere people want to have that kind of dialogue.

On that note, I wrote an essay ("On Eden") for a student who wanted me to explain my thinking on these matters, taking the garden story, the Longer Pure Land Sutra, and a certain Zen koan as its basic texts. It's too long to post here, but if anyone wants to read it, just let me know and I can email it.

[Dharmavidya]

Clark, is your thinking at all close to the Gaia hypothesis? One of the patrons of Amida Trust, Mary Midgeley has often spoken to me about that particular set of ideas deriving from her contemporary James Lovelock. Lovelock has a new book out that I think many eco-theorists will find controversial. He is certainly an interesting independent thinker.

[Clark Strand]

I actually haven't read very much of Lovelock's book--and the little I have read, only very recently. With that caveat, I would say that my thinking diverges from his in one important respect. I don't believe that the planetary ecosystem needs something modeled on a human consciousness. Rather, human conciousness may be expressive of some aspect (perhaps even a temporary aspect) of the planetary ecosystem. But the ecosystem works well enough without it. For me the argument as to whether there is a binding, organizing, or even an all-inclusive consciousness at the center of all things begs an obvious question: Why would there need to be?

Once we have a discriminating consciousness, we naturally want to interpret everything in terms of it. And that is what we have done as a species. But that "interpreting" is really a form of conquest. If we understand it this way, then it becomes clear that Lovelock has simply conquered the world by recasting it in his/our own image. It is we who need to adopt the gaia theory, not the earth. It is we who need to find our center as a species, not the earth.

To my way of understanding, we human beings have taken up consciousness as an act of conquest--over nature, over one another, over ourselves, even over ideas. That project (maybe 100,000 or so years old in its current form) has borught with it certain adaptive features which enhance our chance of survival (or at least increase our population)...until they don't enhance it anymore.

We have now reached a point where human consciousness is confounding our chances for survival rather than enhancing them. What is the answer? Not more conquest, surely--although that is always the temptation. I believe we will find the answer in spiritual practice and spiritual communion, but not by following any of the existing models for these things, virtually all of which are tribal.

Religion is the practice of a species, not the practice of a tribe. But to get that species-wide approach to relgion, we will probably have to reinvent it. That's the work I'm involved in. It involves reading traditional spiritual texts very carefully in order to find out what's really at the bottom of them. I call it "spiritual archaeology," but that's just a fancy way of saying that I want to know where I came from, where I am, and where I'm going--and, increasingly, the answer seems to be the Earth.

Far from being frightened or terrified by that, as human beings traditionally have been, I find that once I stop running from it and turn to face it instead, I find myself in the embrace of God, Allah, Vishnu, and Amida--all rolled into one. It's a very warm embrace, and a very personal one, in spite of the fact that it apparently isn't modeled on my own consciousness or anything like it.

There...that's probably more of an answer than anyone wanted to hear. But I'm curious what other people think...about the 48 Vows and the Planetary Ecosystem that wastes nothing and excludes nothing. Maybe some find it frightening to depersonalize Amida in that way. I just can't imagine how Amida gets to be Amida, or God gets to be God, if either looks just like me. I'm selfish and self-centered and like to have things go my way. But the rain falls on all. Thoughts?