Description
Book SynopsisBy exploring lived ecological experiences across seven Buddhist worlds from ancient India to the contemporary West, Roaming Free Like a Deer provides a comprehensive, critical, and innovative examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics. Daniel Capper clarifies crucial contours of Buddhist vegetarianism or meat eating, nature mysticism, and cultural speculations about spirituality in nonhuman animals.
Buddhist environmental ethics often are touted as useful weapons in the fight against climate change. However, two formidable but often overlooked problems with this perspective exist. First, much of the literature on Buddhist environmental ethics uncritically embraces Buddhist ideals without examining the real-world impacts of those ideals, thereby sometimes ignoring difficulties in terms of practical applications. Moreover, for some understandable but still troublesome reasons, Buddhists from differ
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Some Methods in Buddhist Environmental Ethics
2. The Buddha's Nature
3. The Clever Bee of Sri Lanka
4. Beautiful Thai Buffaloes
5. Eating the Enlightened Plants of China
6. Japanese Water Buddhas
7. Releasing Animals in Tibet
8. Natural Persons in the West
Conclusion
