Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

While traditions of Eastern thought have found spirituality in both nature and man, major traditions of Western thought have treated spirituality as something that is separate from the physical world. Not only has man been made separate from all the other things in nature, man himself has been made into a being whose spirit is separate from his body. The clearest expression of this idea is found in the words of the Apostle Paul: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary to the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would” (Galatians, 5:17). This idea that spirit and body are separate entities would evolve into the main tenet of Judeo-Christian thought, although the Judeo-Christian tradition has had its share of mystics, like St. Francis of Assisi, who proclaimed the basic oneness of man and nature. It is indeed a somewhat vulgarized version of the Judeo-Christian tradition that has been responsible for transforming nature, as some historians such as Lynn White pointed out, into an entity that needs to be managed and controlled by human beings.¹

The scientific tradition of the West, which began with Thales, has also perpetuated the dualistic view of mind and body found in the mainstream Judeo-Christian thought. The famous statement that is ascribed to him, “Everything is made up of water,” was Thales’ answer to the question: “What is the world made of?” While it is not clear what Thales exactly meant by “water”, Thales’ attempt was significant for at least two reasons: First, his was an attempt to develop a “material” explanation of the world, as opposed to a “spiritual” explanation which looks for some sort of animistic spirits behind material phenomena. His was also an attempt to understand the world by the power of human reasoning and not by divine inspiration. As such, it was a clear expression of the idea that the world is comprehensible to the human mind, that the world is an intelligent entity and not some kind of mysterious entity. It was Descartes who would reformulate this idea as the laws of scientific inquiry, thus becoming a pioneer in the development of modern science.

The fact that Paul the apostle and Descartes the scientist expressed similar ideas attests to the dominance of the mind-body duality in the West. As a matter of fact, the West had to wait until the eighteenth century before nature was turned into an object of spiritual experience in the hands of landscape painters and Romantic poets. The rise of worship of nature in the eighteenth century, as Kenneth Clark points out, had to do with the decline of the influence of Christianity: “For almost a thousand years the chief creative force in western civilisation was Christianity. Then, in about 1725, it suddenly declined and in intellectual society practically disappeared. People couldn’t get on without a belief in something outside themselves, and during the next hundred years they concocted a new belief which, however irrational it may seem to us, has added a great deal to our civilisation: a belief in the divinity of nature”.²

A belief in the divinity of nature was turned into a world view in the hands of Romantic painters and poets such as Gainsborough, Constable, Turner, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth in England and Rousseau, Schiller and Goethe on the Continent. What these Romantic artists and thinkers realized was that nature—and everything in it—is spirituality itself. Wordsworth captures most beautifully the basic oneness of nature and everything in it in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”, in which he speaks about a “presence”: Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,/ And the round ocean and the living air,/ And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

While Romantic artists and thinkers were developing a worship of nature, eighteenth-century scientists were increasingly turning their attention from stars and planets to plants and animals in the natural environment. One example of this heightened interest in nature was Linnaeus who coined the term “natural economy” to describe the natural world as a vast mechanism containing plants and animals performing their specific functions based on the principle of specialization which was not unlike Adam Smith’s “division of labor”. From this, it was only a matter of time before Darwin reduced man to a mere species that ekes out its existence in nature in its struggle for life along with all other species. It was only a natural progression of ideas that the science of “ecology” would come into being in the nineteenth century, the term introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866.

It was, however, in the 1960s that the scientific community in general started to embrace an ecological view of the world intuitively grasped by Romantic artists and thinkers, and intellectually expounded by these pioneering biologists and ecologists. It is easy to explain this general lack of interest in ecology until the 1960s because it was only then that people in the West were confronted with vivid evidence of the ecological degradation brought about by their pursuit of economic progress. Rachel Carson was arguably the first scientist who recognized the fundamental defect in the world view of Western science that had led to the degradation of the natural environment and explicitly stated the need for a paradigm shift in science: “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man”.³ Carson, with her pioneering insight, thus ushered in the age of ecological awareness not only by the scientific community but also by the general public.

In the meantime, the science of psychology, which saw its birth at the turn of the twentieth century, was responsible for bringing spirituality into the realm of scientific inquiry by probing the depth of the human psyche. Jung, in particular, clearly recognized that the traditional Western conception of self was the chief reason why nature and spirituality had been treated as separate entities, instead of treating them in what he termed “psychic reality”⁴.

The original oneness in psychic reality, which Jung points out, would later be taken up again by the proponents of the philosophy of Deep Ecology who developed the concept of the “ecological self”. Although mention should be made of the writings of Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and Alan Watts for their influence in the formation of the philosophy of Deep Ecology, it was Arne Naess who gave the clearest expression of Deep Ecology. In fact, Naess sees in the ecological self hope for a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic which is to be found in Eastern thought: “If reality is as it is experienced by the ecological self, our behavior naturally and beautifully follows strict norms of environmental ethics”⁵ With the emergence of Deep Ecology, with its explicit recognition of spirituality that we share with all other things in nature, the traditions of Eastern and Western thought finally began to converge, ushering in the age of environmental concern and movement that we observe in the world today.

1. White, Lynn, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis”, Science 155 (10), March 1967.
2. Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation, New York: Anchor Books, 1969, p. 269.
3. Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962, p. 297.
4. See, for example, Jung, Carl G., Psychology and Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
5. Naess, in Sessions, Sessions, George (ed.), Deep Ecology for the 21^st Century, Boston: Shambhala, 1995, p. 236.

Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

The conception of the universe, or nature, in the tradition of Eastern thought is that of a self-governing web of relationships whose order comes about not by the transcendent God but by spontaneous cooperation among all things in it. Although not created by God, nature is regarded as divine and sacred and, hence, needs to be revered by humans.

In Hindu thought, especially in the early Vedic period when the universe was seen as being controlled by the devas, divinity was a natural part of this world and was considered to exist in mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, and plants. Natural forces—and natural things, including animals as represented by the sacred cow—were regarded as manifestations of the divine law called rita. In short, nature was sacred in itself. Sacred places—mountains, rivers, and so on—were called tirthas, or “crossings”. These places are still revered today as places where people can cross over from the mundane concerns of life to the transcendent realms of the divine.

The Brahmana period, which saw the rise of the Brahmin class as the mediator between man and nature, and the subsequent Upanishad period brought in a slight variation in the original theme of man-nature continuity in Hindu thought. Man and nature are regarded as one in that the innermost self or soul (Atman) is the same as the universal soul (Brahman), for Brahman is the ultimate reality that underlies all existence and animates all living beings. Spiritual salvation called moksa, or “liberation”, is possible, as is discussed the Upanishads, only when we manage to find unity between Atman and Brahman.

Buddhism inherited the theme of unity of man and nature which Hinduism had developed. As a matter of fact, the Buddha went a step further when he denounced the idea of the individual human being having a distinct and separate self as an illusion: “Thy nature is not constituted by the matter of which the body consists, but by the sankharas, the forms of the body, of sensations, of thoughts. The person is the combination of the sankharas”¹.

Our self, like all other things in nature, is a sankhara, a conditioned entity, which is subject to change as nature itself is in a state of constant change. And in this fundamental sameness of all things in nature lies the root of spirituality in Buddhist thought. The idea that all things in nature are fundamentally the same was of central importance in the formation of the Mahayana tradition. In the Tendai school of Buddhism in Japan, for example, all things in nature were regarded as fundamentally the same because they all possessed Buddha-nature, namely, the spirituality that is needed for enlightenment. And Kukai, the founder of the Shingon school of Buddhism in Japan, was quite explicit in expounding the universality of Buddha-nature. According to his view, even trees and plants are endowed with Buddha-nature because they, along with all other things in nature, are ontologically one with the ultimate reality, which he called the Dharmakaya.²

Lao Tzu, revered as the “old master” in the history of Chinese thought, was quite explicit in his declaration of the sanctity of nature: “For those who would like to take control of the world and act on it—I see that with this they simply will not succeed. The world is a sacred vessel; It is not something that can be acted upon”³.

Nature is sacred, according to Lao Tzu, not because of the presence of a supreme and transcending creator behind it. As a matter of fact, nature, or tzu-jan in Chinese, literally means “spontaneous self-generating process”. Nature is sacred because this spontaneous self-generating process, which Lao Tzu calls Tao, ensures, if not intervened by humans, justice and providence to all things in it.

Of the Taoists, Chuang Tzu is best known for his explicit concern over the issue of the relationship between man and nature. What is important, according to Chuang Tzu, is to recognize the unity of all things: “The universe is the unity of all things. If one recognizes his identity with this unity, then the parts of his body mean no more to him than so much dirt, and death and life, end and beginning, disturb his tranquility no more than the succession of day and night”⁴. How do we go about realizing this unity for ourselves? Chuang-tzu’s advice for us is to completely immerse ourselves in this “spontaneous self-generating process”. In calling us to go “back to nature”, Chuang Tzu reminds us of Rousseau who would make a similar call in eighteenth-century Europe.

Like other traditions in Eastern thought, Taoism, too, suggests meditation as one way of accomplishing unity with nature. In this process of unification, we are asked to get rid of all dichotomous notions—such as those of good and bad, giver and receiver, and subject and object—until we become aware of the unitary origin of all phenomena, namely, Tao. Later on, when Taoism was converted into a religion, Taoists developed rituals, regarding them as effective means of harmonizing human life with the forces of the universe, for humans and the universe share the three life forces—shen (spirit), qi (breath), and jing (vital essence)⁵.

Confucius himself had very little to say on cosmic matters; in fact, he forbade his disciples to engage in idle speculations on these matters. This does not mean that Confucius was not interested in the question of man’s place in the universe. On the contrary, his whole social philosophy stemmed from his desire to establish the social order which would reflect the kind of order he found in heaven, for, as he put it, “heaven is author of the virtue that is in me”⁶. Living, as he did, in the midst of the turbulent Spring-Autumn period, it was obvious to Confucius that the social chaos of the day originated in the rule of power and that the social order would not be restored until the rule of virtue founded on sound social ethics was reestablished: “The rule of virtue can be compared to the Pole Star which commands the homage of the multitude of stars without leaving its place”⁷.

Nature and spirituality come into sharper focus in Mencius who saw human nature as a reflection of heavenly nature. To become a man of virtue was, therefore, nothing but the process of self-realization. The eleventh-century Confucian thinker Chang Tsai went furthest among Confucian thinkers in claiming the basic oneness of man and nature: “heaven is my father and earth is my mother, and even such a small being as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore, that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I regard as my nature”⁸.

Nature-worship is central to Shinto, an indigenous faith of the Japanese. In Shinto, kami is the term used to refer to the animate features of the natural environment. Kami are to be found everywhere—in mountains, streams, trees, and rocks—often assuming human forms. Indeed, nature is spirituality itself because kami are endowed with mitama, or “holy spirits” ⁹. Rigorous physical training, such as praying under a waterfall in a remote mountain on a chilly winter morning, is often employed to invoke kami in nature and us. Here we find an idea of total immersion in nature, the same idea that would be elevated into a worship of nature by Romantic thinkers of the West in the eighteenth century.

Common to all systems of Eastern thought is the idea that nature is an all-encompassing and self-generating process, which includes humans. Nature, in other words, is not an entity that exists outside of the space of human experience. Hence, the idea that nature is an object of rational inquiry, or that things in nature can be exploited for the benefit of humans, is foreign to the traditional view of nature in Eastern thought. Eastern philosophers are indeed united in their insistence that nature is something to be identified with and that humans can benefit only by learning about nature’s ways.

1. Carus, The Gospel of Buddha, Oxford: One World, 1994, p. 157.
2. Kukai, Kobo Daishi Zenshu, Tokyo: Mikkyo Bunka Kenkyujyo, 1964.
3. Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching, New York: Modern Library, 1993, Chapter 29.
4. Creel, Herrlee G., Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Mao Tze-Tung, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 100-101.
5. Welch, Holmes, and Anna Seidel (eds.), Facets of Taoism: Essays on Chinese Religion, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
6. Confucius, The Analects, London: Penguin Books, 1979, VII.23.
7. Confucius, ibid, II.1.
8. Callicott, J. Baird, and Roger T. Ames (eds.), Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought, Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 73-74.
9. See, for example, Aston, W.G., Shinto: The Way of the Gods, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1905.