Interdependence Day at Cambridge University

Today is July fourth which is, in the U.S.A., called Independence Day. It celebrates the day when we Americans became independent of you British, the day we became an entity separate from the entity of your country. The country our ancestors established took the motto "E Pluribus Unum," "one out of many," and placed it on their coinage.

So perhaps you can see here one theme I want to pursue today as I examine the interface of Buddhism and Environmentalism. For as we know, a key concept in Buddhism is "selflessness," the actual lacking of autonomous entityness in the persons and phenomena which appear to us to be characterizable precisely because we recognize their autonomous characteristics. In other words, our recognition that we should be celebrating an "Interdependence Day" as well as an "Independence Day" is, at the moment, at least in a hyperbolic way, the key insight in environmental science. Of course the Buddhists beat the scientists to this perspective by over two thousand years, and it is only in the last couple of years that we have been able to make such a statement. That is, it is only recently that Western science and Buddhism, after being on apparently tangential courses, have been seen to intersect at some points.

Twelve years ago today Gregory Bateson died at San Francisco Zen Center. This fact can be elevated to metaphor to illustrate what I have so far suggested about "interdependence day." Bateson was in a line of Cambridge scholars, he emigrated to the U.S.A., applied ecological principles of thought to various realms of human experience, developed a strong curiosity about Buddhism as a philosophy which had avoided what he called the fundamental "epistemological error of Occidental civilization," i.e., the conventional notion of the self, and, as I said, died at a Buddhist meditation center in California.

So today, on July fourth, his life and teachings, as fact and metaphor, interpenetrate, as a California Buddhist, much influenced by Bateson, comes to Cambridge to reflect on Ecology, systems theory and Buddhism.

We may find this no more than an amusing coincidence, but another figure, important in the Buddhist/Western science dialogue generally and important to Bateson specifically, at least at the end of his life, would not find it so. Here I speak of Carl Jung, who would reflect on my experience of today being an interdependence day as a nice example of what he called "synchronicity." This is his by now well-known principle of acausal connectiveness.

All of these disparate concepts and descriptions merge in what has become the key image at the interface of Buddhism and Environmentalism: the Jewel Net of Indra, which, as we know, appears in the Avatamsaka Sutra.

Indra's net has become almost a logo, a banner which brings together notions of systems theory, the interdependence of life forms and Buddhism in a way which appeals to the intellectual, the anti-intellectual, the idealist, the ecofeminist, the environmental activist and so forth.

The supreme vision of "E Pluribus Unum," a vision of the many separate jewels interpenetrating in a higher-level megasystem of ultimate nondifferentiability, a concrete image of the Madhyamaka two-truths, apparent autonomous selves integrated in an interdependent whole with special properties emergent only at the level of wholeness, Indra's Net is woven through all the contemporary discourse. Well, we might think, "so what? That's cute, perhaps, but does it tell us anything we don't already know?"

In fact it does, because of an apparent mistake, a mistake which, like a speck on the projector lens in a movie theater, expands and swells in the projected light to a much larger significance than it might have in itself.

The mistake was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder not carefully reading a prepublication draft of an article sent him by its author, David Barnhill. It was to be published in The Ten Directions.

The article, titled "Indra's Net as Food Chain," explored Syder's ecological vision. All right in itself, but as the howls of readers' complaints ultimately showed, Barnhill went beyond Snyder's vision, at least so far as Snyder asserts in his reply and attempt to distance himself from the furor.

What was the furor about? Ostensibly it was about ahimsa, nonharming. But just as Indra's Net is metaphor, so is this issue.

What Barnhill had done was translate the image of the jeweled net into one of the ecological food chain - a food web in which everything eats everything else in the great samsaric round of existence. Perhaps this in itself would not have offended anyone if Barnhill had not examined the various cultural frames of reference and metaphor in Snyder's writings and then mixed them in a particularly volatile way.

What he mixed were Indra's food web and Native American Indian attitudes toward hunting as a sacred activity. The reaction might have been predictable -- the taking of life is rejected by Buddhism, and cannot be sacralized. Period. Native Americans may have survived by hunting, but no modern Buddhist has such a demand in his or her environment and so there is no conceivable excuse for violating the principle of ahimsa.

Snyder explained in his reply to Barnhill that he rarely hunted. His poems about skinning animals were usually in reference to road-kills, and so forth.

Nevertheless, the chasm had been revealed.

Nature, "red in tooth and claw," romanticized in the American literary psyche is, in fact, a food chain where everything is food for everything else, where the higher feeds on the lower, becoming in its own death and decay food for the lowest. Ahimsa is in fact anti-nature, anti-food chain, and here we find the seat of the chasm between Buddhism and the natural order. While Buddhism and romanticized environmentalism are, in the abstract, consonant when it comes to systems thought, selflessness, interdependence and the two truths, they are divergent in their attitudes to what this means in the natural order!

Let us not forget that the Theravadins sought liberation from the prison of the samsaric round of the food web. It was the Mahayanists that asserted the ultimate identity of samsara and nirvana and promoted the path of the Bodhisattva as the ideal way of traversing this enmeshment in the food web.

But then, how can one even be a Mahayana environmentalist if saving all sentient beings from samsaric suffering is antithetical to the natural order of things? One may argue that humans can easily be vegetarians given the kinds of crops we now grow and the diversity of food available to us. While a counter argument might be that this diversity is not available in much of the third world, still the principle would hold. Thus we can occupy our natural place in the food web without the necessity of killing sentient beings. This would appear to resolve the conflict of ahimsa and the natural order.

Unfortunately, like Indra's Net, the problem is multifaceted and multileveled.

About twenty years ago Gregory Bateson published his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Worrying that we humans were approaching the human population "carrying capacity" of the planet he guessed that we had about twenty years before planetary catastrophe became apparent.

He feared that humanity was like the frog which, dropped into boiling water jumps out and saves its life, but dropped into cool water whose temperature is then raised by imperceptible increments is boiled to death. Not seeing or acting on the imperceptible incremental degradations of the environment, humanity would wake up too late to head off the disaster.

His quintessential example from nature focuses on the role of the predator in keeping environmental balance. Without adequate predators a herd of herbivores will overgraze a habitat to the point where the land erodes from lack of ground cover, and the population of the herd will increase with both the fit and the weak surviving, but with the whole herd becoming weakened due to the loss of rich habitat. Strong enough to survive, the herd continues to degrade the environment as it grows. Weakened as a whole by overpopulating a degraded habitat, the whole herd is subject to death from disease or climactic change.

For Bateson, this seems to be the fate of the human species. Overpopulating and degrading the planet, we precipitate the eco- cataclysm which destroys us.

In this context what is Bodhisattva activity? When the all threatens each one, how do we preserve individual life? What is real ahimsa? What is real Bodhisattvic action at the macrolevel of the larger whole human system when it is the very magnitude of the whole which threatens both the whole and all its constituent individuals?

This was Bateson's paradox. Does one curtail third world population growth by allowing the reinsertion of "predators?" That is, for example, by reducing medical assistance, by stifling the green revolution? Does one curtail the first world's over- consumption through the dictatorial mandates of an ecologically conscious autocracy which would replace the current ecologically unconscious and self-gratifying democracies? This hardly seems like ahimsa or Mahayana.

Where is the solution to these paradoxes? Is there a solution in Buddhism?

Perhaps paradox itself contains the seeds of the solution.

If overpopulation is the root cause of the environmental crisis, than population reduction must be part of the solution. The natural order of things may, in fact, be just this. But the natural process will likely involve widespread suffering. Human intervention to reduce population before the natural process, with its attendant suffering, can take effect may, in fact, constitute Bodhisattvic action.

Alternately, Bodhisattvic action may be seen as integral to the natural process; it may be seen as enlightened self-regulation.

In fact, if human beings are the only self-conscious beings on this planet, the self-conscious self-regulation of population and the consumption of resources may be an aspect of the natural order. This is akin to suggesting that Mahayana on the one hand and Ecology on the other hand, represent stages in an evolutionary process which has mere self-interested self-consciousness for an earlier stage. Unfortunately, from the point of view of seeking conjunctions in Buddhism and Modern Western Thought, evolution is not a Buddhist concept, and it is hard to see how it could square with Dharma, unless one considers, as does Shin-ran, that Amitabha's vow guarantees that every sentient being will, in the course of time, be liberated. By a stretch Amitabha's vow could be considered a kind of evolutionary impulse acting within the samsaric round, but it is a significant stretch.

Alternately, if we return to the spirit of paradox, we may find some seeds for the reconciliation of the moral dilemmas created by our need to live in a self-consciously self-regulatory fashion in Indra's food web. That is to say, we may get some insight into what it means to equate Bodhisattvic activity and the self-conscious self-regulation of population and consumption of resources.

Here we will find that the formulation of the two truths which reconcile samsara and nirvana will be our starting point, since the food web is embodied samsaric existence, while enlightenment is liberation in embodied samsaric existence. Madhayamaka dialectics have drawn an envelope around the territory. For example, Nagarjuna tells us that the one and the many are interdependent. This is usually interpreted as referring to the relationship of the one part and the many parts, where the concept "one" implies the concept "many" and the converse, but it can be understood as referring to the relationship of the many parts and the One Whole System which is composed of the many parts. Certainly this is consistent with the image of Indra's Net, the one system composed of many threads, knots and jewels. Here the One is the Absolute Truth of what is, Paramartha-satya, or Dharma-kaya, while the Many is the Relative Truth of what is, Samvrti-satya, what we experience as samsara.

There is no larger whole system, no One, without the many parts. And in fact, as systems theory informs us, there can be no existence or survival of any single part without the whole, the one. In other words, no individual can exist apart from a society which sustains that individual, and a society is, from a certain perspective, a mere summation of its parts, though from another perspective it has uniquely emergent properties as a whole system. Or, to utilize an alternate example, no organ, such as a heart, can survive if the body does not survive, nor can the body survive if the heart does not survive. Yet, the heart and the whole body have different properties and purposes unique to their own levels of complexity.

This reflects the Madhyamaka two truths, that samsara and nirvana are not ultimately different, that they are two aspects of one pattern, if you will. Yet, samsara is still knowable by the characteristic of suffering and nirvana is still knowable by the characteristic of peace, and suffering and peace are not the same thing.

Paradox, then, arises from reflecting on the fact that we live both as individuals and as members of a society, as individuals and as members of the family of sentient beings. Here there is no "either/or," only a "both/and." What, then, does this mean for the Bodhisattva way, once we have defined it with the language of self-conscious environmental self-regulation? We can find some concrete examples of what this might mean, provided we don't flinch. Here we will have to grapple with one of the thorniest issues of our time: abortion. For if overpopulation is one of the roots of eco-cataclysm, then facing issues such as continence and abortion will be required if we are to examine the path of the "ecobodhisattva."

Recently the abortion issue was faced head on by Helen Tworkov in her article "Anti-abortion/Pro-choice: Taking Both Sides" in tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Her title gives her conclusions away, the essence of paradox: that while she, and many other Buddhists she knew, were opposed to abortion, recognizing it as the taking of life and thus violating the first precept, she supported other women's legal right to choose for themselves whether or not to have an abortion. In her own words, "In the past year, the American Buddhist women I spoke with (from all different lineages) agreed that abortion may sometimes be necessary but is never desirable, and should never be performed without the deepest consideration of all aspects of the situation. This came from women who said that they themselves would, under no circumstances, ever have an abortion, from women who could imagine circumstances under which they would consider abortion, and from women, like myself, who have experienced abortion. All of us are currently committed to a pro-choice ballot."

To take it a step further, Tworkov quotes one woman, a Zen priest, who stated that the idea of abortion made her sick but that she was still committed to a pro-choice vote and her "commitment is to support pregnant women in whatever choice they make."

How do she and her friends and colleagues tolerate the paradoxicality of upholding the first precept, while recognizing that abortion is killing, while they support women's legal rights to choose to kill their unborn children? Presumably they do this by shifting their perspectives to honor the reality of the two truths, that everything is both what it seems and other than what it seems.

She writes that "All forms manifest what is; gross distinctions between life and death are labels of convenience -- useful perhaps, but with no basis in reality."

She quotes the Zen teacher Robert Aitken, who states that "There is fundamentally no birth and no death as we die and are born" and "such basic changes [as abortion] are relative waves on the great ocean of true nature, which is not born and does not pass away. Bodhidharma said, 'Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the everlasting Dharma, not giving rise to concepts of killing is called the Precept of Not Killing.'"

And she quotes the psychotherapist and vipassana teacher Sylvia Boorstein: "There is a way to have a compassionate abortion that involves the recognition that this is not the right time for this plant to flourish. But also, life is nothing but continual change and flux, with no beginning and no ending and, from the big view, it really doesn't matter where life appears to stop and where life appears to start."

This is, presumably, the view from the lofty heights of the Absolute Truth, or from what Tworkov calls the "big mind" of Buddhism. Again, to quote Tworkov, "Buddhism allowed for an acceptance of that killing which is necessary to life, and of the death and the dying that inform the dimensions of a conscious life. Pro-choice can be seen as manifesting "big mind" of Buddhism, not because it promotes or condones abortion, but because it contains all possibilities, and reflects the interdependence of life and death."

But here, with this conclusion I fear she may have broken through the same thin ice as David Barnhill, and one can almost hear the same howls. I say "I fear" because her conclusion is a bit ambiguous, perhaps because it enfolds the Absolute and the Relative perspectives. The problem is that recognizing that life and death interdepend and that the living survive by consuming the living is one thing, but conflating the Absolute and the Relative and then at the level of the Relative interpreting interdependence to mean that killing is accepted or permitted when it could be avoided, is yet another thing. Not holding to this distinction was the very error which Barnhill's critics accused him of making. His critics said, in essence, the fact of death can be sacralized, but the intentional taking of life still violates the precept of ahimsa.

It is not entirely clear to me, however, because of the ambiguities of Tworkov's last statement, quoted above, whether or not she has cracked through the same thin ice as Barnhill. However, this conclusion seems justified if one considers the statements of the authorities she has quoted. That is, I believe that she is writing from the recognition of the ultimate nondifference of samsara and nirvana, but that this view has bled into the realm of the Relative, where samsara and nirvana are different.

Gregory Bateson would probably analyze the pitfalls and complexities of this problem with the assertion that both Barnhill and Tworkov had made a category error, that they had confused their levels of logical types, and had thus landed in an unproductive paradox. That is, he would note that they had confused the class of things, the whole, the Absolute Truth of things, with the particular parts subsumed within the class, the Relative Truth of things. By this analysis, ahimsa applies to the parts within the system, not the system taken as a whole, which is a higher level of abstraction, a differing level of complexity, of logical type, which therefore has different properties and laws. The recognition that life and death are interdependent is a perspective derived from a vision of the whole, from the "big mind," where ahimsa is not relevant because there is no entity to be harmed or to do the harming. But it would be a category error if one were to apply this realization to behavior in the relative world where there are entities to be harmed and helped. In fact, Tibetan teachings about compassion base themselves on precisely this distinction.

From a Zen perspective, Bodhidharma may have said that "In the realm of the everlasting Dharma, not giving rise to concepts of killing is called the Precept of Not Killing" but there is no suggestion that he sanctioned killing any particular being.

Where does this leave our notion of ecological Bodhisattvahood as self-conscious self-regulation? Are we stuck in Epimenides' paradox? (Epimenides was the Cretan who said "Cretans always lie.") In the Eight Thousand Line Perfection of Wisdom Sutra we find that a Bodhisattva can save sentient beings precisely because he cannot find any sentient beings. In fact this is one way of defining him as a Bodhisattva. On the Relative level he saves beings, but on the Absolute level he cannot find any beings. But the ecological paradox is that to save all the individual human beings from environmental harm requires reducing the aggregate total of human beings to within the limits of the carrying capacity of the earth. That means that for any one individual to live, many individuals will either have to cease to live or else not be born.

So while the ecobodhisattva may not be concerned about individuals on the Absolute level of the aggregate whole system, on the Relative level some action is required, and while ahimsa may not be relevant at the level of the Absolute, it still pertains at the level of the Relative. Does this mean that the ecobodhisattva must abrogate the first precept in order to manifest his self-regulating vision of population reduction? But if he were to do so, then he would no longer be a Bodhisattva. This is Epimenides' paradox for the ecobodhisattva.

And, I confess, I cannot neatly resolve this paradox. Like Tworkov, I find myself "taking both sides" and being "pro-choice and anti-abortion." However, I still find the need to separate, both ontologically and morally, the Relative and the Absolute, and am wary of the Absolute perspective bleeding into the Relative when it comes to morality. One may accept the fact that killing is part of the samsaric round; this is the Absolute perspective. But still, one ought to wish to end the killing in the realm of the Relative.

The Buddhist enterprise has been one of seeking a middle path between extremes of action of body, speech and mind. Even, perhaps in this case, the extremes of Absolute and Relative. Perhaps as- yet-unrecognized alternatives of action will emerge at the interface of these extremes. So while I can make my personal contribution to resolving the overpopulation problem by practicing birth control and having no children, and can encourage others to do the same, I can't as yet see further solutions to the ecobodhisattva's paradox and Bateson's paradox when it comes to the reduction of the human population as a whole.

With crystals, growth occurs at the plane of interface between the crystal and its environment. With this population reduction paradox we are at such an interface.

[A paper in honor of Gregory Bateson, read at Cambridge University, England, July 4, 1992. Originally titled: "Emerging Trends at the Interface of Buddhism and Environmentalism: Interdependence Day."]