By Maxwell Wilkens
The Chinese Buddhist community has become a global leader in grappling with climate change, says Venerable Yifa, founder of a Buddhist learning program for United States college students called the Woodenfish Foundation.
“If you search about Buddhism and climate change, you will find out that everybody talks about it,” Venerable Yifa told a UC Santa Barbara audience at a lecture last week. “You will find a lot of Buddhist activists working on these issues.”
Venerable Yifa, a religious scholar and former Dean of the University of the West, spotlighted Buddhist organizations that help the environment through recycling and education, and suggested principles of Buddhism – like vegetarianism and the rejection of material desire – that can be used to combat climate change.
The event was sponsored by the East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies department, and moderated by department chair Mayfair Yang. The event was also co-sponsored by the East Asia Center, the Center for Taiwan Studies, and the Dalai Lama Endowment.
Venerable Yifa, founder of a Buddhist learning program called ‘The Woodenfish Foundation,’ highlighted Buddhist organizations and practices that protect the environment.
People often mistakenly view Buddhism as irrelevant to environmental issues, thinking it is concerned strictly with spiritual matters. But if religious leaders are educated, Buddhist organizations can spearhead real change, Venerable Yifa said. The Taiwan-based, Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation operates over 5,600 recycling plants, and Venerable Yifa will lead a conference later this year to talk about strategies for globalizing their efforts.
Meanwhile, the Taiwanese Dharma Drum Mountain foundation educates the public about traditional Buddhist principles, suggesting that people who protect their minds from greed, hatred, and delusion will leave less of a negative impact on the world around them by consuming less. The organization is also working to virtualize Buddhist rituals, such as lighting paper money on fire, that are potentially dangerous to the environment.
The ‘life releasing’ ritual, where Buddhists purchase animals being sold as food and release them into the wild, can introduce invasive species into ecosystems.
Venerable Yifa said that many basic Buddhist practices are beneficial to the environment, such as promoting vegetarianism, which scientists argue is the biggest single mitigator against climate change, since many animals used for food release enormous amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
Followers of Buddhism also try to rid themselves of material desire. “Rich people have a lavish life, they have a personal jet, and all these kinds of entertainment and traveling create greenhouse gas,” she said. More modest ways of life reduce this footprint.
But “there are some practices and rituals that, on the contrary, can be very harmful to the environment,” Venerable Yifa said. In a ritual known as ‘life releasing,’ Buddhists purchase animals that are sold as food and release them into the wild. Venerable Yifa warned that these saved creatures often wreak havoc on the ecosystems where they are introduced. In 2015, a Buddhist couple released invasive American lobsters and Dungeness crabs into the Brighton Coast of the United Kingdom, which gravely threatened the native marine species.
Still, Venerable Yifa said that Buddhism remains a powerful force of leadership for protecting the environment. “The religious world is a very powerful community, but we have to train leaders to have the right understanding and the right training so they can affect their congregations.”
Maxwell Wilkens is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in Communication and Music Studies. He is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.