This course introduces the East Asian religious traditions of Confucianism, Daoism and East Asian Buddhism in relation to the emerging field of religion and ecology. This overview course identifies developments in the traditions that highlight their ecological implications into the contemporary period. In particular, it relates religious concepts, textual analysis, ritual activities, and institutional formations within the traditions to engaged, on-the-ground environmental projects. It investigates the symbolic and lived expressions in religious ethics, and practices that can be defined as religious ecologies. Similarly, it identifies narratives in Confucianism, Daoism, and East Asian Buddhism that orient humans to the cosmos, namely, religious cosmologies. This interrelationship of narratives and religious environmentalism provides pathways into the study of religion and ecology. At present the rapid modernization of East Asia is causing extreme environmental problems.
This course will investigate Asian religions in relation to this ecological crisis. Both the problems and promise of religions are acknowledged. Religions are now widely seen as significant social, intellectual, and spiritual forces that both shape and are shaped by cultural worldviews. Moreover, religions are containers of symbolic language that often evoke nature’s processes and reflect nature’s rhythms. The multiform roles of religions, then, provide historical sources for reflection upon human behavior guided by values embedded in individual and social bodies, projected onto ecosystems, and molded into cosmological narratives.
Required Texts:
Online Journal / Daedalus
Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, eds., “Religion and Ecology: Can the Climate Change?” Daedalus, Fall 2001.
(https://www.amacad.org/content/publications/publication.aspx?d=845).
Encyclopedia of Religion online articles:
1) on Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism;
2) on Confucianism and Ecology, Daoism and Ecology, Buddhism and Ecology
Selected articles from:
Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Berthrong, eds., Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, 1998.
Daoism and Ecology: Ways Within a Cosmic Landscape. N.J.Giraradot, James Miller, and Liu Xiaogan, eds., Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, 2001.
Buddhism and Ecology: The Intersection of Dharma and Deeds. Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Williams, eds., Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions, 1998.
Thich Nhat Hanh, Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. Parallax Press, 2009.
Background Readings for East Asian Religions:
John Esposito, Darrell Fasching, Todd Lewis, eds, World Religions Today. Oxford, 2013.
Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds., Confucian Spirituality 2 vols. (Crossroads, 2003-2004)
Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism (Cambridge University, 2000)
James Miller, Daoism: A Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003)
Livia Kohn, Daoism and Chinese Culture (Cambridge: Three Pines Press, 2001).
Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
Ken Kraft and Stephanie Kaza, eds., Dharma Rain (Shambala, 2000)
Stephanie Kaza, ed., Hooked: Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume (Shambala, 2005)
Suggested Primary Texts:
Wm. Theodore deBary, ed. Sources of Chinese Tradition (Columbia University Press, 2003)
Wing-tsit Chan, trans., Source Book of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, 1963)
Wm. Theodore deBary, ed. The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan (Random House, 1969)