Eco-Buddhism: Environmentalism and the Distortion of Dharma

The "ecoBuddhism" represented in Buddhism and Ecology repeatedly evidences an ignorance of, among other pivotal ideas, the ultimately central notion of emptiness, and furthermore implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encourages a view of nature - in the ecological sense - as possessing intrinsic reality or selfhood. Compounded upon this error, and perhaps largely responsible therefor, are the various and sundry agendas many of the book's essayists bring to the table and allow or force to be admixed with Buddhist thought, generally to the detriment of the latter. By bringing their cups already full, the tea poured in is spilled. 

Examples abound of a dubious identification of self with other which does not quite resemble that realized in light of understanding the nature of things to be empty. In Habito's article there is an outstanding example (Tucker & Williams p. 172), where he claims that the practitioner of Zen "sees oneself as not separate from mountains, rivers, and the great wide earth. To see one's true self as ... all the inhabitants of the great wide earth, constitutes a solid basis for living an ecologically sound way of life." This talk of a "true self" is worrisome enough in a purportedly Buddhist discourse, but Habito goes further, saying that this identification of one's "true self" with the natural world leads to a highly sympathetic relationship. "Further, one is enabled to feel as one's very own the pain of the earth being destroyed by human selfishness and greed and shortsightedness ... In all this, one feels one's own body racked in pain." Here is an ascription not only of selfhood to oneself and to the natural world, but also of the reality of their suffering, when exactly the opposite should be demonstrated by a Buddhist argument.