Michael Livermore 0:11
Welcome to the Free Range Podcast. I’m your host, Mike Livermore. Today’s episode is sponsored by the program on law communities and the environment at the University of Virginia School of Law. With me today is Jessica Locke, an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University, Maryland, who writes in the areas of Buddhism and Western psychology and cross cultural philosophy. Hi, Jess, thanks for joining me today.
Jess Locke 0:33
Thanks so much for having me, I’m pleased to be here.
Michael Livermore 0:36
So you’ve described your work as thinking about the ongoing reshaping and re-articulation of Buddhist ethics to meet contemporary social and political concerns, of which of course, sustainability is a big one. It’s a huge contemporary social and political concern. Currently, our notion of the environment and environmentalism is, of course, quite far removed in many ways, from the context in which Buddhism developed over the years. So I’m looking forward to chatting with you about these themes. But maybe to get us started, we could begin with your own engagement with Buddhism as a scholar, what drew you to this area of study? What kinds of questions are you interested in? Yeah, what is your work look like?
Jess Locke 1:18
Right. So I got interested in Buddhism, I had finished my BA in philosophy and history at Boston College already. And–but towards the end of that period of time, I started getting interested in kind of contemplative practices. And in the years, like my early 20s, the years after my BA, I became a yoga teacher and got very interested in Vedanta, philosophy and practice. And then kind of along the way, in that period of time, I wanted to get more training in meditation. And so kind of not intending to get interested in Buddhism stumbled into a Buddhist center, just to take a meditation workshop. And then it was just off to the races, it was just clear immediately that this was actually my path. And so then, by the time I went to grad school and to do a PhD in philosophy, I showed up there instead, you know, I know my background is in continental philosophy, mainly and history of philosophy. But I really want to do a cross cultural, philosophical dissertation and integrate Buddhist philosophy into my doctoral work. And to their credit, I was at Emory University. And to their credit, they were extremely open minded about that–not all philosophy departments are. And I also just had wonderful resources. Because the graduate division of religion there has a wonderful set of professors who teach Buddhist studies, I was able to study Tibetan there. So it turned out to just be a very auspicious situation, that allowed me to integrate, really kind of in a holistic way, sort of my whole person of sort of what I was passionate about in philosophy, which, you know, I didn’t really speak about that. But as an undergraduate, I got into philosophy, sort of as an activist at Boston College, it’s a Jesuit university. And so they have this whole kind of social justice orientation to throughout their undergraduate program, but including there were especially in philosophy. And so I did a lot of service learning, and a lot of kind of social justice oriented philosophical sort of applied work in my undergrad degree. And so then what I actually what really inspired me when I stumbled into Buddhism, I ended up getting involved in the Shambala community that has this whole paradigm of creating enlightened society as the sort of ethos and the reason for practicing. And so that felt kind of very resonant with my background in philosophy also. So altogether, sort of those sorts of interests of both Western philosophy and my Buddhist practice really complemented one another. And I sort of managed to forge an academic path of study that was able to sort of mobilize both of those things.
Michael Livermore 4:25
Yeah, that’s really awesome. It’s a really interesting story. And it is a kind of a unique and great place to be at to have such an integrated, as, you know, path of scholarship. What one question that you know, folks might have is what’s different about kind of how you approach questions about Buddhism or how you approach questions about Buddhism, within a philosophy department and coming from a philosophy background with a PhD in philosophy, versus, you know, what folks might traditionally associate with the study of, you know, this kind of thing which would happen in a religious studies department, we have have several scholars at the University of Virginia in our religious studies department who are, you know, interested in Buddhism in various ways. So, so yeah, so that’s the question. Are these things just Are these just words, the unit philosophy, religious studies, and we’re all kind of doing the same thing? Or do you see a substantial methodological distinction? At least, you know, broadly?
Jess Locke 5:21
Right, right. Um, it’s a super interesting question. And honestly, a difficult question. I do want to speak very, very briefly to what you said at the very beginning of your comment about, you know, how it’s wonderful to be able to integrate, you know, my personal and kind of professional interests. And that’s true, but the biggest liability there is that if one aspect of those things wobbles, and it affects the other, and so I do want to be completely transparent that the shambolic community, the business community that I was a part of, for 10 years, collapsed in a sexual abuse scandal. And that really, you know, having that personal experience of grief and instability, then definitely affects my work and has in fact affected how I’ve thought about and worked on Buddhist philosophy in the ensuing years since that’s happened. So there’s like, it’s both a very enriching experience and also quite vulnerable. And I guess risky in some ways. But to speak to your other point on your real question. What does it mean to do Buddhist studies in a philosophy department instead of a religion department? I do think that a lot of it is methodological, in my experience, you know, because also, many of my colleagues in Buddhist studies are in religious studies departments, much of my coursework in Buddhist studies was in religious studies departments. And of course, there’s, I think, much, much greater emphasis on historiographical and anthropological understandings of religious traditions. I think a lot of times, the sort of doctrine of a particular tradition, often in a religious studies context can get couched more in an anthropological kind of frame and sort of understanding the social and historical factors that produced these views, rather than just interrogating the views, just on their own terms as the products of human reason or ways of trying to understand the world, which I think is much more sort of the bread and butter of a philosopher. So I have a ton of respect and appreciation for all of my religious studies colleagues, and I definitely, you know, stand on their shoulders or benefit from their work so much. But as a philosopher, what I really like about what my how my discipline enables me to approach the Buddhist tradition is really interrogating the ideas themselves, seeing sort of, like in a Nietzschean way, which ideas kind of dance and what I can actually how they can, how the rubber hits the road, how we can make use of them what how these ideas actually cash out in the world, I can do a little bit more kind of creative application and interrogation. And honestly, like, take the tradition seriously as an intellectual interlocutor, and kind of like, push them when I don’t think that they’re being rigorous enough. So that’s really how I see what it means to be a philosopher who works on Buddhism. And there’s also just something inherently, I think, both terrifying and humiliating and creative about being a cross cultural philosopher. Since I don’t work exclusively on Buddhist philosophy, I also draw from the Western tradition, and, and other non western philosophical traditions. And so, you know, there’s always the risk of dilettantism, when you’re in that kind of zone. And, you know, there’s always going to be religious studies, people who know more about the topic that I’m working on than I do, there’s always going to be continental philosophy, people who know more about, you know, that figure, that tradition that I’m working on. But, you know, that kind of dance of really trying to draw from more than one tradition and draw them into a sort of productive dialogue is, you know, for me, in my experience, the work of the Cross Cultural philosopher, and that’s really generative for me.
Michael Livermore 9:20
Yeah, it’s all super interesting. There’s like a ton of interesting threads that we could pick up there. I mean, the, the interaction between life as a regular person and life as a scholar, and how those two things interact or don’t interact with each other is fascinating. We could spend time talking about that. This interplay of internal versus external perspectives and different intellectual traditions and bringing them together as super interesting. So maybe we’ll return to some of these but But again, as kind of stage setting, you know, one of the, you know, questions that a Westerner might have is, you know, just kind of what’s going on with Buddhism and what is this interaction between contemporary Western philosophy and this, like really old, very diverse tradition that we call Buddhism. So of course, Buddhism has been in a really interesting period of change over the past. And it’s always changing, everything’s always changing those, say the past 100 years, as there’s been this engagement between the West, or interest in the West, with Buddhist practices and ideas. And there are lots of issues that come up when people from different backgrounds approach this tradition. And so you’re doing this as a scholar as a practitioner, other, you know, other folks are kind of addressing it as purely from a scholarly perspective or purely from a practitioner’s perspective. So So for example, like how do we think about questions like cultural appropriation versus cross cultural engagement? How do you…is this something that you is that for example, a set of issues that you worry about, that you kind of are playing around with? Or, you know, is that a mistaken way of thinking about some of these, these these issues?
Jess Locke 10:59
Oh, no, certainly not mistaken. I think a really, really important concern, to hold in mind always as a cross cultural philosopher, and, you know, as a scholar of contemporary Buddhism, Western Buddhism, to a great extent, some of the issues that you’re raising, or this question touches on, relate to this phenomenon called Buddhist modernism. That, you know, is this generation of or you know, is constituted by this generation of a sort of mutual process of exchange and influence between the East and West, you know, putting that in scare quotes, of generating a new kind of edge, a new frontier in the Buddhist tradition. And I would say, you know, interestingly, hardly anyone who practices or is, in in the process or participating in the creation of what is modernism or practicing in a Buddhist modernist tradition would really cop to that. Nobody really seems to identify as a Buddhist modernist, everyone wants to say that what they’re doing is like, totally faithful to the Word of the Buddha. And, and it’s not meant to be a slur. But it is meant to point out that the Buddhist tradition is dynamic. It has always been dynamic. You know, since the time of the Buddha 2600 years ago, Buddhism has traveled all over the world into all kinds of historical and cultural contexts that it has met with and adapted to and blended with. And so there’s actually not a single Buddhism, there’s multiple Buddhism’s and so saying that there, we’re now kind of in a an era of Buddhist modernism isn’t to say that there’s something false about the new iteration of what is it that we’re seeing emerge today? You know, otherwise, we’d have to say that, you know, Zen Buddhism, or Tibetan Buddhism are false. In authentic forms of Buddhism, however, nonetheless, we can, I think, take care. And try to, I think the kind of the question that you’re pointing to is, like, wonder, ask the question of, to what extent is, might Buddhism be sort of molded in the image of something maybe unsavory, or that might corrupt some important aspect of the tradition such as, for example, capitalism. So when you see like Nick mindfulness, as as one of the sort of cartoonish examples of that there might be lots of people that say, like, you know, corporate mindfulness, is this really producing liberation in the way of the Buddha or the way that the Buddha would have advocated? And I think that that’s a genuine question to ask. So I think that there’s from for me, where I fall in this is that I’m always like, aware that I’m threading a needle between dogmatic piety and colonialist editorializing.
Michael Livermore 14:19
It’s a fine needle, it’s a tough needle to thread yeah.
Jess Locke 14:26
Because I don’t want to simply curate a tradition, you know, and just hold it up like this, you know, this perfect jewel that can’t be touched and can’t ever even be interrogated or questioned. But I also don’t want to just say that I can, you know, pick up the parts of it that I like, and make it what I want to even if it’s just, you know, optimizing for, you know, the alienation of late capitalism. But one interesting little anecdote about this dynamic that really surprised me actually, because I kind of came into this a little bit more maybe on the dog dog About a conservative side. And I’ve spent a few summers studying language and philosophy and Buddhist philosophy and they, Paul and I’m and I some of my past researches on the Tibetan Buddhist Mind Training tradition and Buddhist moral phenomenology and moral psychology and views of ethical moral habituation. And so some of those practices that I was studying are things that have been or are actively in the process of being secularized and offered an in non Buddhist contexts as sort of you could say, like a part of the compassion movement, sort of the mindfulness 2.0 movement. And so I’ve asked some monastics plenty, like several, you know, what do you think about this secularization of this really revered Tibetan tradition of mind training the low John tradition? And you know, don’t you think that something is lost when you’re not talking about emptiness when you’re not talking about, you know, vast, unfathomable, Bodhisavic motivation and compassion and things like that? And to a person they were all like, it’s fine. Not worry. Totally. I’m so unconcerned. Like I’m just I, you know, the view is out of compassionate altruism and generosity. If this is useful to people they can they can make of it, what’s what’s beneficial to them. So that’s the other side of this is that, you know, I think that there’s a lot of sort of dynamism and flexibility often on the side of the, the sort of the, the sort of natively Buddhist cultural side of it, that they’re less conservative, maybe than I would have initially expected them to be.
Michael Livermore 16:51
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And, you know, there is that kind of goes back to something that you mentioned earlier, there is something a little patronizing, right, about not engaging with the ideas in a tradition like that you’re gonna hurt the tradition somehow. You know, so it’s a really, but at the same time, you know, you want to recognize that you come from a place of cultural power, and that these are traditions that have been threatened in lots of ways. So, yeah, it’s, I mean, I guess this is just something that you design your mind and that you just that you just manage as you as you do this work.
Jess Locke 17:28
Yes, it’s on my mind, I manage it. And I also seek out the feedback and reality check of others. Both, you know, my interlocutors within the tradition, monastic scholars and the like, and also others, other cross cultural scholars, philosophers, Buddhist studies scholars to, you know, give me a gut check. But I, to your point earlier, I mean, I do think that there is something patronizing about saying, like, we simply just have to take the traditions expression of its views at face value, and we can never kind of prod them about, well, what follows from that? What about this problem? I think, you know, if you’ve ever seen a Tibetan Buddhist monasteries debate, practice, have you ever seen this?
Michael Livermore 18:13
I have in other Buddhist contexts, not at a Tibetan monastery.
Jess Locke 18:17
So, you know, there’s a million videos on YouTube, it’s so fascinating to watch. But like, it’s quite an, you could say, almost like an athletic event of something like jousting, and like, they are not shy about calling BS.
Michael Livermore 18:34
Oh, yeah, that’s like part of it. I mean, I’ve always thought of that, as part of the tradition. It’s kind of an interesting kind of dialogic, if we think of different communities have different different norms around discourse, like Buddhism is not a, you know, everyone be nice to each other kind of intellectual environment.
Jess Locke 18:51
Totally. And I mean,
Totally. And I mean, again, it’s like, I want to, you know, put this in context. I’m not advocating some kind of colonialist debunking or something like that. But I’m also not saying that we need to, like play nicey nice, like, we can actually have a real philosophical conversation and treat each other as intellectual equals.
Michael Livermore 19:06
Yeah, absolutely. super interesting. So one of the areas that is pretty lively in this in this interface of quoting again, again, quote, unquote, Western ideas and Buddhist ideas and people putting these ideas into practice, and it sounds like from your own history, you were interested in activism and, and, you know, social engagement. And there’s this idea of socially engaged Buddhism that thought we might talk a little bit about. So for some, again, if we take the big step back, they might see this as almost like an oxymoron is some folks have this reputation, or this idea of Buddhism, as you know, associated with quietism. You know, the monastery that’s removed from society or the solitary meditator on the mountaintop. But this notion of socially engaged Buddhism is a really big deal for a lot of people in and around Buddhism these days. So what is this idea of social engagement? How does it relate to Buddhism, both contemporary Buddhism or you know, more traditionally. And, and then I guess the question is is it takes us back to your research agenda is in what ways is this not or is this reshaping and re articulating Buddhist ethics?
Jess Locke 20:11
Right, right. Okay. So, you know, to to your initial point. Yes, for some, there is something wonky philosophically about socially engaged Buddhism. You know, in Buddhist studies, Max Vabre is sort of notorious for having described Buddhism as unpolitical and even anti political because it was so concerned with individual sort of solitary monastic practice, basically. And there are some Buddhists conservatives who will not necessarily I mean, they wouldn’t put it in those terms, but would say that, in fact, Buddhist soteriology, is defined by the task of achieving individual liberation. It’s just a solitary affair through and through, it’s about releasing oneself from samsara. And, and, of course, you know, like there’s, within even canonical Buddhism’s, of course, there’s concepts and values like compassion that are, you know, have a social valence and all of that, but ultimately, it’s about getting yourself out of samsara, and certainly not about adorning samsara and making samsara more livable. The point is, like no samsara is its defects cannot be corrected. It’s irredeemable, just get out. So from that perspective, this idea of a socially engaged Buddhism seems to sort of be like misplacing your efforts or something. But on the other hand, you know, there are especially emerging in the in the 20th century, lots and lots of both Asian Buddhist thinkers, you know, monastics and in traditional contexts, and scholars, and European or North American scholars of Buddhism, who are kind of pointing out the relevance of Buddhism, to social engagement. And there’s a few different sort of methods for how that can come about, some people will point out in a sort of exegetical sense, sort of conceptual affinities between Buddhist principles, and some sort of social or ecological principle. So I’m thinking, for example, in this vein of the activist, Joanna Macy, you know, and how she connects the concept of coemergent arising, or interdependence with something like deep ecology as one example, some of the social engagement, socially engaged, Buddhist theorists will be more generative, more explicitly generative, and say, Look, I want to push Buddhism in this direction, I think it has sort of gas in the tank, to expand its ethical mandate to include social or and or ecological themes. And then there’s other thinkers who will sort of try to apply Buddhist principles. And I think that a lot of times what’s coming from where these sorts of thinkers are coming from is, you know, from the standpoint of already having an existent commitment, existing commitment to Buddhism, how can we say, like, this is how our tradition speaks to this contemporary issue, like anti racism, like peacemaking or anti war, that kind of thing.
Michael Livermore 23:47
Okay, this is really, really fascinating. And you’ve you’ve, you know, helped introduce, you know, the environment into the conversation. And so, and we’re also playing with a lot of complex concepts here that maybe not everyone is familiar with. So one of the ways that maybe we can move forward is to take a problem like, like environmental protection, and I’ll offer what might be like a couple of standard Western ways of thinking about these kinds of problems. And then maybe you could articulate what is different or what is the same in a kind of a Buddhist. And of course, as you say, there’s many Buddhisms. So but what are some ideas from Buddhism that might, or that people have thought might have something to say about these kinds of challenges? So so just to say, Okay, we’re worried about clean air, or we’re worried about climate change, or we’re worried about species extinction. And like a standard Western utilitarian say approach would be say, Okay, well, people’s, you know, people’s well being is affected by the quality of their environment. And so, you know, the quality of the air you know, whether the climate is stable, all those kinds of things, and therefore, it makes sense for us to care about the environment. So it’s really quite straightforward. We can have a rights based approaches and people have a right to a clean environment or people ought not to harm each other. And the environment is one of the ways that we could harm each other, we ought to respect each other. And, you know, attending to the harms that we create through our conduct that travels to the environment is one of the ways that we can be attentive to those kinds of obligations. Okay, so those would be and then species preservation, it’s actually a really hard problem in Western philosophy. And there’s environmental ethicists who think about this, and we respect species as you know, having some interests of their own, or is it just that species are important inputs into, you know, other interest bears like people? Should we be worrying about animals as interest bearers? And then what’s the complex relationship that goes on in nature where there’s a lot of animal suffering? Should we intervene there? And we’ve had prior guests on the podcast that talk about some of those issues. So. So anyway, those are just, you know, the thumbnail sketch of how certain Western philosophical, ethical and moral traditions might, you know, might compute some of these questions. So what is, you know, what have folks thought that Buddhism adds this conversation or asks us to subtract from this conversation or, you know, offers a different perspective than what we would get from that kind of those standard Western models?
Jess Locke 26:15
Yeah, really interesting question. Um, you know, so, one interesting kind of background dimension to your question, is that within Buddhist studies and was in Buddhist ethics, there’s considerable debate about how to even think about the nature of Buddhist ethics. There’s some Western scholars who try to systematize Buddhist ethics and actually say that, you know, Buddhist ethics enacts basically a version of consequentialism, for example, utilitarianism, your utilitarian thinking, or that Buddhist ethics is an iteration of virtue ethics, virtue ethics, right? Um, and, you know, I can definitely when these theorists put these views out there, and I can read them and kind of get where they’re coming from. And for me, just, in my own view, I do think that there is it’s better to think about Buddhist ethics just on its own terms, not as an iteration of some more, you know, quote unquote familiar to a Western reader normative system from Western philosophy, or Western ethics. And overall, I tend to think of while there’s definitely a normative dimension, to Buddhist ethical thought, you know, there’s, you’re gonna find precepts, you’re gonna find, you know, virtues that are that are held up, as you know, the most felicitous way of being things that we ought to cultivate in ourselves, what are wholesome and unwholesome states and things like that. Overall, I tend to think of Buddhism as being more like its own kind of thing. And I’m a little bit echoing I’m sympathetic to the interpretation of Buddhist ethics from Jay Garfield, who reads it as, as more or less a form of moral phenomenology of the work of sort of transforming the way that we experience the world phenomenology. You know, you could take capital phenomenology is a European tradition. From the 20th century French and German thought, mainly studying the structure of conscious experience. But you know, full on phenomenology with a lowercase p, we can just think of as you know, ways of understanding what shapes our experience of the world and moral phenomenology is as sort of interrogating critically, what are the sort of avenues of agency that we can exploit for transforming the way that we experience the world in a more felicitous way, you know, within the sort of paradigm of Buddhism in a way that’s liberatory or compassionate. And so, when I think about it in those terms, there are you know, there’s there are again, different Buddhism’s so I can speak to, you know, what’s common to like, literally every Buddhism Buddhist tradition in the world over across history, but there are a couple of Buddhist concepts that sort of are foundational and maybe that various Buddhist traditions would hold as at least some kind of commonly held foundation. Um, and some of those would be like the, I mean, something that would definitely be shared by all Buddhist traditions is something like the Four Noble Truths and the articulation of human suffering and, and liberation the pathway out of suffering, or the concept of Karma and understanding how the how cause and effect produce not only sort of the quality of our experience in a given moment, but also literally the world that we’re experiencing, and the like practical material sense. And also principles of moral psychology and problematizing, you know, the ways that self cherishing, you know, the, our attachment to the existence of a concrete self, which is considered from a Buddhist standpoint to be mistaken, and ignorant, how that produces ethical problems and, and thinking about how certain afflictive emotions arise from that orientation of self cherishing. So, that’s sort of a basis of Buddhist ethics, sort of the basic foundational concepts in Buddhist ethics. And what’s interesting, then when we get into this environmental or ecological frame that you’re bringing up, one interesting thing that we see a lot of engaged Buddhist environmental thinkers doing is mobilizing those foundational ethical principles in a sort of collective or ecological framework. And so this is a way in which, you know, you could say, the unit of analysis of Buddhist ethics is changing, or is changed under these sorts of theories, were, you know, these concepts that were really structured around thinking about individual experience, individual liberation, and confusion and the pathway out of it and things like that, how might we apply that to a collective situation or to an ecological situation? And, and so in that respect, like some of that is, can be a little radical, some of it involves like neologisms. Thinking about us to say, you know, collective liberation collective karma. That’s, there’s a little bit of textual evidence for that in canonical Buddhism, but it’s often fairly radical, honestly. Um, and so that’s the way in which I think some traditionalists might look at those engaged Buddhists and say, you’re kind of just making stuff up here. But I do think that there is something structurally, they’re not making, I don’t think they’re making things up in the sense that they’re holding to a structural similarity between what it means to liberate the individual and kind of trying to think about the ways in which selfhood might function at a group level, how karma might function at a collective level, and how liberation might function at a collective level.
Michael Livermore 32:28
Yes, it’s all super, super excited to think I keep saying that, but it is. So. So just a couple of points to just just reiterate there, and then maybe just offer a thought on this. So So one possibility, right, so I was kind of gave the quick wrap on Western philosophy. And, and so we could say, like, well, there’s a way in which the, you know, the various Buddhist traditions are a little orthogonal, right to the, they’re not necessarily opposed, right. So there’s nothing that necessarily inconsistent about being a consequentialist. And then also having some views that you kind of pull out of Buddhism. But, but they’re not, you know, they’re not the same thing, right? Just because there’s not inconsistencies? Well, there’s lots of things that, you know, they’re just kind of maybe they’re just orthogonal to each other, which, which is, which is interesting, it’s interesting possibility. But then the, what you were kind of recently talking about is how some, some folks in the engaged Buddhism movement, or people who are kind of in this space, are thinking about, you know, how do you know how Buddhism can be responsive to this, the modern challenges associated with with the environment? I mean, in a way, this is very similar to what went on in, in western moral philosophy, you know, a couple decades ago, where the field of environmental ethics kind of came into being, and there was a lot of thinking about, well, wait a second, are we looking at the right unit of analysis? Right? You know, we tend to have this individual, you know, human individual at the centerpiece of our moral universe. And there’s also animals, you know, Peter Singer, right. There’s also animals, there’s also animals. There’s all of the other life on the planet, right? And then there, and it’s organized in lots of different ways. And there’s ecosystems and this whole world that we have an effect on. And, you know, maybe we need to rethink some of the foundational principles. I don’t know that that’s fully caught on. I mean, there’s, there’s threads in environmental ethics, you know, probably hasn’t led to a huge wholesale paradigm shift within Western moral philosophy. And which, of course, is hugely diverse as well. So, so any case, I guess, that’s that’s my Maybe that’s my question is, what do you think of that analogy? Is it kind of just something that’s playing out on two separate tracks where you just have intellectual traditions that are responding to the facts of the modern world, and they’re just doing it in some ways that are not surprisingly similar because the facts on the ground that they’re addressing have certain characteristics? to them. So that’s one thing that’s happening, but then there’s also this engagement. So I guess. So that’s the kind of the question is, in what way? Is it kind of two tracks dealing with the same set of issues? And which way? Is there kind of cross pollination and interaction between the two tracks? Interesting. Okay. Um, so, and feel free to just abandon my track idea altogether? No, no, no.
Jess Locke 35:25
I mean, let me know if I’m addressing the tracks as as you’re sort of imagining them. But you know, what this what your question brings to mind is a point that has been made by the engaged Buddhist environmental activist, David Loy, who, who has coined actually this term, eco dharma. And he is very explicit about the fact that traditionally, Buddhist philosophy, generally much less Buddhist ethics doesn’t deal with environmental issues, because those issues didn’t come off. In the historical context in which the teachings of the Buddha were emerging, or, or were being articulated. And so he’s, he’s just totally honest, like, look like this is not, I’m not being some faithful interpreter of the canonical texts. But kind of, to your analogy of, you know, Western moral theory and the emergence of environmental philosophy, he says, the ecological crisis is in our midst, it is one of the most pressing moral issues of our time. And so if we are not deploying all of the theoretical resources that we have within it, particularly if we’re already committed to a tradition, like Buddhism, then what is it that we’re actually doing? And so he’s really trying to push, really, I would say, Western Buddhist convert communities, to rethink their sort of other worldly transcendental orientation of what their Buddhist practice means. And actually in, in, engage more concretely in the situation that’s right under their noses, right, right under our noses. And at the same time, so while he’s, he’s really trying to, you know, put, convert Buddhist communities on on the spot, he also says, like this, if we can’t do this, the Buddhist tradition is irrelevant, because this is a form of suffering that is prominent and important. And, and underway, empirically, this is this is happening. And so if our tradition can’t speak to this, then it is just going to be a historical anthropological artifact. And so there is something about that, I think that I don’t think that I’m being I’m editorializing too much, I think he would really say that. It’s the nature of Buddhism to adapt and evolve and transform itself as it comes into contact with novel circumstances, socially, and historically and culturally. And this is the circumstance to which Buddhism really needs to kind of if not adopts then at least, you know, adopt a stance of nimbleness. And the survival of the tradition really depends on it. The viability of the tradition really depends on it.
Michael Livermore 38:50
Yeah, that’s really, yeah, I mean, that that’s interesting. And so that that really is a kind of almost internal to Buddhism, kind of conversation in some sense. That is, you know, like this is, you know, this is we live in a world that requires us to address these kinds of issues. So maybe one of the things that we could do is just play around with some of the some of the ideas that we’ve been kind of mentioning and yeah, like, how, what do they have to say about the environmental, environmental policy, environmental law and the environmental context? So a couple that you’ve mentioned, so the interdependence, right? So this is an idea that’s, you know, very common in, in many Buddhist traditions, maybe foundational to all Buddhist traditions. You talk about samsara, right? The which is kind of the world, the world of suffering, right? The kind of that we’re casually familiar with our manifest image is something that is a term that’s used in other circles for that kind of idea. It’s just how we, just how we, the world that we come into, and how we understand it. impermanence, right? The idea that everything is temporary doesn’t have essences that persist, you know, forever. And okay, so too, so one could I think it’s look at some of these ideas, and there’s kind of a, maybe a facial obviousness in how some of them might be applied. So, interdependence would be something right, like, that’s very similar to John Muir’s ideas, right? Or just ideas that come out of ecology that, you know, the world is a is a complex place, you pull on a thread, and the whole thing is attached to everything else. Right. And, you know, so one could just say, well, that’s just a kind of a basic recognition that our actions have all kinds of consequences on the natural world, and that the natural world is a complex, you know, interwoven thing that we have to be very careful about intervening in, right. So that would be one set of ideas that might come out of the notion of interdependence. But as you know, there’s, there’s other things too, like, so this idea of samsara, that, you know, the world is just suffering, and what you need to do is kind of come to the right relationship with that world. Rather than try to make it somewhat better, in some sense, that, you know, to reduce, to reduce suffering in a facial way of say, making people’s lives a little bit less painful, extending their lives, you know, you know, that kind of thing, that that’s, that’s a mistaken way of kind of orienting your efforts or an idea like impermanence, which is to say, you know, well, maybe the issue isn’t so much that we, for environmentalists that were causing all this change, the problem is that, you know, we have this notion that the world shouldn’t be changing. And that, you know, we’re trying to cling to an idea of nature that we’ve essentially alized and that we have, you know, we’re kind of reified. This, this notion, and that’s just a mistake, like, we’re just, you know, you’re you’re, you’re never gonna get anywhere, if you’re trying to just cling on and grasp onto a fundamentally impermanent state of affairs. So yeah, so So anyway, I just chose to throw those out there as food for thought so what, what’s your take on how we can deploy, and whether we can deploy these concepts are in service of trying to think through questions in environmental ethics, either as someone who, you know, is really in the tradition and kind of adheres to a whole set of ideas, that kind of attrition, or, you know, as many, many people are, you know, they kind of pick and choose different moral ethical ideas, and they’re very pragmatic and just put them into practice where they see them fitting. Right, right.
Jess Locke 42:30
Um, well, I mean, the first concept that you drew on interdependence is in fact, I would say, I think one of the primary concepts used by Buddhist environmental FSS because as you note, it is such a foundationally important concept in Buddhist philosophy. That is both it’s it describes the world. And it’s so important that even in the Pali canon, the early Buddhist texts, it is sad that, you know, if you understand interdependent arising, interdependence, you understand the Dharma, that’s the whole ballgame. And that’s, you know, just one specific set of kind of one Buddhist philosophical tradition. But nonetheless, like, I think that points to how important this is, it’s not just some like random, you know, concept that’s cherry picked out of nowhere by, you know, environmental Buddha’s environmental theorists. And it does, the, and why I think makes it so juicy as an ethical concept, though, is that it is this descriptive sort of ontological illustration of being the way the world is the way the world exists, which is to say, what it means truly is that everything that exists, is dependent upon causes and conditions. Nothing exists autonomously, or independently. And as you note, I think that there’s lots of affinities with sort of ecological thinking and other environmental sorts of paradigms. What’s soteriological what’s liberatory about that in the Buddhist tradition, is that that can really thinking that way can really displace our some of our habitual tendencies for how we place ourselves in the world, how we experience our our own selfhood, and what we seek out in the world. And so you were also kind of noting impermanence as another key kind of teaching. One other sort of philosophical concept that that I would add to that discussion is emptiness, which is one of the key teaching In the great vehicle, the Mahayana Buddhism that emerged about 500 years after the lifetime of the Buddha. And emptiness holds that all that exists, including the individual is empty of intrinsic existence, that nothing exists separately. So, so you can say like interdependence is sort of like the flip side of emptiness, the other side of the coin of emptiness. And if we think about ourselves in the world in this way, as not separate, not inherently existent, not permanent, but rather in dynamic, interdependent relationship with everything else in the world, that stands to really displace our tendency towards selfishness, and our sense of separation from others, that in that sense of separation is what gives rise, of course, to then thinking about, well, I’ve got my own interests that are in competition with everyone else’s, and I need to do whatever it takes to protect me and mine. And that’s the biggest ethical problem in that needs to be solved in Buddhist soteriology. And in the Buddhist study of liberation. And I think that it doesn’t take a really vast imagination to really see how that might apply to a sort of Buddhist ecological ethos of really thinking about how to displace the sort of anthropocentrism, that has been so much at the root of our ecological crisis, and the sort of thinking of humanity as not only separate from but dominant over nature, other non human animals and, and the environment. And so this is another this is, you know, I was referencing earlier, how kind of the unit of analysis can change in Buddha’s environmental theory. And I think this is a sort of example of saying, Look, interdependence is a sort of, it’s not just describing our own individual, like the stakes of our own individual liberation, it’s also applying, we can apply this to modernity and coloniality, and all kinds of aspects of, you know, what motivates our extractive relationship with the natural environment.
Michael Livermore 47:28
So, so what the is, I think, kind of just coming to mind, as we talk through this is a key difference, again, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong. But a key difference that I see here between, say, a West, some standard West Western ethical frameworks, broadly and for think about environmental issues, and you know, what we can say broadly comes out of various Buddhist traditions, is the relationship between individual inputs between, let’s say, liberation and ethical practice, right? Which is not something that Western philosophers talk a lot about it, we think about in terms of what what is good, what has value? What are obligations, and, you know, that kind of thing. And it’s not really about like me, in what I’m supposed to, it’s, it’s just what I’m supposed to do. Right? In some sense, right? What I have most reason to do that kind of thing, but it’s not a path to anything that are, you know, that’s not the idea. Whereas, you know, there is an idea of kind of liberation that comes out of Buddhism that you’ve mentioned, you know, several times. And so, so I’m gonna just see what you think of this thought, which is that, you know, in a way, you know, thinking of Buddhism is providing ethical resources for thinking about how we should address environmental problems. That is kind of I’ve been approaching this question, I’ve been kind of questioning along those lines, maybe that’s a little off. And maybe a better way that’s more in keeping with the tradition would be something or the traditions would be something along the lines of that, engaging in environmental questions. And what these are, these are opportunities for the app for kind of Buddhist ethics and Buddhist practice to, to flourish in the kind of in a contemporary environment, maybe you’ve been saying words along these lines. So which is to say, an idea like interdependence, is, you know, it has this liberated liberatory effect if you really understand it, right of kind of allowing you to see clearer of your own kind of self orientation. And you know, what, it turns out engaging in environmental activism or engaging in environmental ethical thinking is destabilizing and exactly that way. It’s a it’s a, it’s a recognition of interdependence as both an opportunity for personal clarity and it as a kind of direct and irreducible part of that you or engaging in, you know, kind of improving the conditions of the world. So anyway, that’s just a thought. I’m curious what you think of that?
Jess Locke 50:09
Well, so one thing that comes to mind, the first thing that comes to mind is that, you know, one way of approaching ethical theory generally. And certainly a prominent way of approaching ethical theory in the western world tradition, isn’t a normative way of saying, you know, what kind of rules should I adopt in my behavior to avoid being a monstrous jerk? And and I think lots of there’s been plenty of ink spilled by Western philosophers trying to come up with the the most morally defensible, Maxim, you could say, for live to live by. And you could, and maybe a lot of Western environmental ethics deploys that sort of attitude of like, what are our obligations? What is just behavior in an ecological sense, or an environmental sense? Personally, this is my hot take on those sorts of approaches to moral life is that you can come up with the best, most defensible rule. And there’s a whole other set of personal qualities that you also need to develop alongside that rule that will allow you to live by them. Because a lot of times the rule says you can’t act selfishly, for example, you know, you need to be selfless. That’s hard for a lot of people. I’ll go on record, personally. So I think, personally, this is why, you know, interestingly, you know, I have I mentioned earlier that some theorists and Buddhists, ethical theorists read Buddhist ethics, as a form of consequentialism. Some read it as a form of virtue ethics and read it as sort of different in kind from Western moral theories. I personally haven’t seen many people arguing that Buddhist ethics is deontological, meaning duties faced. And so I think that that is kind of getting a little bit to your question of that maybe I don’t think Buddhist ethical reflection is necessary or environmental ethical reflection is necessarily so concerned with sort of like, what is the correct way to be engaging environmentally, or what is the correct ethical relationship that I shouldn’t be having with environmental policy or with environmental issues, per se? Personally, I think that it’s there’s a much stronger emphasis in what is ethical reflection, generally, including within an ethical pair, or within an ecological paradigm of transforming the relationship that we have with our environment, sort of like from the very ground up, so that it’s not necessary. moral life isn’t necessarily a matter of following the right rule. But it’s not, it’s more a matter of kind of spontaneously, enacting what follows naturally from the kind of relationship that we have with others and with the world. And that comes from having conditioned our consciousness in a particular way through practice. And so I do think that while you know, I think there’s lots of interesting concepts that Buddhist environmental philosophers can articulate, that come from maybe Buddhist canonical, ethical theory, you know, things like interdependence, or things like the figure of the Bodhisattva, which we haven’t talked about yet, but which is also kind of at play sometimes in this discourse. And we can certainly sort of forge these conceptual affinities and conceptual connections. But ultimately, that that exercise can get a little bit academic. And I do think that there’s something to your sort of intuition that you’re raising, that Buddhist ethics isn’t a strictly academic exercise, it’s about self transformation and transforming the ways that we experience ourselves in the world. And so, in that respect, I actually think this is less discussed, I think, in the Buddhist environmental literature to my knowledge, but there’s a particular kind of attunement to place and to environmental phenomena that we can see in a lot of Buddhist literature across different Buddhist traditions, that I think actually sort of helps illustrate the sort of first personal a will ever say a first personal kind of relationship with environment that is very different from this kind of like human centered How should I act within the environment and instead enact something like how should i How can I put this being in a, in a subtle community communicative compassionate relationship with the environment as, um as an awake and expressive, expressive phenomenon. And so, you know, when I’m saying this, it sounds a little woowoo. But we see in like Indian and Tibetan Buddhist texts, you know, we can read about teachers doing rituals to subdue local deities, and interacting with a local environmental deities that are sort of inhabiting a particular place geographically speaking, in East Asian Buddhism, we we read about the sacralization of geographic features, like mountains, sacred mountains. Also, in Tibetan Buddhism, or rather more like the pre Buddhist I talked in US tradition have been, there’s this real emphasis on the importance of elemental energies and relating to the elements as kind of expressive communicative forces. And what I think is powerful about this within the context of kind of Buddhist environmental thought is the way that it reframes how human beings are in relationship with their environment, and seeing the environment actually as powerfully responsive and alive, like it’s an interlocutor. And, and some of this, you know, we can see shades of this articulated in the concept of Buddha nature to talk to garba, which is the sense that all sentient beings and even possibly the phenomenal world is is Buddha is awake, is enlightened. And the communicative it’s there’s this communication of compassionate wisdom that is the arising of everything of all phenomena. And so I think maybe the Zen teacher Dogan expresses this when he says, the mountain and mountains and rivers or sutras, or teachings or word of the Buddha. And so, yeah, so I think that there’s a way to kind of conclude this, this thought, I think that we can turn to a lot of the Buddhist ethical concepts from a normative standpoint as a way to get us away from a mechanistic view of nature or an anthropocentric placement of humanity within nature. But I also think that there’s so much juice in a lot of Buddhist environmental, writing, and practice that tunes us into this the sort of magic of the phenomenal world, the speech of the world, that is an open defiance of the modern rationalistic mores that are, I think, directly related to the extractive colonialist paradigms that are responsible for the ecological crisis.
Michael Livermore 58:09
Yes, I mean, this guy. Yeah, that’s a really, you know, interesting set of ideas is actually links up to some earlier podcast guests. Load I can do is, was one talks about the loving nature, that’s a podcast episode that we did. And there was a lot about this idea of kind of communicate communication and understanding, and particularly opening a particular relationship to play. So there’s a she’s a she’s a philosopher in Europe. So yeah, so maybe just the final thing. Appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today. But something I wanted to raise that I’d be curious your thoughts on. So obviously, we’ve been talking about a lot about the moral resources that that we have in Buddhism and, you know, Buddhist ethics and, you know, thinking about their, how they apply to the environment, and social questions, but obviously, there’s, you know, it’s Buddhism isn’t a moral magic of magic moral bullet, right? There’s, there’s troubling you know, there’s trembling historical, this troubling contemporary dynamics and in cultures that have very strong Buddhist influences, you know, during World War Two, Zen, Buddhists, leading figures were, you know, involved in the nationalist movement. Miramar is a contemporary example, where folks speaking out of a Buddhist tradition have been complicit with uneven kind of promoting some really terrible repression of folks. So so how do you how do you respond to these, these kind of historical issues? Is it just kind of that’s the complexity of any human institution? Or is there any specific you know, for someone who is isn’t really inclined to buy into any of this thinking in part due to some of these bad historical and contemporary examples? What What What thoughts might you offer?
Jess Locke 1:00:02
Yeah, the the Myanmar thing I have had to do a lot of answering for Myanmar as a Buddhist ethicist. And I will just point out that, you know, I think that this is true in all kinds of traditions, the world over that there’s a huge difference between, you know, the views that are espoused on paper, and the actual cultural instantiation, and a particular time and place. And the ways in which, you know, a society might be defined as, as, you know, Buddhist culturally, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the way that that society manifests is a specific expression of a Buddhist view, per se. And, you know, obviously, I think, I don’t know that one could really justify genocide on the on the basis of Buddhist philosophy, maybe the Burmese regime manages that. Um, but overall, I think that this is where we’re seeing what which a phenomenon that I think happens in plenty of instances of a yawning gap between the actual doctrine of a particular tradition, and then the ways that it gets institutionalized. That’s sort of how I’ve come to understand when when societies go against their avowed views is That’s what’s at play.
Michael Livermore 1:01:39
Right. And, of course, as you’re absolutely right, like the, you know, pick up moral tradition or religious tradition, there’s been some bad behavior that’s been just, you know, attempted to be justified, according to it, of course. All right. Well, just this has been a super interesting conversation. I suspect we could keep talking for a while on various themes, but we have to at some point, and so yeah, this has just been really, really interesting. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me today.
Jess Locke 1:02:05
Thank you so much for having me. This was a pleasure.
Michael Livermore 1:02:06
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