In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, and#8220;Indraand#8217;s Net andamp; The Web of Life,and#8221; Akuppa traces positive lessons to be learned from simply observing and engaging with natureand#8217;s patterns and processes and#8211; and invites us all to prepare to be awestruck as a necessary first step.
From the talk: and#8220;Buddhism and Ecologyand#8221; given at the Triratna [Western Buddhist Order] Convention, 2005
[music] Dharma Vites is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for real life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, come and join us at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. Thank you, and happy listening. [music] The Buddhist symbol that's very often invoked as a description of ecology is of course that of Indra's Net. It's a symbol that combines pure relatedness with pure individuality. And I must say I've found Indra's Net to be a very powerful tool. I think somehow just as an imaginative tool, it's helped me to sort of have a sense of feeling part of a greater web of life. Without plunging into the other extreme of nihilistic non-existence. So Indra's Net is a very powerful image for ecology. This isn't to say that the natural world is Indra's Net. I'll come back to this. But Indra's Net does seem to represent a kind of deeper pattern which ecology mirrors. Or at the very least, it's a very effective, strong, imaginative device for the truth of ecology. So ecology does have this very immediate affinity with Buddhism. And the basis for that is the idea of interconnectedness. Symbolized by a network, symbolized by a web, the web of life. Quite often this is where the kind of Buddhist exploration of ecology stops. I'd like to come back to interconnectedness later. However, I think there's more to it than just this. There's more I think we can draw on from ecology the science than just interconnectedness, just Indra's Net. And two things that I think we can draw from it. One is kind of the actual empirical content of ecology. I'll explain that in a moment. And the second one is with kind of other truths, other general patterns that we can observe at work in ecology. So first, the actual empirical content of ecology. What do I mean by this? Well, I think there's a sort of danger, and one that we're far from immune to as Buddhists, in kind of appropriating the truth of interconnectedness in quite a glib and abstracted way. Kind of hey man, we're all interconnected. It can kind of sink quite easily into a sort of sentimental truism. If we actually go back to scientific ecology and look a bit closer, what we actually see is that ecology isn't quite Indra's Net. It isn't a perfect reflection of Indra's Net. It isn't pure mutual interconnectedness. The similarity with Indra's Net is only partial. What we actually see if we look at nature is that beings are related to some beings more than they are to other beings. And they're related in very particular causal relationships, very particular ways. So I think there's much to learn from ecology about why it doesn't conform to Indra's Net as to why it does. Ecology really is about the particularities as much as it is about the general kind of truth, the general sort of pattern of interconnectedness. Ecology as science is interested in the particular empirical realities of living systems. And that brings us into a deeper experience of actual living beings. We hope you enjoyed the talk. Please come and help us keep this free at freebuddhistaudio.com/community. And thank you. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]
