Buddhist Faces of Indigenous Knowledge in Highland Asia: Rethinking the Roots of Buddhist Environmentalism

Abstract

This article is written as part of the ongoing multidisciplinary inquiry into how ecologically focused Buddhism is and whether or not the faith-based “Buddhist ecology” and the natural scientifically conceived discipline of ecology—which studies the relation of organisms to their physical environments—communicate well and are mutually complementary with each other. It addresses these questions by linking regionally specific Buddhist traditions with modern Buddhism and Buddhist studies in the West, which are, respectively, known for initiating Buddhist environmentalism in the public sphere and shaping Buddhist ecology as an academic field. Situated in the eastern Himalayan-Tibetan highlands, this article offers a twofold argument. First, many ecological practices in Buddhist societies of Asia originate in pre-Buddhist indigenous ecological knowledges, not in the Buddhist canon. Second, understood either from the Buddhist environmentalist perspective or as an academic field, Buddhist ecology originates in the modern West, not in Asia, as a combined outcome of Western Buddhists’ participation in the greater environmental movement and their creative interpretation of Buddhist canonical texts for the purpose of establishing a relational understanding of ecobiologically conceived lifeworlds. This argument is based on the case studies of long se, or spirit hills, in Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, and of lha-ri, or deity mountains, in the Tibetan Plateau. Both long se and lha-ri are often discerned as a spiritual-environmental basis of Buddhist ecology. While Dai and Tibetan societies are predominantly Buddhist, the cultural customs of long se and lha-ri are pre-Buddhist. Through the comparable cases of human-spirit-land relations among the Dai and the Tibetans, this article concludes that, conceived in the West, Buddhist ecology entails a body of syncretized approaches to the relational entanglements of all life communities. These approaches find their origins mostly in the ecologically repositioned Buddhist soteriology and ethics as well as in the modern scientific environmentalist worldview.

1. Introduction

Since the mid-twentieth century, Buddhist environmentalist engagements around the world have shown a sustained track record in raising local and global awareness of the ecological interdependence between human and nonhuman lifeworlds and between human-built societies and the earth’s natural biosphere (Thich 2021; Kaza and Kraft 2000; Tucker and Williams 1997; Macy 1991; Badiner 1990). The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) and its allies around the world recently applauded Buddhism as a faith that “attaches great importance to wildlife and the protection of the environment on which every being in this world depends for survival” (UNEP and PoWR 2020, p. 53). Likewise, among academics, it is widely recognized that the strengths of contemporary Buddhist environmentalism come from the concept of dependent co-arising (Pali: paticca samuppada; Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada) and the precept-based life ethic Śākyamuni Buddha doctrinally laid down in his time, both of which have been given a modern interpretation since the 1970s (Wirth 2024; Lin 2022; Darlington 2019; Gaerrang 2017; Findly 2002). At the same time, the question of what ecological knowledge is found in the historical Buddha’s teachings remains a perennial inquiry.

We write this article as part of an ongoing multidisciplinary inquiry into just how ecological Buddhism is and whether or not the faith-based claim of “Buddhist ecology” and the natural scientifically conceived discipline of ecology—which studies the relation of organisms to their physical environments—communicate well with one another. We thus ask, “Is Buddhism an ecologically oriented religion”? “Does it embody a religious ecology”? “If so, what are the ecological messages that the biophysically related Buddhist concepts such as samsara (the cycle of birth and death) and impermanence, convey”? “Does contemporary Buddhist environmentalism offer a scientifically- and publicly legible ecology”?

To address these questions, we interlink regionally specific Buddhist traditions with modern Buddhism and Buddhist studies from the West, which are, respectively, known for initiating Buddhist environmentalism in the public sphere and shaping Buddhist ecology as an academic field. Based on our two case studies from the eastern Himalayan-Tibetan highlands, we offer a twofold argument. First, many Buddhist ecological practices in Asia originate in pre-Buddhist ecological knowledge of indigenous societies that were historically converted to Buddhism. In reference to the case studies in this article, the ecological aspect of lived Buddhist practices in the Himalayan-Tibetan region could be described as what we call the “Buddhist faces of indigenous knowledge”. In other words, the Buddhist canon does not offer intentional ecological teachings to address the environmental suffering of the physical earth. Second, the canonical basis of the widely claimed Buddhist ecology in both the academic world and the public sphere originates in the modern West and is creatively expanded through Buddhists’ participation in the greater environmental movement to build its compatibility with the relational understanding of ecobiologically conceived lifeworlds.

This twofold argument is grounded in our studies of lha-ri, or deity mountains, in the Tibetan Plateau, and of long se, or spirit hills, in Dai villages in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, in the far-eastern part of the Himalayas. Both lha-ri and long se are often credited as being part of the spiritual-environmental basis of Buddhist ecology (Pitkin 2020; Salick et al. 2007; Shen et al. 2012; Pei 2010; Zeng 2018). Tibetan and Dai societies are predominantly Buddhist, having, respectively, accepted Vajrayana and Theravada traditions as their national faiths; however, the cultural customs of lha-ri and long se are pre-Buddhist. Through these two comparable cases of human-spirit-land relations among Tibetans and Dai, this article intends to show that indigenous ecological knowledge is experientially based concerning human relations with locally specific environmental flows and nonhuman species. It concludes that, from this regional perspective, the recently conceived Buddhist ecology in the West entails a body of syncretized approaches to the relational entanglements of all life communities. This multistranded syncretization traces its epistemological origins to both modern Buddhist environmental discourse and scientific knowledge of the earth.

The research activities supporting this article were a combination of individual and collaborative projects of the co-authors from 2010 to 2023. Both Smyer Yü and Ma conducted ethnographic fieldwork and historical research in a number of Tibetan and Dai villages, respectively, in Qinghai and Yunnan Provinces, China; however, for this article, Smyer Yü also did fieldwork in Yunnan. Their fieldwork involves participant observation and conversations with villagers. The authors’ collaborative fieldwork and archival research have been carried out since 2018 under a climate-multispecies conservation project in Yunnan (Smyer Yü 2023; Smyer Yü and Ma, forthcoming). The findings about the indigenous knowledge and its Buddhist transformation compelled us to write this article framed in the field of religion and ecology and given a comparative approach to addressing a common pattern of Buddhist reorientation of indigenous ecospiritual cosmologies and customs among Tibetans and Dai. Given the conservation backdrop of this article, we hope the outcome of our co-authorship, in addition to being a scholarly contribution, will be policy-relevant for the UNEP’s faith-driven, knowledge-based, environmental advocacy for achieving sustainability goals.

To note, throughout this article, it is not our intention if Buddhist environmentalism and Buddhist ecology may appear interchangeable because it is common that Buddhist environmentalists and some scholar-activists use the latter without prescribed boundaries separating the academic and the non-academic worlds (Kaza and Kraft 2000; Darlington 1998). By recognizing this objective condition, we treat Buddhist ecology in the academic world as a socially engaged field. We thus request our readers to read the two phrases contextually in this article.

2. Indigenous Meteorological Knowledge in Buddhist Tibet

Tibetan Buddhism is widely applauded as providing a rich ecospiritual foundation to environmental conservation inside and outside the Tibetan Plateau (Woodhouse et al. 2015; Simonds 2023; Allison 2019). As such, Tibetan Buddhism has had a role in preserving the highland’s natural environments, particularly through recourse to the conservation value of the folk custom of revering lha-ri, or deity mountains, as both the bodies of local gods and the gods themselves. In the course of the spread of Buddhism in the Himalayan-Tibetan highlands, the pre-Buddhist, indigenous sense of lha-ri has been largely superseded by or become synonymous with gnas-ri, or Buddhist-sanctioned sacred mountains. Buddhism in this case is proportionally given more credit for the ecological significance of local human stewardship of the deity mountains, particularly in Bhutan and cultural Tibet, inclusive of its three traditional regions U-tsang, Amdo, and Kham, which are currently partitioned into the Tibetan Autonomous Region, Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan of the PRC.

At present, we would like to point out that the idea of gnas-ri, translated as sacred mountain, is more associated with Buddhism than with the human-land history of the Tibetan Plateau (Mathieu 2023; Gutschow et al. 2003; Huber 1999). In Smyer Yü’s earlier research in the Amdo region, reverence for a mountain as gnas-ri is correlated with beliefs that Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche) left his footprints, handprints, or faceprints on the surfaces of rocks and boulders in ancient times. Gnas-ri are also recognized after local Tibetan Buddhist masters took residence in a mountain’s caves for long years of solitary retreat. Given the unique Buddhist history of Tibet, the sacred character of gnas-ri can be understood as territorial charisma spiritually imbued by the presence of historical Dharma masters. In the context of the indigenization of Buddhism, gnas-ri customarily became an encompassing phrase referring to a variety of deity mountains (Smyer Yü 2012, pp. 51–52, 56–62).

Etymologically referring to place, residence, and realm, the word gnas often finds itself in other conjugated Buddhist terms such as mchod-gne (མཆོད་གནས་། offering site), gyab-gne (སྐྱབས་གནས་། place for taking refuge), and shempe-gne (ཁྱིམ་པའི་གནས་། residence of householders as opposed to monastics). In comparison, the use of lha-ri is historically more inclusive of the pre-Buddhist human-deity-land relations and is more comprehensive of both Buddhist and non-Buddhist deities. The phrase thus includes the three basic types of deities, namely btsan (བཙན།), ngyan (གཉན།), and glu (ཀླུ།), respectively, guarding the domains of the sky, the earth, and the underworld. These nomenclatures are found in use among contemporary Bonpos; however, collective memory of these words is alive among contemporary Buddhists, too. This suggests the intertwinement of the pre-Buddhist beliefs with the indigenized form of Buddhism that originated in India.

Among the Buddhist villagers Smyer Yü works with, lha-ri refers variously to bla-ri (བླ་རི། ancestral soul-mountain), gyi-lha (སྐྱེས་ལྷ། birth-god), gyi-sa (སྐྱེས་ས། birthplace), zhedek (གཞི་བདག local deity), dgra-lha (དགྲ་ལྷ། warrior god), and chos skyong srung ma (ཆོས་སྐྱོང་སྲུང་མ། Dharma protectors), to name a few. Lha-ri is inclusive enough to convey the animistic and/or sacred character of a mountain. It is therefore more than reasonable to say that the current-day synonymity or conflation of lha-ri with gnas-ri is one of the outcomes of the imperially sanctioned conversion of people and landscapes in Tibet to Buddhism by King Songtsen Gampo in the seventh century.

The immediately pertinent question is, “What does lha-ri have to do with ecology”, in answer to which we might temporarily bracket off the invisible presence of lha (deities) to gain a clearer picture of the ecological role of ri or mountains. Across the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau, mountains are natural water storages, weather-makers, and sources of local and regional environmental flows, such as clouds, rain, snow, and hail. The geological scale of the Tibetan highlands affords us to see them, together, as a “terrestrial ocean” of fresh water (Smyer Yü 2021, p. 9), which gave birth to the mighty continental rivers millions of years ago. The ecological forces of the mountains thus omnipresently environ the life of human and nonhuman highlanders alike. From the plateau, the environmental flows in the varied forms of water reach the vast lowlands of East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia before joining the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. It is not surprising that natural scientists conclusively find that mountains, worldwide, take up only twenty-two per cent of the earth’s land surface, yet are responsible for the fresh water supply for half of all human societies and support twenty-five per cent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity (Sharma et al. 2019, p. 2). The environmental significance of the Himalayan-Tibetan mountains is undoubtedly planetary.

Tibetans in ancient times might not have been aware of the continentally extensive contributions of their mountains to their fellow human beings in far-away lowlands; however, knowing the mountains that environ local human livelihoods, making sense of both the nourishing and depriving power of the mountains, and attempting to forecast and regulate the meteorological flows from them have naturally been part of human ecological engagements on the Plateau for ages. The arrival of Buddhism was recent in comparison with the place-based, pre-Buddhist ethnohistory of the Tibetan people (Kirkland 1982; Bellezza 2005; Aldenderfer and Moyes 2005). The pre-Buddhist indigenous ecological knowledge came from lived experiences with mountains and moving waters. The indigenization of Buddhism did not phase out the pre-Buddhist ecological knowledges of local environments but gave them a Buddhist appearance.

In Smyer Yü’s fieldwork in a cluster of Tibetan villages known as ngak-sde (སྔགས་སྡེ། tantric yogi villages) in the foothills of several physically connected and genealogically related deity mountains in a riparian area of Machu (the upper reaches of Yellow River) in northeastern Qinghai Province, traditional human relations with the surrounding mountains and the water bodies flowing into Machu are both ecological and spiritual. From the native perspective, the deities’ spiritual forces activate the meteorological occurrences and produce ecological effects. In other words, the invisible power of the deities makes the land ecologically alive. To an outsider’s observation, the liveliness of the local ecological world is the environmentally discernible basis of the human-land/water-deity relations; whereas the spiritual aspect of the relations is expressed through the humans’ religious ritualistic actions as responses to and negotiations with the supernatural forces of the mountain deities who are believed to be the makers of the natural environmental flows affecting human life. From either perspective, the ecological and spiritual entwinements of humans, deities, and the environment are factual in this Tibetan context. The local traditional ecological knowledge is thus both experientially accumulated and spiritually communicated. Although drastic ecological alterations have taken place since the Tibetans were transitioned to the socialist era in the late 1950s, some of the traditional ecospiritual customs have been preserved.

For example, the hail-prevention ritual is an important ecological action undertaken by ngak-pa (tantric yogis) in the villages of Sambha (སཾ་བྷ་སྡེ་བ།), Garjed (དཀར་བརྗིད་སྡེ་བ།), Tsachu Nang (དཀར་བརྗིད་སྡེ་བ།), and Gyam (གཡམ་སྡེ་བ།). The ritual is usually performed in late spring and mid-summer. The village appoints a ngak-pa to lead the hail-prevention activities approximately fifty days before wheat ripens in the fields. The purpose of hail deterrence is to ensure a good harvest by preventing hail storms, which are believed to be the result of human offenses to the mountain deities. The lead ngak-pa is authorized to thwart humans’ offensive behaviors that irritate deities into sending down violent hail storms. The forbidden behaviors during the sanctioned months include weeding, borrowing or moving fire (e.g., coals) from one household to another, quarrels, fights, and having unkempt hair. During these months, if one household’s events involve neighbors, the householder is required to ask for permission from the lead ngak-pa. These prohibitions and restrictions are lifted after the crops have been harvested.

From Smyer Yü’s ethnographic findings, besides policing the social behaviors of his fellow villagers, the lead ngak-pa consults with a pre-Buddhist weather-controlling ritual text known as “The Knack of Storm Prevention” (སེར་བ་སྲུངས་བའི་སྔགས་བཞུགས་སོ། ser-ba-sruangs-bavi-sngags-bzhugs-so). Its authorship and the initial year of publication or circulation are unknown; however, its contents are grounded in the mountain environment. For instance, it lends instructions about how to recognize local meteorological conditions that form hail clouds,

When dragons roar in the east, hail will come from the west and vice versa; when dragons roar in the south, hail will arise from the north and vice versa… When dark clouds lie in the front of the moon, hail will come down at midnight. When dragons roar under the clear sky, it means that demons and ghosts will drum up hail.

The roar of the dragons in the text refers to the piercing sound of strong winds sweeping over the surfaces of the mountains covered by grass, shrubs, forest patches, and/or bare boulders. This locally based meteorological knowledge has inevitably compelled the yogis to stay vigilant to the shifting weather patterns at high points, particularly on the ridgelines that connect several mountain peaks. The lead yogi takes shifts with his fellow yogis to observe the movements of wind and clouds on a ridgeline or a hilltop. What they see and hear on the high points is not necessarily the same as what the ritual text mentions. For example, when dark clouds are present at sunrise, hail usually comes from the west; when the sunrise is covered by red clouds, hail will come from all directions; when it is shrouded by yellowish clouds, hail will appear in the afternoon. Oftentimes, weather patterns are discerned in conjunction with the formation of clouds around the peaks of the deity mountains.

According to the yogis, the moving clouds are not merely meteorological flows but are also the outcomes of the mountain deities’ purposeful weather-making in reciprocation with the local human activities that are either favorable or offensive to them. Hail prevention thus involves a series of ritualized human actions to receive or redirect the clouds sent from the deities. When standing on a high point, the lead yogi and his assisting villagers are not empty-handed. They are equipped with nyingma-korlo (ཉི་མའི་འཁོར་ལོ། sun-wheel), orcha (འུར་ཆ slingshot for herding livestock), and mda (མདའ། bow-arrows) to deter the hail clouds. In many ways, their main task on a ridgeline is to herd clouds with these ritual tools. The function of the sun wheel is to invite the sun back when dark clouds take over the sky above, dispersing hail storms at their formative stage. With the same principle, but directed toward an incoming hail storm, the slingshot fires stones into the cloudy sky, and the bow shoots arrows, too, toward the hail clouds. Both weapons deliver the opposing messages from humans to the deities behind the hail clouds. In real life, these ritual projectiles are physically far from reaching the clouds, but it is their embodied spiritual power that deters the meteorologically harmful actions of the gods.

When the deity-initiated hail clouds look unstoppable, the yogis bring forth the Buddha Dharma as the authoritative power to stop them. The commonly recited verses are:

Oh, all the spirits, we ask you if karmic fruits and fate exist in this world.

If you are true spirits, please discern truths from falsity for us.

When we make mistakes, we see ourselves as ignorant ones.

When you make mistakes, we see you as primordially wise spirits

In the name of the Buddha and Dharma Protectors

We order you to fulfill our wishes

and to protect the sangha of the Buddha.

Do not disobey and betray your bodhisattva vows.

Herein, we see the Buddhist identity of the indigenous mountain deities when the local humans converse with them as nonhuman fellow Buddhists and expect them to respect the Buddha as the sole judge of the moral consequences of making hail storms. In this regard, the ecological role of Buddhism is a source of moral intervention in the imminent or already-occurring conflicts between humans and gods in the meteorological sphere of their shared living space. The pre-Buddhist indigenous ecospiritual knowledge continues to exist with a Buddhist reorientation.

3. The Dai Pre-Buddhist Long se as “Green Reservoir” in Xishuangbanna

Similar to lha-ri in Tibet, long se—“holy hills” or “sacred groves” (Pei 2006; Xu et al. 2005; Zeng 2018)—has a long history tracing back to the pre-Buddhist era of the Dai society in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan. Comparatively, the Buddhist conversion of the Tibetan physical landscapes was more thorough than the Dai counterpart, particularly regarding the nomenclatural transformation and spiritual reorientation of indigenous physical environments. In this section, we would like to unpack the ecospiritual meanings of the Dai “holy hills” by offering two inter-connected arguments. First, the ecological knowledge of the hills is rooted in the Dai indigenous history, not to Theravada Buddhism, which was externally introduced in the seventh century and became widely accepted only in the twelfth century when the Dai established their formal polity known as Meng Le in 1180 CE, recognized in Chinese historical sources as the Kingdom of Chiang Long Golden Palace (Zhang et al. 2014, pp. 38–45; Zhang 2014, p. 51). Second, the local forest-based beliefs are not the sole basis of the ecological sustainability of the “holy hills”. Instead, it is a human-nature positive feedback loop that produces the mutually regenerative benefits.

Our attention to the ecological significance of long se began in 2018 in the course of a conservation project about historical climate change and multispecies relations in Xishuangbanna (Smyer Yü 2023; Ma 2022; Smyer Yü and Ma, forthcoming). However, Ma’s own research in Xishuangbanna began in 2012 for village-based ethnographic work. In particular, she has performed in-depth ethnographic work with folks in Manzhao, Manla, and Manying villages in Menghai County. Based on our individual and collaborative research findings, Long se, a Dai native phrase, is better known as long or long hills in both English and Chinese research publications thanks to Pei Shengji’s internationalization of the “holy hills” studies (Pei 1982, 2010). Pei regards the revered forested hills as places where “the gods reside” and where the wild animals and plants are considered “sacred beings living in the gods’ garden” (Pei 2010, p. 102). Based on this godly association, in both Chinese and English publications, long is thus commonly translated as “holy hills”, “god forests”, and “sacred groves” (Pei 2010; Zeng 2018, 2022). After combing through Pei’s and other scholars’ texts (Pei 1982, 2006, 2010; Huai et al. 2005) in Chinese and English, we think the English use of long comes from Chinese texts, particularly those of Gao (2013), known for his pioneering research in the 1950s–1980s on Dai society and ecological practices. The phrase Gao uses “longlin” or “long-forests”—is a Dai-Chinese hybrid. It is often translated into Chinese as “shenlin,” which means “deity forests” in English. As far as we have discovered, this is the conceptual root of “holy hills” in English publications. Currently, its existing meanings are no longer questioned. However, we think it is essential to revisit how the Dai traditionally named the “holy hills.”

In the native lexicon, Long, an ethno-toponym, means forests or woods, but holds no connotation of “gods”, “spirits”, and/or “holiness”. In actual use, with added suffixes, long can signify concrete places with specific local meanings. The Dai differentiates two types of long, namely long se meng and long se man, respectively referring to “ancestral spirit-hills” and “village spirit hills”, with the former geographically larger in area than the latter. Meng literally means “place”, but its usage mostly refers to an administrative division of the Dai traditional polity Meng Le (1180–1950), which consists of multiple villages. Man means “village”, which is subsumed under meng. Se is a Dai word meaning “spiritual beings” and including human ancestral spirits and local deities. Since Buddhism was introduced to the Dai, se has been used to convey the meaning of the Pāḷi-based word “devatā” or celestial being, inherited from Theravada Buddhism. The current use of se is more Buddhist than indigenous. In the key phrase, the coupling of se with long indicates that the Buddhist reclassification of the native pantheon and ancestral spirits is a cultural effect of the indigenization of Buddhism, similar to the Tibetan case.

To note, the Buddhist use of devatā connotes a moralized cosmology of se, or the place where the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth incessantly repeats itself as the source of all suffering. Understood as samsara, the world of suffering is parsed into six realms of unenlightened beings, including devatā living in the celestial realm unseen to human eyes, still acting like any other sentient being on earth except for their supernatural abilities. In their works, Gaetan Reuse and Lily Zeng argue, “The devatā in Holy Hills are a Buddhist amalgamation of two polytheistic supernatural entities called phi, spirits of local leaders, and lak, guardian spirits of a territory” (Reuse 2010; Zeng 2022). In this Buddhist-leaning reading of long se, the native deities and spirits become synonymous with Buddhist devatā. In our understanding, this assessment makes sense only on the ground of the Buddhist nomenclatural transformation of the indigenous spirit worlds, not a substantive conversion of their pre-Buddhist meanings. We think that a more accurate translation of long se would be “spirit hills” inclusive of both the ancestral souls and local deities residing in the forested hills adjacent to human settlements. Therefore, this article interchangeably uses long se and “spirit hills” to highlight the nuances of the indigenous context.

The pre-Buddhist spiritual purpose and the ecological effects of long se compel us not to overlook the Dai’s forest-based, pre-Buddhist history and ecological know-how that have deeper roots in Xishuangbanna than Buddhism. While the cultural establishment of the Dai Buddhist national identity is visibly shown in the Buddhist temples, values, and ethos that dot the current human settlements, the Theravada tradition, coming from Myanmar, has not been able to achieve the full Buddhist conversion of the indigenous landscapes of Xishuangbanna. We therefore offer a reading of the ecospiritual history of the Dai as a “Two-in-One” religious tradition (Zhao and Long 2020) combining Buddhism and indigenous beliefs, though we see Buddhism as mostly the representation and not the source of the local human ecological knowledge.

The nature-based cultural tradition of long se is not a heritage handed down from one generation to another without changes. Xishuangbanna had over one thousand “spirit hills” before 1958, the year marking the beginning of the socialist modernization in both political and material terms. The total area of these culturally designated sacred hills was over 100,000, or five per cent of Xishuangbanna’s total landmass (Gao 2013, p. 27). Ultimately, three quarters of the spirit hills were destroyed due to the government-led anti-superstition campaign during the Cultural Revolution and by the replacement of the original natural forests with commercial plantings over the last six decades (Pei 2010, p. 103). The surviving quarter of the original forested hills is not necessarily intact and continues to be encroached upon by commercial land use, such as rubber and tea plantations, and tourism (Zeng 2019). In this context, our appreciative approach to the ecological value of the long se tradition is mostly based on the pre-modern history of the Dai, which informs us of a significantly healthier ecological baseline prior to the arrival of the socialist transformation in the late 1950s.

That said, in our field and archival findings, the “holy” or “sacred” status of the spirit hills is distinctly associated with the ancestry of the Dai, who were once forest dwellers, rather than rice farmers situated in a Buddhist cultural environment. The emergence of long se coincided with the Dai people’s sedentarization process in the larger forested, hilly environment and in the numerous riverine valleys of a far-eastern Himalayan region, which formerly also included territories in the borderlands of contemporary Myanmar, Laos, and northern Thailand. In those regions, long se was an inherent part of the transition of Dai ancestors’ modes of subsistence from foraging-hunting to rice farming. While Buddhism may have contributed to the sustainability of the forested hills, with its complex life ethics, since the twelfth century, when it became a widely spread religion in the Dai region, it has very little canonically based ecological knowledge to offer that would be relevant to the physical environment of Xishuangbanna.

Akin to neighboring ethnic groups in the eastern Himalayan region, the early history of the Dai indigeneity, pre-Buddhism, can be understood as “forest-based migratory indigeneity,” referring to the Dai ancestors’ adaptive migration from the “cold forests” on the eastern Tibetan Plateau to the current “hot forests” in Yunnan and Southeast Asia. The added emphasis on forest-based is meant to point out that current Dai cultural customs and ecological knowledge are embodied with “remembered indigeneity” (Smyer Yü 2021, p. 241), historically traced to another forested place in a remote past. This remembered past is well retained in the Dai oral history as geographically covering the Tibetan-Himalayan rivers, all the way up to the eastern Tibetan Plateau (Dao 1996; Hubameng 1981).

The historical transregionality of Dai indigeneity thus connotes not merely geographical shifts but pertains more importantly to a series of elevational, climatic, and ecological transitions from the upper reaches to the lower reaches of Tibetan-Himalayan rivers, from the alpine climate to the tropical rainforest climate, and from sparse to close multispecies proximity. In this sense, migratory indigeneity can also be understood as an adaptive indigeneity moving from one ecological environment to another, both of which are geologically contiguous but ecologically divergent with ecotones in between. According to Dai oral history, their ancestors once lived in the upper reaches of “na-san-mi” or the three parallel rivers Nami-lancang, Nami-saihan, and Nakong, known, respectively, as the Mekong, Jinsha, and Salween Rivers. As they flow through different ethnic regions, each of these rivers has two or more ethnonyms, attesting to the diverse human populations that live with them. For example, the Mekong is called Rdza chu by Tibetans, Lancang by the Chinese (transliterated from the Dai Nami-lancang), and Mae Nam by the Thai and Lao; the Jinsha is called Dri-chu by Tibetans and Changjiang by the Chinese; and the Salween is called Gyalmo ngulchu by Tibetans, Nu by the Chinese, and Mae Nam Salawin by the Thai. The elevational, transregional descent of the rivers is thus also generative of both biodiversity and human diversity along the different riparian environments from the Tibetan Plateau to the foothills, valleys, and plains in Yunnan and Southeast Asia.

The Dai people’s remembered indigeneity, moving with the rivers over time, is a story of migration from the “cold forests” at higher elevations, to the “hot forests” at lower elevations. The “cold forests” were conifer-based and located in the source region of the three transregional rivers on the Tibetan Plateau, while the “hot forests” were the tropical forests in southern Yunnan and the adjacent borderlands of Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. The existential challenges to living in the cold forests of the high mountains were the freezing weather and food insecurity during most of the year, as the folk accounts narrate: “The sky blew cold winds and sent down the white raindrops [snowflakes] as big as tree leaves. Huddled in caves, the elders were hungry and the infants were crying for milk from their mothers. Wild fruits and berries were all picked and eaten, and wild herbs were buried deep under the white rains. Hunger and the cold weather sent us death” (Hubameng 1981, p. 99). In response, many of the Dai forebears followed the rivers downstream for more food sources and warmer locales.

The “hot forests” located in the tropical climate of the far-eastern Himalayan foothills provided the Dai ancestors with an abundance of plant- and animal food sources. The people were successful hunters and gatherers; however, they were also hunted by large carnivores such as tigers and leopards. As they learned to domesticate wild rice, they gradually settled down in the riverine valleys. Both the meng, the large administrative area of their settlements, and the individual units known as man, akin to villages, had designated hills they called long se, to commemorate their ancestral spirits. This is where the Dai established their affective and spiritual relations with the hills. The name long se, thus emphasizing the presence of the human ancestral souls and local deities, recognized the presence of spiritual beings without bodily form that resided in the forested hills and animistically interacted with living human communities. In some ways, treating the spirit hills as the abodes of unenlightened beings (devatā) from the Buddhist perspective, is contrary to and disrespectful of the highly revered cultural status of se for pre-Buddhist Dai people. The spirit hills, as the forested embodiments of ancestral souls, timelessly commemorated the forest-based history of Dai and were related to customary taboos that had been thus naturally enforced around long se to prevent logging and hunting.

Factoring in the long history of Dai’s migratory indigeneity from the “cold forests” to the “hot forests”, we see long se as the mutual embodiments of spiritual and ecological worlds in which humanizing and “naturing” processes concurrently reciprocate with each other. The humanizing aspect is the human ensoulment of the forested hills and is more than simply “personification”. Reciprocally, by turning the word “nature” from a noun to a verb, we highlight the earth’s own ecological agency, which can be tangibly understood as what we call a “geo-commoning” process—it is the earth’s own way of distributing environmental flows and making habitable or inhabitable places (Callicott 2013). The Dai ancestors knew very well how the naturing process of the highland forests and rivers taught them the adaptive knowledge of their ecobiological survival and cultural thriving (Ma 2022, p. 8). Long se, thus, already embodied both the humans’ spiritual intent and nature’s own agency long before the arrival of Buddhism.

In their transition from a foraging-hunting mode of subsistence to one of paddy-rice farming, the Dai ancestors embedded their knowledge of the integrally connected forest-, water-, and land-relations succinctly in many proverbs: “Forest is Father, land is Mother, and the ears of rice between heaven and earth are paramount” recognizes that the forest, as the source of water, and its union with soil ensures the food source of the Dai. While the monsoon of the Indian Ocean brings rain down from the sky in the months of June, July and August, it is the forests that store the fallen water. Contiguous to the greater natural forests, long se become the water stations immediately benefitting the paddy rice fields during the dry months of the year. The forests of long se act as what Gao (2013) called the “green reservoirs” in the 1950s, when he, as the first cadre-scholar sent to Xishuangbanna as a policy researcher, systematically documented the human and natural attributes of long se. He wrote:

Before 1958, Xishuangbanna was fully forested, densely dotted with long se, received abundant rainfall, and was, therefore, rich in water. In the past, there were only streams [from long se to villages] and no artificial water storage; There were only fish ponds, but no dams. The 450,000 mu (30,000 hectares) of the rice fields in the entire [Xishuangbanna] Prefecture relied on the water from the “green reservoirs” complementary to the monsoonal rains.

(Gao 2013, p. 28)

The Dai society that Gao witnessed still retained its pre-Buddhist, indigenous water supply system centered on long se, the spiritualized natural forest hills bridging the Dai farming society with a greater natural environment. According to Gao’s field documentation in the 1950s and 1960s, the Dai’s spiritual attendance to long se ensured the ecological sustainability of the hilly forests as hosts of plant diversity and as microclimate regulators (Liu et al. 1992). The former have been verified and further documented by contemporary scientists (Pei 2006, 2010; Xu et al. 2010). The latter was proven to be true at a high cost after two-thirds of the spirit hills were deforested. This high cost is revealed in rising temperatures and annual droughts due to the loss of forests and the water they held (Zhu et al. 1993).

By factoring in the local ecological history and indigenous human-nature relations, we therefore maintain our argument that the ecological significance of the Dai spirit hills was the outcome of the mutually beneficial interactions between the pre-Buddhist human environmental practices and nature’s own ecological agency. It is widely recognized that Pei (2006) brings the ecospirituality of long se from the Dai society to the forefront of positively valuing indigenous lifeways rooted in the natural environment. Although Pei is not a religious or spiritual ecologist, he has nevertheless played a critical role in affirming the sustainable value of long se as a fine example of indigenous spiritual approaches to balanced human-nature relations. At the same time, we have to caution ourselves not to inadvertently establish a causal logic that would assume the sacred status of long se as the sole basis of the ecological sustainability of the forested hills (Pei 2006; Liu et al. 2001). It is not ecologically possible that only humans play an active role, while nature remains a passive recipient of human environmental care. In our understanding, the ecology and spirituality of long se are mutually embodied. Their positive feedback loop manifested as the environmental sustainability of the Dai society prior to the arrival of Buddhism. The Buddhist influence came fairly late in Dai history, not as a body of ecological knowledge, but as a body of ethics that have found their environmental value only recently.

4. Western Origin of Buddhist Ecology and Environmentalism

Speaking from our case studies and understanding of the canonical absence of conscious, systematic teachings on ecological issues, Buddhist ecology is a recent construction emerging from the Buddhist environmentalism of the modern West, and it is an outcome of individual and organized Buddhist participation in the broader environmentalist discourse and activism. It has spread from Western countries to Asia, not the other way around. Well-stated in the works of Tucker and Williams (1997), Swearer (2001), and Sponsel (2012), Buddhist ecology, as a socially engaged academic field, addresses the 1970s Buddhist-environmentalist claims that Buddhism is a nature-friendly or nature-based religion. This faith-based environmentalism and the accompanying academic field rest on a shared epistemological foundation comprising Buddhist precepts concerning nonviolence, the interpretively expanded Buddhist concept of dependent co-arising (Pali: paticca samuppada; Sanskrit: pratityasamutpada), ecopolitical engagements, and the modern scientific knowledge of the environment as an interdependent living system. The multistranded epistemology of modern Buddhist environmentalism is woven together to confront environmental damage as a collective, more-than-human suffering, rather than karmically determined individual personal suffering.

In the global political realm in which policies attempt to tackle the accelerated mass extinction of nonhuman species and high rates of deforestation (Kolbert 2014; Malhi et al. 2014), the Buddhist precept for both householders and monastics that prohibits killing particularly finds its ecological and ethical relevance in protecting the diverse lifeforms on the earth in the Anthropocene. In this process, the Buddhist canonic notion of sentience no longer only applies to animals and humans but is also being extended to plants, which are doctrinally grouped together as a “borderline” lifeform (Schmithausen 1991; Findly 2002). Influential Buddhist figures from Asia teaching in the West have gone further to bestow sentience upon Planet Earth, with characteristics of a mother figure (Thich 2013, 2021; Dalai Lama 2017; Valdez 2018). They have taken the radical step to broaden the canonic definition of sentience that privileges humans and animals. This unprecedented Buddhist interpretive trend—of seeing sentience in both organisms and inorganic matter—finds its epistemological roots in modern scientific findings and corresponding thoughts, especially those concerning the vegetational life (Meyers 2024; Tucker and Williams 1997), the earth’s self-regulatory geophysiology (Badiner 1990), systems theory (Macy 1991; Upreti 2023), and the mycorrhizal world in the soil (Johnson 2000). Thus, the spread of Buddhism among the environmentally concerned populations of the West is concurrent with the synergetic use of modern scientific theories and worldviews by the founding figures of Buddhist ecology and Buddhist environmentalism in the West, such as Joanna Macy, Stephanie Kaza, Kenneth Krast, and Allan Hunt Badiner. This alliance of modern science and Buddhism has made possible an ecological transformation of Buddha Dharma and Buddhist practices as ecodharma (Loy 2019) and eco-sattvahood (Macy and Johnstone 2012).

For example, Dharma Gaia: A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology, edited by Badiner with a foreword by the Dalai Lama (1990), is representative of the ecological turn. Earth-centered, the Buddhism in the volume emerges as “Green Buddhism” (Abraham 1990, pp. 39–52) and “Gaian Buddhism” (Roberts 1990, pp. 147–54) practiced by the “ecocentric Sangha” (Devall 1990, pp. 155–64). We see this collection of essays by modern (Western) Buddhist notables as a defining text marking the ecological transformation of traditional Buddhist teachings from Asia. In particular, the Gaia hypothesis and systems theory cited by the authors serve as the primary non-Buddhist epistemics that lend support to the environmentalist transformation of the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-origination (paticca samuppada) into a concept of ecological interdependence (Macy 1990, pp. 53–63; Abram 1990, pp. 75–92). Traditionally, this doctrine addresses how the twelve causal links—ignorance, formation, consciousness, name-form, the six sense faculties, contact, sensation, craving, grasping, becoming, rebirth, and old age/death—are regenerative of mental and physical sufferings (Sayadaw 1987; Buddhadasa 2020; Lotus Sutra 2002, p. 56). The Western environmentalist expansion of it fosters a creative dovetailing of Buddhism with modern ecology’s relational understanding of the earth’s diverse ecosystems and with the scientific thoughts of the earth’s self-regulatory geophysiology.

Breaking canonical limits, the alliance of Buddhist environmentalism and modern scientific thought has effectively transformed Buddhism from Asia into an ecological religion. In this union of religion and science, we see scientific thoughts being integrated into or being adopted as new Buddhist hermeneutic approaches to reinterpreting, revamping, and renovating the applicability of the historical Buddha’s teachings in the eco-centrically understood world. The traditional soteriological orientation of Buddhism is thus rerouted from the spiritually conceived Other Shore back to the ecologically experienced This Shore, the world subject to samsara, from which Prince Gotama started his enlightenment journey. This ecological regravitation of Buddhist soteriology is unique in coming from Western Buddhist understanding.

5. Conclusions

Returning to the questions raised in the introduction, our response is that Buddhism did not initiate a religious ecology, and, therefore, it was not an ecologically oriented religion until it found itself participating in the environmental movements and discourses of the West in the 1970s. Buddhist ecology is thus native to the West, not to Asia. As such, modern (generally but not exclusively Western) Buddhist environmentalists have been innovating a scientifically legible, faith-based ecology comparable to ecology as a subdiscipline of biology. Their activist application of the reformed Buddhist concept of interdependence and precept-based life ethics is relevant to the greater public concern about mass extinction and climatic and environmental consequences of industrial extractivism.

The historical era of Śākyamuni Buddha had no known environmental crises comparable to those of the current Anthropocene world. The use of fossil fuels on an industrial scale, beginning in the late eighteenth century, was responsible for initiating this “human era” driven by a variety of modern extractive development activities (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Since then, anthropocenic environmental destruction has hit all nations on earth. By factoring in the context of modern environmental challenges, we would like to underline the fact that our current fossil-fuel era is more than two and a half millennia away from the non-fossil-fuel time of the Buddha. If ancient India had similar environmental issues, we have no doubt that the Buddha would have offered systematic teachings about the state, the cause, and the cessation of environmental suffering.

Thus, it is not surprising that no historical human-induced environmental crises are recorded in the sutras. Instead, the Buddha’s canonical teachings are centered on how to end the personal sufferings of self and others generated by the universally identified three poisons plaguing the sentient world, namely greed, hatred, and ignorance. Among the six realms of the sentient world, the hungry ghost, the animal, and the hell realms are indicative of personal sufferings in the forms of hunger, enslavement, torture, and killing, all as karmic fruits accrued from previous and current lifetimes. This Buddhist cosmology parses samsara as experienced in the sentient world into the moralized and spiritually differentiated realms in terms of who receives what karmic retributions and who takes what visible or invisible form. To say that environmental suffering was not present in the Buddha’s discussions of samsara is not to say that the agriculture-based human societies in ancient South Asia left no environmental impacts; simply, the massively human-led degradation of the earth seen in our modern era had not yet occurred. Thus, it is not unexpected that the Buddhist canon offers no corresponding cases of ecological deterioration and directly relevant teachings on local and global environmental care.

If environmental care was not on the historical Buddha’s teaching agenda, does Buddhism at least hold ecological knowledge that serves as the doctrinal basis of modern Buddhist environmentalism and Buddhist ecology, a subfield of religion and ecology? If we respond to this question from the perspective of ecology as a biological science, we would say “No”. Our response is by no means building a simplistic argument with peer scholars who see Buddhism as a nature-based religion (Kabilsingh 1990) or as an ecospirituality (Sponsel 2012). It is indisputable that Buddhist texts mention varieties of animals and plants. Among them, we point to The Jataka Tales (Francis and Thomas 1916), the birth tales of the Buddha’s previous lifetimes, as a frequently cited text as evidence of Buddhist ecological knowledge. A collection of over five hundred stories of the Buddha as he experienced rebirth as different individual humans and animals in his previous lifetimes, the Jataka is appraised as a text that “celebrates forests, waters, and the Earth’s wild creatures” and lists “a rich variety of wild animals, antelope, elephant, buffalo, deer, yak, lion, rhinoceros, tiger, panther, bear, hyena, otter, hare, and more” (Kabilsingh 1990, pp. 8–9). Yet, in our reading of the tales, the writing genre of the unknown author(s) is similar to that of Aesop’s fables, in which the appearance of the animals is anthropomorphized to deliver moral lessons, more than to purposefully illustrate the ecological webs of local environments in different historical times. The morals we learn from the interactions between the humans and the humanized animal characters in the tales relate to the harms originating from greed, hatred, and ignorance. While we do not think that the anthropomorphized animal figures can serve as evidence of the systematically collected Buddhist ecological knowledge in ancient India, we can nevertheless attempt to reconstruct the historical environment of the Buddha’s time by looking at the different ecological elements in the tales.

The textual presence of the nonhuman beings suggests a multispecies world and points to the local belief that humans and animals can be reborn into each other’s bodily forms. It is deducible that Prince Gotama was born into a world with pre-existing animal and plant species, as well as with the local animist belief. By relationally connecting the dots of the humans and nonhumans in the tales, we see an agricultural society in the Buddha’s time, surrounded by the ecologically healthy natural environments. It grew rice, beans, sesame, and fruit trees. The animals, who frequent the outskirts, the crop fields, or the households of the human world, include monkeys, deer, wolves, boars, foxes, jackals, mice, and crows. Human-grown crops, livestock, and food stocks are primary or supplemental food sources.

Our overall ecological impression of the Jataka and other sutras is that the agricultural society, limited to household-based paddy farming, was not the extractive type with which we moderns are familiar. It rather kept a balanced relationship with nonhuman habitats. The physical environment was healthy and, therefore, did not compel the Buddha to offer a series of ecological teachings. The entire Buddhist canon hosts the Buddha’s teachings spoken to a human audience and centered on the sentient world as samsara, in which sufferings occur. The canonical texts thus do not concern the nonsentient, environmental existences, such as soil, water, and rocks. Modern Western Buddhists took the initiative to implement the ecocentric application of Buddha Dharma, to promote eco-bodhisattvahood as a form of environmental stewardship, and to honor the moral considerability of the earth as a living planet.