Talk: The Power of Nature

It might be better. Was anyone here? Some people here on Wednesday? No video apart from me. Oh great, so it's definitely going to be better. It won't be, it'll just be different. But do what— at some point Enrique will give us, may well give us permission to post it. Yeah, it was very good. And, and then I would encourage you to watch it if, if we, if we are able to put it online. So this partly is inspired by doing the BioBlitz later, which we've wanted to do for a couple of years and haven't quite managed to get the dates to work, which is, uh, when Jane the ecologist is coming to support us to find what's in the garden. And Dave the ecologist has already found some things in the garden, and I found a moth this morning that I'd never seen before. So it's all very exciting. So thinking about Buddhist practice and the natural world, the wild outdoors, some of which I've touched on before, but hopefully some new ideas in here as well. So some of the context of Buddhist— Buddhism has always had outdoor practice in it, and that stems from the Buddha, who spent most of his life practicing outside. Some of the context of the Buddha's life is that he comes from the Shakya tribe, who were originally a nomadic people in and around northern India. And by the time the Buddha was born, they'd become a settled community, and there was some farming that was happening, and they were living in one place. But that was a fairly recent development in that community's history. India at the time was changing quite a lot. There was quite a lot of settling happening and towns growing. And, um, yeah, the, the Buddha's family and community were part of that change. So some of you will have heard the story of the Buddha at the Plowing Festival when he was a child. He falls into this state of meditative bliss spontaneously, just while he's observing the Plowing Festival. He, first of all, he gets distressed at seeing the insects and bugs exposed by the turning of the earth, and then the birds are coming down and taking them. And I guess maybe worms are getting cut in half by the plows. And he feels acutely the sort of distress of the suffering of these living creatures. And he takes himself away, further away, sits down, sits quietly in a cross-legged position, as children do often and spontaneously, has this experience of meditative bliss that many years later he recalls when he's trying to work out his spiritual path. This becomes like a key touchstone in his spiritual journey. But I think something about the new— I wonder if something about the newness of the plowing festival was part of the conditions for that experience. Because when I went to a plowing festival in the center of France, uh, when I was out there on with the Bruce community, it had been going on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. And everybody was very in the culture of this is how civilization operates. We use these machines, we make straight lines. This is how we create agriculture and create food. And our kind of collective memory of being nomadic and being more in harmony with the natural world has been disrupted. It's been lost. We might kind of somewhere have that deep inside of us, but it's not really part of our conscious awareness. And yet this plowing festival, this agriculture, this farming was pretty knew that memory of living in tune with nature was much closer at hand. And I can't help wondering if that was part of what prompted the Buddha's reaction at seeing these insects suffering when the earth was turned over, because he already knew that in his experience— and there were other tribes that hadn't settled this was— there was something jarring potentially about this. As Enrique said on Wednesday about Shinran's life story, look, we don't really know how these people felt. We sort of have a few biographical details and we fill them out with our own sense of what's meaningful and our own imaginations. And the same is true for the Buddha's life story. It wasn't written down until hundreds of years after he lived, by which time some biases would already have crept in. So when I say this is what I imagine, you know, I'm also bringing my own bias and, and I'm kind of imagining, yeah, I'm creating something imaginative, which is meaningful to me. And I think has some important truth to it, regardless of whether it was historically true or not. Anyway, years later, the Buddha left that settled life and went into the jungle, which was pretty common at the time. There was quite a big movement of people, often older people but not exclusively, leaving home to, to go and find a spiritual teacher. And if you wanted to find a spiritual teacher, you went into the forests and the jungles because that was where a lot of them lived. You couldn't like walk 100 yards in the forest without tripping over somebody in an orange robe. But that wasn't the only thing that was happening in India at the time. The other thing that was happening alongside that was the growing popularity and power of the Brahmins, who, who, which were the priestly caste.. And the job of the Brahmins was to, I guess, to hold the temple space and to make offerings on behalf of other people to ensure them a better rebirth. So if I was, if I was like, oh, I don't like, I'm a, you know, I'm a low-caste person, I'm a medium-caste person, or even I'm a high-caste person, but I don't want to go down. The caste ladder in my next lifetime. And even worse, I don't want to become an animal. How can I stop that from happening? I'll pay a lot of money to offer something to the Brahmins, whether I'm bringing a herd of animals to be slaughtered or whatever it is. And this is a spiritual practice that is about control. It's about order. It's about if I put in this amount of offering, I'm going to get this amount of merit back. It's like, it's almost like a technology of rebirth. You put in this to one end and you get your positive results at the other end. And many of the teachers in the, in the jungle would have been were attempting to solve the problem in different ways, and some of them using different technologies like asceticism, yoga, meditation, fasting. But I'm just naming those two different options because what the Buddha chose to do was go into the forest. He didn't choose to take some of his wealth and make a big offering to a Brahmin. And maybe I'm projecting, but I can't help wondering if something of the call of the wild was also stirring in the Buddha. I really enjoy practicing in this room, but I— there's also a power with practicing in wild spaces that is qualitatively different. I'm just— I mentioned this, I don't know if anyone was around when I was talking about this the other day, but when Satya and I were away last week, the different landscapes in different places were very noticeable. In South Shropshire, although it's very farmed, there's particularly in the hedgerows, which are big, and around the footpaths, and in the edges of things, there are still very complex, diverse ecosystems with lots of wildness and different flowers and different insects and different trees. It's very diverse. And then moving into West Wales, where there's a lot of sheep farming in the hills, all of that disappears. And the feel is very different. And what I mean when I say the feel is very different is that I feel very different when I'm in those spaces. When I'm in a complex, diverse, relatively intact ecosystem, actually something in me begins to settle. My embodied experience of myself is different in that place. It's more easier. It's easier for me to notice interconnection, to feel grounded, to have a sense of spaciousness. It's easier to notice the presence of the Buddha. Whereas when I'm on one of those hillsides where there's nothing apart from maybe a monoculture of grass which has been nibbled down to the ground, or in the middle of a town square where there's no trees, the embodied feeling is very different. And the Buddha chose to go into the relatively intact ecosystems of the jungles of northern India. And since that time, monks and nuns have done the same thing. A lot of the teachings that have been preserved are from the monks that chose to live in monasteries, and we don't have so many stories of the people who went out on their own to live in wild places, but we do have a few of those. And what you find is this pattern repeats as Buddhism moves from country to country to country. There's a kind of flourishing of temples and monasteries and communities, settled places, often on just on the edge of towns. And then there are monks and nuns who go further. Away from civilization into the forest. Even in the Buddha's time, there's stories of monks who would just wear a robe like woven out of the bark of particular trees. And I sort of trust that they had a very— I mean, some of them might not have made any spiritual progress, of course, but based on my own experience of being in those places, actually the lessons of impermanence of the Four Noble Truths of interconnection. I said they're all playing out every day right in front of you. And my sense is that, that dwelling in those places, meditating in those places, maybe gives you a depth of experience that is harder to find elsewhere. Having said that, I still live here and, and I enjoy living in a house that's got central heating and Netflix. And okay, I was gonna read you a quote by Buddhaghosha, who was a 5th century Buddhist commentator who was just really describing what I've talked about, the experience of monks and nuns at that time. And it was a little piece of poetry, and I haven't brought it with me, so Maybe I'll tell you later, but it describes the sort of sense of— he doesn't— I don't think he says this exactly, but like your mind becoming like an open sky, you know, and the sense of being rooted to the earth and all those really important things we get from being in those spaces. And in contrast to that, you also get Buddhist monks and nuns who live in monasteries who write about the wild as if it is dangerous and best avoided, and actually we're better over here. And, and even in Buddhism, this— the beginning of this split between order, good, uh, chaos, bad, which is a shame, I think. I was reading about ancient, uh, Greece while we were away in a book about boundaries and borders. They had all these city-states like Athens and so on, and they had a very clear sense of this is where civilization ends. Inside this line is the polis, the civilization, which means the land that belongs to men, not women, not children, not slaves, a particular sort of men. I don't, I wrote down the Greek terms for these things that I wanna talk about, but I don't know that I'm confident to read them at Esketeia, maybe. Anyway, they had a very clear sense of the boundary, whatever the name of it was. And outside of the boundary was associated with the feminine. It was associated with the, wilder gods like Dionysus and Pan, who— where we get the word panic from. It was associated with otherness. Homer said, undivided and uninhabited, where beasts which eat raw flesh roam through shady glens. But in here, once you step this side of the line, you're safe. We're going to build our city out of straight lines and everything's going to be ordered. And what that means is really that a certain group of men will be in control of things. I think control is a lot of what this division is about. We can't control what's out there. It has a life of its own. We can control what's in here, and that makes us feel safe. The Chinese— one of the Chinese characters that means nature means essentially like self-managing things that have a life of their own, that we don't need to interfere. With. And actually, if you're deeply insecure, something that has a life of its own is quite threatening. I want to be able to put things in boxes and make them very neat, and then I'll feel safe. And something that flourishes and changes and shifts of its own accord, that I am not in charge of, maybe feels a bit dangerous. So Anything that wasn't understood, like women, were associated with these wild places. And women would go out and have their own sacred ceremonies in these places where they could be themselves away from the order of the patriarchy that was present in the cities. And young men would go out for initiation rituals, and then they'd come back and take their place among society. So there was some sense of Well, there probably is something important. Like you can feel like there's some draw. We keep having to go back there and then it's like, no, you're not a child anymore. Now you draw a line. Now you take your place and you perpetuate this order, this control, which is about cutting off parts of yourself. It's about leaving things in the shadow. It's the opposite of wholeheartedness and integration. Briefly, in Nick Totton's Wild Therapy, one of the most important things I took from that book was how usually we hold up civilization and the wild as these two opposite things, but when we really examine it, What we discover is that civilization emerges from wildness. Human beings are animals, and we created tools, and then we created towns and cities from what we discovered in the wilderness. And for me, there's something that— there's sort of a relief in this, because the danger with this polarization between, like, wildness bad, civilization good, is that I sit here giving you a talk reacting to that and say, no, no, no, no, wildness good, civilization bad, which causes a different set of problems. You know, there are benefits to order and to, you know, to straight lines and to that way of thinking if they are held lightly and in balance with chaos and complexity and don't involve cutting things off that we don't understand. And this mirrors meditation and spiritual practice. In a practice like, uh, Vipassana meditation, where you're invited to go inside and notice physical sensations in the body, what you're being invited to do is tune into your human wildness. Oh, this is how it is to be a human animal. This is what's present. These are the things that I've been cutting off when I just imagine that I'm like a, a mind without a body that floats through the world. This practice of coming into relationship with ourselves, investigating what's within our own shadow, noticing how Bambu we are, if you like, mirrors the invitation to step across the boundary and go into the wild, and that is meaningful and beneficial thing to do. And I think in ancient India, these lines were less starkly drawn than in ancient Greece. They were more porous. There was more sense of moving in and out of the jungle. Still. But, but you still get some of the— you can still hear echoes of— and, and maybe echoes is the wrong word— you can still sense the beginning of this split that occurs. The other thing, you know, in Greece, like Pan is in the forest, in, in ancient Buddhist texts you get a lot of nature spirits that are in the forest, some of whom are very capricious. They're not all benevolent. And part of, part of what the Buddha encourages his disciples to do if they encounter these is just to be with them, is not to reject them. And we can say the same for our own internal wildness. When I notice my own capriciousness, when I notice my own wayward nature, I might think, oh, I'm not that sort of person, I'm civilized. And then I build a wall in my own mind between those parts of myself and the way that I like to think of myself. And actually the invitation is to make my sense of self bigger, to include all those different aspects, the wild aspects, the capricious aspects. One of the analogies that I, uh, thought of when I was making the notes of this talk is like the difference between looking at a fire, looking at a candle, or just looking at an LED. Candle or an LED on Christmas lights. And they're all quite nice things to do. But I find that when I'm looking at a fire, particularly when I'm outside looking at a fire, there's a sort of settling that happens in my system. And over and over again, I find when my senses are dwelling in complex ecosystems or with complexity, whether it's complex, meaning like unpredictable, unordered, whether it's the sound of the rain, which I can hear from my office because like it's underneath the balcony. You can't, it's not like listening to a drum that is repetitive. It's always a little bit different. And there's something very soothing about that. I think, you know, as human animals, there's something really important about rebalancing ourselves, bringing ourselves into those places. And I guess I, I'll finish by, and as I'm finishing, I'm like, there's not, you know, I'm, I'm just sort of sharing ideas. It's not necessarily sort of a single thread through this talk. It's like, like a narrative arc. A strong beginning, middle, and an end. But the, the end is that I want to tell you about Stephanie Carson's model of meeting wild places, because it ties in with what we're doing here this afternoon, mainly. And I thought, fine, there's something neat about that. She describes that initially we have a sensory experience with a place or a tree or a rock. And that there's a value in that, in allowing ourselves to have this kind of less mediated experience. Just go and sit with the tree, with the cliff, whatever it is. But she also reminds us that we're not just wild bodies. We also have brains and thoughts and analysis. And actually, another way of meeting the tree, the rock, the waterfall is to learn the stories about this place, that the stories that Indigenous people tell, but also the stories that ecologists tell and geologists tell, um, and climate scientists tell, like what has happened in this place, what is the damage that we have as humans have caused to this place? What is resilient about it? How can we meet it with our thinking mind? This is also a really important way of engaging with place. It's not one or the other. Like I was saying earlier, let's, let's have a porous boundary between the wild and the civilized, but holding a place for both of them. Or you might say, for the head and the body, or the head and the heart. And the last stage of Stephanie Kahrs' model is action, that when we are moved both by our embodied response to places and then by hearing the stories of the places, we will tend to want to take compassionate action, and that perhaps there's something wiser about the action that comes out of both of those experiences rather than just out of one or the other. And this really reminded me of what Robin Kimmer Wall is doing in Braided Sweetgrass, where she brings together her training, her training as an ecologist, and her heritage and the teachings of elders of her indigenous community, and tries to bring two different ways of seeing the world together. So this, as I said, this isn't an invitation for us all to go and put on robes of bark and just live in the Malvern Hills until the conservators throw us out, but it is an invitation to think about how we make space for wildness, both our own inner wildness and complexity, and how we allow ourselves to be supported through dwelling in wild or even half-wild spaces like the garden and the hills. Namāmi tabū.