Daniel Capper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches courses in Asian and comparative religion. He has published on Buddhism in the United States including the book Guru Devotion and the American Buddhist Experience. CORRESPONDENCE: University of Southern Mississippi, 118 College Dr., #5015 Hattiesburg, MS 39406, USA.
摘要
In current debates about Buddhist approaches to the non-human natural world, studies describe Buddhism variously as anthropocentric, bio-centric or eco-centric. These perspectives derive for the most part from examinations of philosophical and normative aspects of the tradition without much attention to moments when embodied practice diverges from religious ideals. Responding to the need for narrative thick descriptions of lived Buddhist attitudes toward nature, I ethnographically explore a Vietnamese monastery in the United States. There I find multifaceted Buddhist approaches to nature which sometimes disclose disunity between theory and practice. Philosophically and normatively, this monastery embraces eco-centrism through notions of interconnectedness, instructions for meditation, environmental lifestyles, and non-violent ideals. In practice, however, the monastery displays a measure of anthropocentrism in terms of rhetoric which values humans more than the rest of the natural world, human-centered motivations for environmental lifestyles, and limits on non-violence which favor human lives.
