[Buddha-l] The American New EnglandTranscendentalists' retreat--Follensby Pond

[jkirk]

Having just spent a wonderful day at the Bosque del Apache
wildlife preserve with my wife and our dog, and feeling
completely energized by the hundreds of thousands of snow geese
and sand hill cranes and a few great blue herons and
red-shouldered hawks, I would have to count myself among the
nature mystics in the Quaker (and Buddhist) fold.

One of the first shocks I had as a young man still experiencing
the first stages of a love affair with the teachings of Gautama
was an article I read making the observation that Buddhists in
India tended to see nature as dangerous and threatening, not at
all the sort of thing a person would want to have much to do
with. A nature lover for as long as I can remember, I wondered
whether I could ever get serious about a religion that sees
nature as something to take refuge from rather than as something
to go for refuge to. Seeing nature as a paradigm of danger rather
than as a source of nourishment and rejuvenation seems so, well,
Republican! 

--
Richard Hayes

==============
Ah, the immense and wonderful Bosque del Apache nature-preserve. 

RH: "One of the first shocks I had as a young man still
experiencing the first stages of a love affair with the teachings
of Gautama was an article I read making the observation that
Buddhists in India tended to see nature as dangerous and
threatening,...."
JK:
Well, this point would apply to householders, far as I've been
able to tell--they are the ones who engaged in apotropaic magic
(as Jayarava notes in this weeks' rave). As either farmers
dealing with cobras and kraits, or merchants dealing also with
cobras and kraits (which restrain themsevles not from entering
people's houses or huts), they'd tend to look on nature as
dangererous. But we find the Buddha and his sangha of monks and
occasional lay-people resting in the park-like groves of rich
merchants or kings...Jeta's or Anandapithika's Groves come to
mind here. Such places were where they struck camp and rested,
and where the Buddha gave a lot of teachings. Some of the stories
have the Buddha calming rampaging beasts; some iconography shows
him being sheltered from rain by the multi-headed Naga King
cobra. There were also monks, like Kashyappa (or one of the K's)
who spent most of his time alone on retreat in the jungle, a
practice ideal that seems to have begun while the Buddha was
alive. It's not that some weren't afraid of cobras, tigers and
such--but they didn't loathe nature per se, and some of the
suttas as I once posted on the list wrote poems about how
wonderful is the solitudinal beauty of nature in the forest and
mountains.
So whoever wrote that aticle must not have been reading the
suttas. Or maybe it depends on what one calls "nature." The
Buddhasasana sure were not laudative of unreconstructed human
nature!

Joanna