The Climate Crisis as the Call for Spiritual Awakening

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

Grumbling about the weather is something that we humans have been doing for a long time as many human activities depend on weather conditions, including farming, fishing and logging. We know very well how farmers pray for rain as the source of water for their crops. On the other hand, there are people who become impatient about rainy weather lasting for three days, as Benjamin Franklin noted in his Poor Richard’s Almanac in June 1733: “After three days men grow weary, of a wench, a guest, and weather rainy.”

In the geographical areas where there is the rainy season lasting more than three days—for weeks, even for months in some places—people have learned to adjust their living to take advantage of it—like farmers who plant their rice ahead of the monsoon season and Buddhist practitioners who go into the rains retreat. While people expect the rainy weather to last for a long time during the rainy season, they certainly would not want to see rain becoming too heavy or lasting too long. People also would not want to see the rainy weather occurring outside of the normal rainy season.

What is worrisome about the weather these days is that it has become too erratic and too extreme, depriving people of the opportunity to conduct their normal activities, whether farming, fishing or any sort of outdoor events. While meteorologists around the world provide us a reliable and timely weather forecast every day and at all times, knowing about the weather condition does not prevent us from becoming victims of extreme weather such as hurricanes, floods, and wild fires.

As a matter of fact, incidents of extreme weather seem to be happening more often and becoming severer in recent years. The heat wave, a yearly event in American states like California and Nevada, expanded this year to Canada from late-June through mid-July, with the highest temperature reaching 49.6℃ in British Columbia. In August, the rain clouds that are normally observed during the rainy season of June covered the western region of Japan for more than a week, producing the weather phenomenon known as “training” that is known to cause heavy rains, thunder storms, and flash floods. Prefectures in the Kyushu region were hit especially hard by this late rainy season, with people losing their homes to floods and landslides, not to mention loved ones.

“Everybody talks about weather, but nobody does anything about it” is a statement attributed to Mark Twain. It is certainly incumbent on us to disprove Mark Twain, who made this statement back in the nineteenth century. What can we do about these extreme weathers, then? Daily news about the casualties of extreme weather around the world should be a wake-up call for all of us to start doing something about the weather, not just grumbling about it.

International organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are calling us to action, for extreme weather events happening in the world today are symptoms of the climate crisis, which we humans have a lot to do with. Scientists working for other research and academic institutions are also telling us that the climate crisis today is mostly man-made in that the way we have been conducting our living with little regard for the environment is responsible for such climate changes as air pollution, fresh water depletion, rising sea levels, and top soil erosion.

What is behind the climate crisis that we face in the world today if we humans have a lot to do with it, if it is mostly man-made? It is the view of the world that has guided our thoughts and actions for the last couple of centuries. As Fernand Braudel, a French historian known for his work on civilization and capitalism, points out in his A History of Civilizations (1993), “In every period, a certain view of the world, a collective mentality, dominates the whole mass of society. Dictating a society’s attitudes, guiding its choice, confirming its prejudices and directing its actions, this is very much a fact of civilization.” What has been behind our collective mentality, dictating our attitudes, guiding our choices, confirming our prejudices and directing our actions for the last couple of centuries is the view of the world that sees the natural environment as the storehouse of resources that can be exploited for the production of goods and services to increase our material standard of living.

To the extent that the view of the world that has guided industrial civilization is behind it, the climate crisis is the spiritual crisis as well. The climate crisis is the spiritual crisis because there is inner weather as well as the outer weather. Recall what John Burroughs, an American naturalist, said about the weather in his 1877 essay titled Is it going to rain?: “I was born with a chronic anxiety about the weather.” John Burroughs craved for rain sometimes because, for an essayist like him, “rain is necessary to the mind as to vegetation”, as he put it, and his thoughts became thirsty without moisture. Recall also what Robert Frost, an American poet, said about the weather in his 1928 poem, “Tree at My Window”: That day she puts out our heads together, / Fate had her imagination about her, / Your head so much concerned with outer, / Mine with inner, weather.

What is needed today is for all of us to re-examine what the world around us is like and what our relationship to that world ought to be. This is the reason why we need to listen to what spiritual leaders such as Thich Nhat Hanh (in his 2008 book The World We Have) and the Dalai Lama (in his 2020 book Our Only Home) have to say on the climate crisis. What they have to say, as is to be expected, is the need to embrace the Buddhist view of the world. What they are advocating can also be called the ecological, or systems, view of the world, which sees the natural environment not as something separate from us, but as the evolving web of interdependence among all the living and non-living systems. Only when we wake to the reality of delicate balance among causes and conditions that link these systems to one another can our thoughts and actions be directed towards preventing the climate crisis from escalating into a real catastrophe for human civilization.

Silence in Zen Practice: From Noble Silence to Illuminating Silence

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

What was in the beginning? “In the beginning was the Word,” would be the statement that immediately comes to our mind in the case of Christianity, as these words open the Gospel According to St. John. In the case of Islam, the corresponding statement would be: “In the beginning was the Voice,” for it was the voice of Gabriel that Muhammad heard on the Night of Power, urging him to “Iqraa (Recite)!”

What was in the beginning in the case of Buddhism? We might say, “In the beginning was the Silence,” recalling how the Buddha accomplished Enlightenment while sitting in silence under a Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya. The statement, “In the beginning was the Silence,” applies more specifically to Zen Buddhism, for, according to the Chinese Chan tradition, Zen Buddhism started with Mahakasyapa’s silent smile of understanding when the Buddha on one occasion, instead of using words, silently held up a lotus flower to begin his discourse.

With such beginning, it is not surprising that silence has come to play an important role in Buddhism, especially in Zen practice. Keeping silence is recommended not just while we are sitting in meditation but also while we are engaged in other types of daily activities such as eating, washing, standing, walking, and lying down. Silence we keep during our daily activities is known as “noble silence,” which, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, is “conscious, intentional quiet.” (Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise, 2015, p.81) By keeping noble silence while we are engaged in these daily activities, we are, the Buddha tells us, trying to calm our thoughts, which is needed if we are to reach enlightenment: “One who, whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, has calmed his thoughts and delights in the stilling of thought: a bhikkhu such as this can reach the highest enlightenment.” (Anguttara Nikaya IV.11)

Calming our thoughts to take delight in the stilling of thought is not an easy task for us today, as we are living in the world full of noise, not just the noise around us but also the noise inside of us. Since we have little control over the noise around us, our practice of silence must begin with stilling the noise inside of us, as Thich Nhat Hanh recommends us to do: “When you’ve been able to still all the noise inside of you, when you’ve been able to establish silence, a thundering silence, in you, you begin to hear the deepest kind of calling from within yourself.” (Silence, p.12) By stilling the noise inside of us, we will begin to hear the inner voice prompting us to find answers to such questions as who we are, why we are here, and what we are going to do with our life. Since Zen does not rely on letters and words for transmission of the Dhamma, it is not in the suttas that we will find answers to these questions. We will begin to see the true nature of reality in the world around us only when we are able to recover silence within us by stilling the noise inside of us.

When we are able to recover silence within us, we will begin to enjoy listening to a sound as well: “You can just hear a sound, and listen deeply, and enjoy that sound. There is peace and joy in your listening, and your silence is an empowered silence. That kind of silence is dynamic and constructive. It’s not he kind of silence that represses you. In Buddhism we call this kind of silence thundering silence.” (Silence, p. 80)

Here again, Thich Nhat Hanh refers to the term: “thundering silence.” We all know that thunder is not silent. If so, what is this “thundering silence”? Most of us tend to treat it as an oxymoron, or a rhetorical device that prompts us to gain insight into some phenomenon by combining two contradictory terms. As a matter of fact, Thich Nhat Hanh seems to find no contradiction in the expression, “The Sound of Silence,” which Paul Simon used as the title of his 1964 song, when he says: “Silence is often described as the absence of sound, yet it’s also a very powerful sound.” (Silence, p.8)

In the context of Zen practice, “thundering silence” could be treated as a koan, which is employed to guide us towards enlightenment. Reflecting on a koan, as we all know, does not mean to figure out its meaning through logical reasoning. Rather, it means to employ the kind of reflection called prajna, which will illuminate the true nature of reality. By reflecting on thundering silence while listening to the sound of a bell, or the chirping of a bird, we will be led into the mental state which Master Sheng Yen calls “silent illumination”: “Silence is samadhi, and illumination is prajna. When samadhi and prajna are not two separate things, this is silent illumination.” (Attaining the Way: A Guide to the Practice of Chan Buddhism, 2006, p.126) By stilling the noise inside of us through Zen practice of noble silence and thundering silence, we will thus be able to reach the highest enlightenment the Buddha teaches us we can, for the silence we find by calming our thoughts is “illuminating silence.”