2022–23 Buddhism and Posthumanism Series
No Nature, No Culture: Ethnography of Some Chinese Buddhist Contributions to Environmentalism
Mayfair Yang
Abstract
This lecture examines some Chinese Buddhist practices in Wenzhou that may contribute to global environmental efforts through the dissolution of the Nature-Culture ontological opposition that launched modernity. Vegetarianism and providing animal shelters are built on a long Buddhist tradition of empathy and compassion for the suffering of sentient beings, and tied in with notions of reincarnation into the Six Paths of beings. One to two millennia before Donna Haraway’s call to recognize that “all earthlings are kin in the deepest sense,” Buddhist reincarnation cosmology had already set up a trans-generational ethics of kinship across the boundaries between humans and animals, and between humans and divinities. “Releasing Life” (fangsheng) rituals represent another expression of compassion for other beings and species.
Biography
Mayfair Yang is a faculty member at UC Santa Barbara in the Department of Religious Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages & Cultural Studies, where she is the Department Chair. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in the intertwined processes of religiosity, secularization, and state operations in Chinese modernity. Her current research focuses on religious environmentalism or religion, ecology, and environmental ethics and ontologies.
Registration
Each event in the Buddhism and Posthumanism series will be held as an online Zoom meeting and registration is required. You may register at any time to join a lecture. Your registration is valid for the whole series, and you may attend as many lectures as you like. You will automatically receive reminders for the lectures. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
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