Religion, 'Nature' and Environmental Ethics in Ancient India: Archaeologies of Human: Non-Human Suffering and Well-Being in Early Buddhist and Hindu Contexts
Archaeology as Environmental Humanities; Indian religion and 'nature'; Agriculture, food change and environmental control; Violence and non-violence; Purity and Pollution; Monasteries as gardens
摘要
This paper assesses archaeology’s contribution to debates regarding the ecological focus of early Buddhism and Hinduism and its relevance to global environmentalism. Evidence for long-term human:non-human entanglement, and the socio-economically constructed element of ‘nature’ on which Indic culture supposedly rests, challenges post-colonial tropes of India’s utopian, ‘eco-friendly’ past, whilst also highlighting the potency of individual human:non-human epistemologies for building historically grounded models of Indian environmentalism. For early Buddhism, I mediate between two polarized views: one promoting the idea of ‘eco-dharma’ as a reflection of Buddhism’s alignment with non-violence (ahiṃsā), and the alleviation of suffering (dukkha); a second arguing that early Buddhist traditions have been misappropriated by western environmentalism. I argue that the latter view subscribes to canonical models of passive monks removed from worldly concerns, despite archaeological evidence for socially-engaged monastic landlordism from the late centuries bc. Others cite this evidence only to negate Buddhism’s eco-credentials, thereby overlooking the human:non-human entanglement theme within modern environmental discourse, while the predominant focus on non-human suffering overlooks convergences between modern and ancient ecological ethics and environmental health. Case studies include examples of Buddhist land and water management in central India, set within discussions of human v. non-human-centric frameworks of well-being and suffering, purity and pollution, and broader Indic medico-ecological epistemologies, as possible models for collective responses to environmental stress.
目次
Abstract 517 Introduction 517 Archaeology, religion and environmental ethics 519 Archaeologies of religion and 'nature' in ancient India 521 Purity and pollution: religious v. environmentalist categories of dirt? 523 Ahiṃsā: the ethics of non-injury in Indic environmental discourse 524 Buddhism and ecological ethics 525 Monasteries as gardens: transcendence or control of nature? 526 The Sanchi Survey Project: long-term patterns in the socio-ecological landscape 529 Reservoirs, rice-production and monastic landlordism 531 Conclusion 534 Acknowledgements 536 Disclosure statement 536 Funding 536 Notes on contributor 536 References 536
