What is Ecodharma?
The Buddha's dharma is the brilliant and uniquely transformative teachings that Siddhartha Gautama taught from the wild forests of Northern India to pretty much anyone that would listen. His profound words stewarded and passed down for over two millennia by the deep monastic lineages of Theravada Buddhism, still completely resonate for us today and have the power to transform us at the very deepest level, to depths of freedom and bliss that are hard to grasp. His teachings are all centered around his profound insight into the empty nature of reality and mind, which leads to clear understanding of the nature of suffering and the path of contemplation and practice that leads to the release of suffering.
Buddhadharma is the insight and teachings from any awakened master who deeply contemplates the Buddha’s dharma and sees directly the nature of reality for themselves. All the sutras of Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism speak to and from Buddhadarma by recognizing that reality itself is buddhanature, of the nature of awakening itself and a direct expression of it.
There are newly emerging expressions of Buddhadharma coming into form in this moment of urgent need called Ecodharma, a style of Buddhist teaching that centers more explicitly around the practice of looking at ALL forms of nature, especially ones left more or less intact by human, wild nature, which is a uniquely powerful and beautiful manifestation of the way things are. Let’s not forget that dharma can be translated as “nature” in both the sense of the dynamic living world of the endless permutations of forms and being, as well as the “nature of something” or the way that thing is, its essence. And let’s not forget that the Buddha himself was awakened sitting in the forest under the tree. And so “ecodharma” is in some sense even redundant, but a necessary redundancy to remind us of the centrality of what we have termed “nature” as distinct from “human society,” but which is actually our very selves, for all reality is at one with itself, there is only one “nature,” beyond all words and comprehension, sublime reality itself.
Ecodharma is entirely consistent with the Buddha’s teachings about developing our capacity for direct insight into the nature of reality, but shifts the center of gravity away from exclusively introverted contemplation of the nature of the human mind, opening its senses to the wild living world all around us, which just so happens to include ourselves and our mind as an emergent property of that world. It doesn’t just see impermanence in the arising and passing away of bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts, but in mercurial winds blowing through tree canopy, in the bursting forth of grasses and wildflower and the slow decay of layers upon layer of disintegrating leaf litter, in the endless cycle of traceless transformation. Birth and death and rebirth everywhere, always, but brought out in brilliant display in the seasonal changes of nature.
By bringing our awareness, our loving attention into all expressions of the natural environment, we see directly not only the nature of reality, but we see ourselves woven into it, as deeply belonging to the web of life. The reality of non-self is not a negating into nothingness or any kind of transcendence, it is a liberation of our isolated, disconnected sense of self, haunted by lack and insecurity, into being held a wholeness that is only whole by virtue of letting ourselves go into it, to remember and realize our profound and ultimate interdependence with all of reality, with all of life.
Come learn more about and practice Ecodharma on one of my monthly daylong retreats (every third Sunday in Sonoma County, CA) or by working one-on-one with me.
Cataract Falls, December 28, 2024