Transcription
Transcribed and shared here under this Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Intro:
Buddhist Geeks: discover the emerging face of Buddhism. Episode 252: Climate Change is Happening on our Watch. In this episode, we speak with Insight Meditation teacher Rob Burbea to discuss the silence in Buddhist circles concerning climate change. Buddhist Geeks is supported largely by the generosity of our listeners. If you like what we're doing, please consider making a one-time or monthly recurring donation by visiting http://buddhistgeeks.com/donate. [Editor's note: as of November 2020, the link is https://www.buddhistgeeks.org/, then click About → Give.]
Rohan: Hello, Buddhist Geeks! This is Rohan Gunatillake, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Rob Burbea, who's skyping in from Devon in the south-west of England. It's a pleasure to have you here today, Rob.
Rob: Thanks, Rohan. It's a pleasure to be here with you as well.
Rohan: Great. Now, I'm especially pleased to be having this conversation, as I think it's a really fresh topic for Buddhist Geeks. Of course we've discussed activism and social engagement before, but what we're going to do today is talk about your passionate interest in the relationship between contemporary Buddhist teaching and practice and climate change, which I think is such an obviously critical issue at the moment. But before we get into that, I know you personally relatively well, having attended a fair few retreats under your guidance, but our wider community may not be so familiar with your name and your voice. So for a number of years, you've been the Resident Teacher at Gaia House, which is the main Insight Meditation centre here in the UK. Perhaps you might want to, Rob, share a little bit about how you ended up there, and what you do at Gaia House.
Rob: Right. I was living in the States for about fifteen years before I came back to England in 2002. I actually began my practice in England, and then moved to the States and was practising on the East Coast with different teachers at CIMC and IMS. Then I moved back, and I spent about three years mostly on retreat, mostly at Gaia House but also other places. And after that, in 2005, I became the Resident Teacher of Gaia House. So yeah, most of my work is now at Gaia House. I travel less and less, and that's partly connected with the topic that we're talking about. I work mostly with the personal retreatants -- people who come for periods, shorter or longer, to work on their own practice, in different directions in practice, and also work retreatants. I also teach retreats at Gaia House and around England.
Rohan: Brilliant. And in recent years, you've been writing and thinking and talking quite a lot about the relationship between Dharma teaching and Dharma values in respect to climate change. Having read quite a few of those pieces and so on, I find a lot of the arguments really striking. In one of your essays, you talk about how you feel that we're falling short of what it's possible for us as a community to manifest.[1] I was wondering whether you might be able to sort of tease open the topic a bit, of what you mean by that.
Rob: Yeah, okay. I think first thing to say is: it's a really huge topic. I think once you start to pull at it a little bit, you realize that the whole topic of climate change, and not just the Dharma response to climate change, but humanity's response to climate change, there's so much connected to it. It's very tempting for us to have a conversation, perhaps, about counting the carbon, for instance. And we could do that. It probably wouldn't be that interesting! [Rohan laughs] But once you start going into it and saying, "Well, why can't we do this? Why don't we change this? Why are we doing things the way we're doing?", you actually realize that it's connected to all kinds of other fundamental assumptions or values or blindness that might be there. This goes, I think, probably for us collectively as a human species, but also for the Dharma community.
I was wondering on the way over what would be a good way to go into this, and I thought just to throw out a couple of ways in, in terms of direction.
Rohan: Sure.
Rob: What if we fast forward 100 years, 200 years from now, and we look back from that vantage point to current society, but also current Dharma, and the place of Dharma within the wider society? Now, if, as many people believe (and I think I do, too), climate change is actually, although it's not pressing every day for us, it's actually the most crucial issue of our time, the most pivotal issue of our time. We don't see that, as I said, every day, but from hindsight, cumulatively, it will.
I mean, what scientists are saying about potential rises in temperature over more than 100 years, this will have enormous, enormous consequences on every aspect of society, of civilization, of human well-being. The suffering that would come out of that will be enormous, and collectively, we don't seem like we're addressing it. And I also feel in the Dharma it doesn't feel like, relative to other topics, that we all -- including myself -- address and engage in and bring up and talk about it. It doesn't seem like it's that alive. So I just wonder, from the perspective of 200 years, 100 years, looking back, that you've got -- here you have Buddhism and the Dharma. We talk about suffering, the end of suffering, awareness, wisdom, etc., and from that perspective of what's going to happen with climate change, I just wonder what people will think, looking back, about what we were thinking about what those words meant.
Rohan: Sure. You feel like if we don't include climate change within those definitions and within that framework, there will be something missing.
Rob: Absolutely. It just strikes me at times as a little odd, and I think from the perspective of the future, it will strike people as very odd that we're talking about suffering, we're talking about ending suffering, we're talking about the causes of suffering, we're talking about seeing through delusion, and yet there's a pervasive delusion that's part of our society at the moment, and a great deal of suffering that is being caused and that will be caused, that it doesn't seem, collectively, as a Dharma community, that we're any further along than anyone else addressing. So we have words. We have Dharma words like 'suffering,' 'end of suffering,' 'awareness' and all that, and yet, somehow they might ring a little hollow in some time.
Rohan: So in a way, I guess there's a lot there, in the sense that the Dharma world could be seen as a bit impotent if it doesn't actively engage in this space.
Rob: I would say, yeah. I mean, that's a strong word, but it's a good word. I would say that: impotent, unaware, deluded, unintelligent. Someone might say, "You guys were asleep at the wheel. What's happening? This was going on. It was the most fundamental issue of the time. It was the issue that was responsible for the most suffering. Humanity knew it was happening. We knew what the possibilities were. It seems very much connected with greed, aversion, and delusion -- certainly greed and delusion. And here was this whole system that was supposed to address greed and delusion, and yet it somehow didn't step up to the plate there."
Rohan: I would say that, generally in the culture, climate change isn't felt as urgently as it clearly is, generally. Why do you think that is? And what might the Dharma be able to help in that regard?
Rob: In the wider culture?
Rohan: Yeah. Well, I'm just wondering, because it is a wider issue as well, not just within Dharma communities.
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is a question, because -- in a way, that relates to what we were just saying -- theoretically, as it's a form of delusion or a form of inertia that pervades society in relation to climate change, you would think that the Dharma would have a lot to offer there. But I'm wondering a little bit if, as Dharma practitioners, most of us are not just actually caught up in the same delusion, and that our Dharma practice and our Dharma vocabulary and our Dharma concepts somehow are not reaching far enough into this, into this area of climate change. They're not penetrating it. So we can talk very much about this delusion or that delusion, about letting go of self, about letting go of greed, but somehow it reaches a certain point and then it kind of peters out. It doesn't go into this area of climate change. That, to me, is absolutely fascinating, completely and utterly fascinating. What is going on? For me, most of this is more of a question than I have a particular answer. And I think, in terms of the wider society, the psychology behind the inertia in relationship to climate change, in terms of denial, disengagement, all this, the psychology is enormously complex. So I don't think there's going to be one thing that's going to flip the situation for everyone.
What I'm wondering, then, is we have these concepts in the Dharma, and I'm wondering whether they need to be rethought a little bit, redefined. If we think, instead of 200 years in the future, 100 years in the future, if we think about now, this time now, the Dharma is kind of taking birth in the West. It's rebirthing, if you like. It's exciting times. And it's in very, very early stages. When the Dharma moved to any other culture, its kind of core principles, its core vocabulary, actually also underwent a transformation of meanings. And I feel that that also needs to happen now, for us in the West. In other words, when we use words like 'suffering,' what do we mean? What are we talking about? And when we use words like 'ending suffering,' what are we talking about? What are we talking about when we say 'delusion'? These basic, very basic concepts, it's so easy to kind of just absorb them as a vocabulary, and they have a limited range of meaning, or we just assume we know what we mean, and somehow we lose a lot of the potential of what they could mean and their ability to have more meaning for us today.
Rohan: In a sense, are you suggesting that we need a new set of practices that include this reflection and this topic?
Rob: Yeah, practices and, as I said, I'm not sure quite what the word is -- reformulation, reconsideration of what basic Dharma ideas mean nowadays. For instance, you know, when the Dharma moved from India to China and Japan, the concepts of nirvāṇa, a lot of the concepts were reshaped by that new culture, or in the meeting with the new culture, and I think something similar needs to go on. That's going to happen through practices, as you suggest, through reflection, through people speaking. At the moment, it doesn't seem like it's a hot enough topic for us in the Dharma world. People come on retreats, etc., or they want to read a book about a certain kind of suffering. It's as if another kind of suffering is not involved. Or awakening is presented as 'this,' but doesn't seem to include something else. So my questions are: what do you think awakening is going to look like? What's your kind of fantasy of that? All Dharma practice is fed by a kind of almost semi-conscious sense of where we're headed towards. Are we including in that more fundamental social issues, climate change, etc.? Is that included in my concept or my vision, my feeling, my fantasy of what it's going to look like when I'm more woken up?
Rohan: I guess the risk of not doing it is that Buddhism plays up to its stereotype of being navel-gazing and introspective, and not participative in the world around it.
Rob: Absolutely. And that will be more charged as an accusation, and more kind of tragic as an accusation, as the level of difficulty and enormous suffering that will probably be involved with climate change, as that rises. I think, as I was saying, people will look back and think, "Well, what was going on? What was happening? And who was addressing it?", and the idea that the Dharma is supposed to be addressing suffering somehow won't seem like a very believable statement on many levels.
Rohan: I'm just thinking this might be good to take away to the thing around the teaching model and the leadership piece, and so leaders leading in the space. Are you a bit wary of going there, or ...?
Rob: No, that's fine. I mean, one of the pieces I wrote that you read was specifically taking the theme within climate change of flying, and how much flying the Dharma seems to involve nowadays: flying to teach, flying to go on retreats, etc., and just kind of wanting to question what is going on with that, whether it's really necessary, and whether, on the whole, the Dharma is contributing to less suffering, given what we know about climate change. So in terms of the leadership, it's like, if I fly a lot to teach, I'm kind of wondering, in the bigger context of what we're talking about, what statement is it making? What statement is my action or non-action making as a Dharmic statement? What am I saying about values, about what's important, about what's not so important, about what awakening looks like? If I'm a teacher, in a way I'm supposed to be modelling that. I'm doing a lot, I'm expressing a lot, not just in the words that I say. And again, how many talks, how many teachings are there that really bring in this subject in a fundamental way that brings it to the heart of people's practice? But I'm also giving out messages in terms of what I do, what I choose, my lifestyle, all that.
Fundamentally, I think all this conversation is about values, rather than about, as I said, counting the carbon. It's about the values, and the values that get communicated, the values that are either supporting an inertia or an inaction or a kind of delusion, propagating more of the delusion about climate change, or the values that can actually come in and there can be a transformation of values, a questioning of our values -- which, to me, is fundamentally what the Dharma is about. The question I really have is: somehow, has the Dharma world gotten kind of caught up in, hijacked, a little bit blindsided by just the flow of the mainstream values, and not quite realizing how we've been caught up in that and how we're actually propagating a problem rather than questioning it? If Dharma is fundamentally about values, then we need to really think comprehensively about what we're saying about values, and how that translates in what we say, what we write, what we do, how we act.
Rohan: Sure. And I've heard you speak before about practice being very much a radical and a revolutionary act. I remember you talking once around how, with revolution, we often do the first part of turning inwards from a life of looking outside of ourselves for happiness and well-being, but then you go further on to say that we need to, as well as looking inwards, we then need to go outwards again into this type of area.[2]
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, if we go back to, for me, what's a very exciting investigation into revisiting fundamental Buddhist concepts, and take something like ethics, for example. The Buddha lived at a certain time, in a certain society, which wasn't a globalized society, and with a certain world-view, and pre-industrial, very limited sort of ramifications on the globe, certainly, of whatever actions people did. So the whole question of ethics has become different now. We no longer are innocent of the ramifications of our actions. Ethics has to be expanded. I don't think it makes that much sense to continue with an ethics that's purely personal in that way, given that we live in a highly connected globalized society now. What I do, what I choose to do, is going to feed into effects far away from me.
Rohan: Sure. So alongside the investigation into our values and the expansion of our ethics to include that, do you think that that will require a structural change in the way that the Dharma is taught? You talked a lot about flying. Outside of the work I do in Buddhism, I work a lot with arts organizations, and I know that you have a very rich history in music yourself. There's a very live conversation now in the arts about internationalism and the whole model of sort of touring orchestras and international festivals and the sustainability of that. But that doesn't seem to be on the agenda in Dharma circles. As different industries, different types of organizations start looking into sustainability in more detail, and do start feeling it, what do you think might be the practical ramifications of that?
Rob: First of all, I'm delighted to hear that. I wasn't quite aware that that conversation is happening in the arts, and that's absolutely fantastic. I think, in a very small way, I'm hoping that we can begin really having seriously the same conversations in the wider Saṅgha, in the Dharma. How it actually transforms, I think the details are secondary. I think we have to, first of all, really agree that it needs to transform. And then the question is, if we can't agree on that, what's happening? What's going on with us in terms of assumptions, in terms of views, in terms of fears, in terms of delusions? What's happening that we can't agree that it's enough of a priority to change something? I'm not sure if this is what you're asking, in terms of how it actually plays out practically, how it might play out practically. Is that what you're asking?
Rohan: Yeah, I'm just trying to imagine what does the future, future Buddhism structures, which is aligned with a less impactful on the environment ...
Rob: Yeah. Well, to me what seems kind of fairly an obvious solution, although not necessarily simple to transition it towards that, would be just simply more local Saṅghas, and teachers living more locally with more Saṅghas that they can plug into and offer to and really develop a rapport with, really know the students, the students know the teacher, really kind of serve people's individual paths in the waking up. And that's already happening. There are places -- even my staying at Gaia House is that, and certainly CIMC, for instance, in Cambridge, Massachusetts is part of that. There are all these kind of Saṅghas everywhere. And now that we have the opportunity for what's possible via the web and electronic media, the actual need for someone to go somewhere is less pressing, I think. I think it could probably be less and less justified, really.
Rohan: But like you say, I totally agree -- the practical ramifications are secondary to the intention, I guess, that has to be really felt. What can we as a community do to really start feeling that need for change? Is it just more conversations like this, a more open discussion around the issues and our blind spots?
Rob: I think so, yeah. Sometimes people say the teachers have to take the lead, but at the moment, we teachers are not taking the lead. It's just not happening. I'm curious why that isn't happening. That, to me, is what's very, very interesting. I think, perhaps, if it came from the Saṅgha, the Saṅgha almost bringing it up to the teachers, asking for more teachings on the subject, bringing it up and saying, "This is affecting my heart. This is causing me confusion ethically. What should I do?", you know, bringing it up as Saṅgha to Saṅgha, Saṅgha to teacher, teacher to student, all this, multiple conversations. But the conversations involved are actually really rich and complex. They're conversations about feelings.
It's even interesting, in terms of climate change, how rare [that] people actually share their feelings about what's happening, and yet, sometimes I know when people do, it touches something very -- there's a lot of feeling there that isn't getting expressed or isn't getting felt. So there's an emotional conversation to have, to be supporting each other in that, enabling that, making that normal, normalizing it, because at the moment it's totally abnormal, even within the Dharma culture, to really bring this up, as I was saying. This is a kind of dukkha. This is a kind of suffering, and it needs to be addressed. But there are certainly practical conversations, and there are these more -- I hesitate to use the word 'conceptual'; that's not really the right word, but kind of really questioning: how are we going to give birth together to the Dharma? What's it going to look like, not just on a practical level, but on the meaning level, of what the Dharma means today in our society?
For example, with ethics, there's this sense: we live in a globalized society, as I was saying before. I can't apply the same kind of ethics. What does it mean about sexuality? We are lay people. I can't simply take Pali Canon Buddhism and try and fit it onto a lay life and the kind of assumptions and ideals and the kind of direction that that's implicitly moving in. It simply won't work. If we take this a little deeper, in terms of the feeling and the kind of assumptions and ideals involved in this, it's quite interesting. If we think about ethics, which is also something that isn't that much talked about within the Dharma, if you think about it a bit more, I wonder if Pali Canon, certainly basic Buddhist ethics, is actually in the service of a kind of simplicity. So, in a way, we keep ethics so that our minds will be less agitated by remorse and by guilt and sort of wondering what people think of us and the ramifications of what we've done. The whole thing is moving towards simplicity.
That movement towards simplicity, obviously, is a beautiful movement, and like everything else, it has a shadow side, so that when I come to open the Dharma towards something like climate change, if I'm addicted and attached to simplicity, and I view the Dharma as needing to be simple because that is what feels Dharmic, that's what feels spiritual is simplicity, I'm going to run into a brick wall with climate change, because (1) it's not a simple topic at all; it's immensely complex, and how it feeds into economic questions, socio-political questions, human rights questions, all this, consumerism, everything. So that's one thing. (2) A second thing about the simplicity, the sort of ideal of simplicity that's implicit in particularly modern Dharma, is that a lot of people come (understandably) to the Dharma because they want to simplify what feels like an overcomplicated life, because there's an agitation, because there's a kind of disturbance. And what's wanted is calmness and a simplicity. And if I'm going to open my mind and open my heart, certainly, to the question of climate change, and where we are as a species, and where we are as a Dharma community, that's going to be agitating. It's going to be troubling to my heart. It's going to stir things up. If I'm attached to simplicity, I won't be able to go there. I won't let myself go there.
This is what I mean. It's like, once you start probing a little bit deeper, you see on all kinds of levels that this calls into question fundamental sort of directions, assumptions, ideals, visions, fantasies of what the Dharma is and where it's going. And these, to me, it's very exciting to question those and really reconsider what they might mean for us today.
Rohan: It's interesting. The more you talked, the more it sort of felt like this topic or this investigation could form the basis of a really full practice.
Rob: I think so, very much, because, as I said, once you start pulling on a thread here, you realize, "Oh, goodness me, it's connected to this, and it's connected to this," and not just things out there in the culture like economics and politics and human rights and all that, but it's actually connected to my own sense of inner direction, my own sense of values, my own sense of what I'm holding up as an ideal. And what I hold up as an ideal has massive, massive ramifications for where my practice goes.
It's interesting. I was at an Engaged Buddhists conference a little while ago, and heard a couple of eminent speakers -- David Loy was one of them, for instance -- and really enjoyed hearing what they said. But what I noticed was that they all shared an assumption. They were all coming from Mahāyāna backgrounds, and it was very lovely. But they all shared an assumption, which I began, as the day went on, to actually really question. And the assumption was that if you practise, and you begin to see the emptiness of self and see through the self, that that will translate as a kind of political engagement, and if that's not happening, it's just that you haven't seen through the self.
I'm just not sure if that's true any more. I just am not sure if that's true. For instance, I think it was David Loy (I could be mistaken), but someone was saying, "At the time of the Buddha in India, there was, because of sponsorship by royalty and the nature of the society, their room for manoeuvre in terms of freedom of speech in addressing social and political issues was severely constrained. They wouldn't have got the support if they started questioning social structures, etc." Now, that may be true, or it may not be true, but nowadays, we don't have that so much. There's no one stopping me or another teacher getting up and really starting to question the way society is, the assumptions of society, the assumptions underpinning consumerism that basically are supporting climate change, etc. And a lot of teachers talk about seeing through the self, etc., and yet it's not really translating as that. So I don't know if you can actually equate, assume that seeing through self leads to caring about this. There's something else going on. That's what makes it so interesting. What is it that makes a person engage or not engage, makes them care or not care? And I think that has to do with what our image is, or, if you like, what we are fed about what the Dharma is, if that makes sense.
Rohan: Sure, yeah, the archetype that we're explicitly or subconsciously ...
Rob: Exactly. So you look at some traditions, and there's a lot of talk about freedom from self, seeing through the self, and yet, in those traditions, there's no archetype about engagement, so there's actually very little engagement. It's not, it doesn't seem to be, in a lot of cases, that seeing through self is enough to cause care about some issues. And then the question is: why not? What's going on? What's happening there? Which, to me, is fascinating. Again, it goes into the question of: we are in the process of shaping the Dharma. I think everyone would agree that we are doing that. There's the meeting of Dharma and psychology in different ways, fascinating. There are all kinds of meetings of Western culture and Dharma. But this is one of them. And we kind of have to think about it a little more carefully in the places where we're blind. And that's not so easy, because obviously it's hard to know where we're blind.
Rohan: Sure, because it's happening on our watch.
Rob: Exactly. And as I said, are people going to look back and say, "You guys were asleep at the wheel"? Here was the biggest, the most fundamental thing going on, and what were you doing? You were looking at this, and trying to bring the Dharma to this and this, and there was something, in a way, more fundamental than all of that that had to do with delusion, that had to do with suffering, that had to do with ending suffering, and where was the response? Where was the consciousness of it?
Rob Burbea, "An Open Letter and Proposal to All Who Are Involved in the Dharma" (1 Apr. 2011), https://www.sanghaseva.org/info/ClimateChange.html, accessed 4 Nov. 2020. ↩︎
Rob Burbea, "The Meditator as Revolutionary" (31 July 2011), https://dharmaseed.org/teacher/210/talk/13850/, accessed 4 Nov. 2020. ↩︎
