Emptying ecology

Abstract

Chan Buddhist emptiness, as a practice and discourse of emptying fixations, has notable implications for an ethics without fixed norms and principles and an antinomian and anarchic environmental ethics that calls for the dereification of nature and the liberation of things. In response to an ethically questionable reification and essentialism of words and practices, in which one does not ethically attend to others and things, it indicates ways of placing such structures and its own self-reification (as in the contentious image of killing the Buddha ascribed to Linji) into question. The ostensive scepticism, iconoclasm, and antinomianism of Chan Buddhist discourses and practices can serve as a point of departure for environmental ethics insofar as such expressions do not only sceptically destabilise conventional morality and immorality but entail performatively enacting a responsiveness through deconstructing fixations such as “nature” and exposing oneself and things in their own self-emptiness.