ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS AND COSMOLOGY: A BUDDHIST PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Abstract The ground for a Buddhist environmental ethic is rooted in one of the earliest formulations of Buddhist teaching, the principle of dependent co‐origination. This concept provides an ecological perspective where nothing exists in and of itself but only as a context of relations, a nexus of factors whose peculiar concatenation alone determines the origin, perpetuation, or cessation of that thing. The primacy of dependent co‐origination is consistent with the subsequent development of Mahayana Buddhism and its concept of Tathata (wondrous Being), as understood through the complementary doctrines of the Tathagatagarbha (embryonic consciousness) and the Alayavijnana (Absolute Consciousness). Together, these specify the ontological and epistemological framework for understanding wondrous Being as the movement toward its own self‐revelation: it comes to recognize itself as the essential nature of all things in and through the human mind, which is grounded on and informed by it. Through such a cosmology, coherent with the classical ideals of a bodhisattva, Buddhism reinvigorates the human in an ethic of mindful awareness of, reflection upon, and care for life in its entirety, as the species that can identify the integrity of the whole in the richness of its diverse particularities.