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 were practiced, stewarded, and passed down for over two millennia by the deep monastic lineages of Theravada Buddhism. The Dharma, consisting of many teachings all centered around the Four Noble Truths, still resonate 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 point us toward a 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 wisdom that arises directly from the primordial source of awakened consciousness itself, often called the Tathagatagarbha (Buddha-womb, Buddha-matrix). It can be known and transmitted 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 express the Buddhadharma by recognizing that reality itself is an expression of Buddha-nature. So the historical Buddha’s original teachings, his Dharma, has continued to be elaborated and expanded authentically in the subsequent movements that arose as Buddhist spread through Asia, into China, Japan, and eventually to the west.

There is a newly emerging expression of Buddhadharma coming into form in this moment of urgent ecological crisis called “Ecodharma,” a style of Buddhist teaching that centers more explicitly around the practice of contemplating the natural environment, which is a uniquely powerful and beautiful manifestation of the Dharma, of Buddha-nature. Many traditions, especially Chinese Chan Buddhist, which was highly influenced by native Taoism, already had a deliberate focus on nature as expressions of the Dharma, but this new form of Ecodharma makes that focus not only central to its teachings, but also to its field of practice, as the realm that deserves and needs our attention, compassion, and action. 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 thus “eco” is always already “dharma” (nature is always an expression of the nature of things) and “dharma” is always already “eco” (the nature of things is directly expressed in what we call nature). And let’s not forget that the Buddha himself was awakened sitting in the forest under the tree. So “Ecodharma” is in some sense redundant, but a necessary redundancy needed in this moment in time, a skillful clarification and emphasis to remind us of the centrality of what we have termed “nature” as distinct from “human society,” but which in reality is actually our very selves. For all reality is in its essence 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 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 in springtime, and the slow decay of layers upon layer of disintegrating leaf litter, all things in an endless cycle of transformation. Birth and death and rebirth everywhere, always, but brought out in brilliant display in the seasonal and daily 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 negation into nothingness or a kind of transcendence beyond the self, it is a liberation of our isolated, disconnected sense of self, haunted by lack and insecurity, into being held by a wholeness that much greater than us. We find our own wholeness paradoxically by letting ourselves go into this greater wholeness, by remembering and realizing our profound and ultimate interdependence with all of reality, with all of life.

Learn more about Ecodharma on one of my monthly daylong retreats.

Cataract Falls, December 28, 2024