Whole Earth God

Green Meditation: Buddha Touches the Earth

A legend about the Buddha's enlightenment has profound implications for Green Meditation. According to tradition, on the night of Shakyamuni's awakening, as he sat in deep meditation under the bodhi tree, the tempter Mara assailed him with numerous threats and distractions, including vast armies of demons and seductive dancing girls. When these failed to unseat the aspiring Buddha, as a last ditch effort Mara challenged his right to sit upon "the throne of enlightenment."

"Who bears witness to your attainment of Buddhahood?" demanded Mara.

In answer, Shakyamuni is said to have reached the fingers of his right hand down to touch the ground. "I call the Earth as my witness," he declared.

A Reprise of "Born Again Buddhist"

There seems to be a renewed interest all of a sudden (courtesy of my friend James Shaheen over at Tricycle) about an article I wrote for him some years ago. I thought I'd post it here for those who never saw it. Anyone who has read HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not will recognize some of the writing, which found it's way into the introduction for that book. In the article I speak about Amida Buddha, however, rather than about God. That was because I was writing for Buddhists, and was doing a Buddhist practice at the time. For me the two are interchangeable, hence the title I chose for the article, which blends Christian and Buddhist teaching into one. (One Note: My understanding of Amida and the Pure Land has changed a bit since that initial experience, although nearly all that I wrote here remains true. At some point in the coming week or so, I plan to post a brief essay explaining The Longer Pure Land Sutra as a portrait of the planetary ecosystem.)

For now, here's the link: Born Again Buddhist

Listen to Clark Strand Talk About "The Sermon on the Moon" on Station KXYL

Does Christianity have any workable teachings for an age of global concerns? Were Jesus to return on this 40th anniversary of the moon landing to preach a “Sermon on the Moon,” “Consider the lilies” would become “consider the ecosystem,” and a “house built upon sand” would be, well, just about any house built on any shoreline in the world.

Listen to Clark speak on KXYL about "The Sermon on the Moon": Download 7-16-09%20Clark%20Strande

Green Meditation (Interlude: The Practice of Deep Time)

a deer family
visits the small village’s
old cemetery
          --Priscilla Lignori

These days I can't help thinking that the antidote to most human ills and human sorrows is what archaeologists and physical anthropologists call Deep Time. Personally, I prefer to think of it as Green Time.

Green Time is bigger than an individual human life, bigger than human history, bigger even than humanity itself. It reaches hundreds of thousands of years back to embrace the first stirrings of Homo sapiens, then millions of years before that, probing to the evolutionary roots from which it sprang.

Green Time was already old then, and as impeccable in its verdicts as it is today. The world we see around us even now--when the human presence on the planet is the most conspicuous aspect of many landscapes--is underwritten by Green Time, governed by Green Time, and ultimately makes sense only in terms of Green Time. Sadly, we don't see this. The human mind has difficulty managing durations of more than 100 years.

How to Learn Green Meditation

In my first post about Green Meditation, I suggested that all true theology is ecology. Where it isn't, it is because theology has gotten off track. Next, I promised to write something on how to learn Green Meditation. But really, that is just a matter of applying this same basic principle to every aspect of human activity until its meaning is inescapably clear.

The current imbalance between theology and ecology (which weights the value of human culture more heavily than the Earth) is at the root of our 21st century ecological crisis. That crisis was at least 10,000-12,000 years in the making, so it won't be righted in a day. The rebalancing of a species that has lost its niche in nature is necessarily a lengthy process, just as it took a very long time for us to lose that niche in the first place. A certain kind of thinking got us into this problem, and it will take a very different kind to get us out of it again. But it won't happen in a small way. And it won't happen fast. That is mostly what I mean when I speak of Green Meditation. "Green" doesn't refer to the emphasis of our thinking, its focus, or to its "color." It indicates an altogether different scale of mind.

What Is Green Meditation?

I first introduced the term "Green Meditation" at a talk I gave in Manhattan last fall, but since then I’ve said very little about it in public, even when people have asked to have it explained. The reason for this is simple: Green Meditation overturns pretty much everything we know (or think we know) about our existing religious practices and beliefs. Or, rather, it reinterprets them so radically that they aren’t recognizable any longer to most people.

For all that, the basic idea is easy to understand: Green Meditation tells us that all theology (interpreted broadly to include any religious teaching) is ecology. Where it isn’t, theology has gone astray. Nature is never wrong.