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“the Four Noble Truths:
1. There is suffering.
2. Suffering comes from desire.
3. Nirvana is the solution.
4. Nirvana can be achieved by means of the Eightfold Path.”
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“The Buddha supported the new market economy and what it entailed: urbanization, trade, wealth production, familial reordering, individualism, free will, and new political structures.”
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“Nature earns little notice in the Buddha’s teachings, but when nature does appear in early Buddhist texts, it is typically in terms of impermanence, decay, and as something to be avoided.² One will search in vain for anything that could be interpreted as an appreciation of nature in the early Buddhist canon.³ In a rare passage that mentions a beautiful mountain lake, it turns out to be a manifestation of hell.⁴ ”
“2. “Householder, suppose a man dreamt of lovely parks, lovely groves, lovely meadows, and lovely lakes, and on waking he saw nothing of it. So too, householder, a noble disciple considers this: ‘Sensual pleasures have been compared to a dream by the Blessed One; they provide much suffering and much despair, while the danger in them is great.’” Ñanamoli and Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, 470–471.
3. As Yi-fu Tuan succinctly put it, “topophilia has no part in Buddhist doctrine.” Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and “Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 114.
4. “This Tapoda [boiling hell] flows from this: this lake of beautiful water, of cool water, of sweet water, of pure water, with lively and charming fords, with an abundance of fishes and turtles, and lotuses bloom.” Horner, The Book of Discipline, vol. 1, 188.”
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“The Buddhist canon is filled with stories about and paeans to the value of hard work and the moral value of creating wealth. In them, happiness is explicitly linked to prosperity, and the types of bliss available to the average man are ownership, wealth, and being free of debt.²¹ ”
“21. Woodward and Hare, The Book of the Gradual Sayings, vol. 5, 60.”
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“On account of the Dharma’s ideology of wealth and its inherent connection to the merchant class and their expanding networks of trade, Buddhism came to play a pivotal role in the religious life of Asia.”
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“Buddhism’s institutionalization began in north central India where the Buddha had lived, preached, and ultimately passed away. The locations of these life events became important sites of worship and pilgrimage, but they were not the only sites of Buddhist devotion. A crucial aspect of early Buddhism was the worship of the Buddha’s relics, which, being themselves a field of merit, were vehicles for the accumulation of good karma.⁴”
“4. Kate Crosby, Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, and Identity (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 43–68; Strong, Relics of the Buddha.”
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“During the Tang (618–907 CE) and Song dynasties (960–1279 CE), Chinese Buddhism reached its greatest heights of intellectual creativity and institutional prosperity.” (Pág. 218)
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“By 680 CE Silla (57 BCE-935 CE) unified the peninsula and began the process of making the Dharma an integral part of Korean society.³⁵ During the subsequent Koryo dynasty (918–1392), Buddhism came to play a key role in imperial ideology and practice of the Dharma was woven into Korean society.³⁶”
“35. Lewis R. Lancaster and Chai-shin Yu, Assimilation of Buddhism in Korea: Religious Maturity and Innovation in the Silla Dynasty (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1991).
36. Sem Vermeersch, The Power of the Buddhas: The Politics of Buddhism During the Koryo Dynasty (918–1392) (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2008).”
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“Buddhism would also become an integral part of the state in Japan since Prince Shotoku had the Dharma written into its first constitution of 604 CE.”
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“In the Kamakura period (1185–1333), the teachings of Hōnen (1133–1212) and Shinran (1173–1262) energized the Pure Land tradition, and Eisai (1141–1215) and Dōgen (1200–1253) promoted the Zen traditions. Perhaps even more important were the teachings of the Buddhist reformer Nichiren (1222–1282), who played a pivotal role in bringing the Dharma out of its aristocratic circles and into the broader society.³⁸”
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“By the time Europeans arrived in India in the fifteenth century, the Dharma and its many monuments were long-lost memories. In fact, it took Europeans quite some time to figure out that the religion practiced from Sri Lanka to Korea, Mongolia, and Laos was actually one and the same.⁴⁵ ”
“45. On the Western discovery of Buddhism see, for example, Urs App, The Cult of Emptiness: The Western Discovery of Buddhist Thought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Kyoto: UniversityMedia, 2012); Urs App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.”
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“By incorporating in my analysis the individual religious entrepreneurs who pushed into the frontier and promoted economic development, I recognize that both state-sponsored ideology and individual action drove the spread of Buddhism.”
“By bringing all three categories of Buddhist actors into our historical narrative—the state, the laity, and the monastics—we will better understand not only how the Dharma helped weave together the fabric of Asia, but also how these Buddhists radically transformed Asia’s environment.”
(Pág. 229)
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“In early Buddhism, ahimsa was part of a critique of Vedic animal sacrifice, which Buddhists often criticized in order to make themselves look better in comparison.¹⁷”
“17. Pollock, “Axialism and Empire,” 402–403.”
“The Buddhist theory and promotion of ahimsa were specifically intended to denigrate Brahmins and their rituals.”
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“The three major areas where the Dharma first flourished—northwest India, the Krishna valley in south central India, and Amaravati on India’s east coast—were all hinterlands extraordinarily rich in natural resources.³¹ ”
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“Wherever the Dharma became established this same dynamic played itself out: Buddhists brought local resources into global trading networks.³⁵”
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“Beyond the more familiar tropes of planting seeds and ripening fruit in discussions of karma, the Buddha expounds explicitly on the practicalities of farming, especially irrigation.”
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“The success of Buddhism depended on the surpluses that agricultural expansion enabled.” (Pág. 283)
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“the Buddhist transmission of rice was also at the root of the processes noted above: agroexpansion, population growth, marketization, and, ultimately, urbanization.” (Pág. 289)
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Notas: 64 y 65 (sobre el crecimiento de la población en el sur de Asia desde -400 a 0, coincidente con el del Buda Dharma,
“64. Edmund Burke III, “The Big Story: Human History, Energy Regimes, and the Environment,” in The Environment and World History, ed. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 33–53 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 38–39.”
un crecimiento que no se volvió a ver sino en el S. XIX, con la tecnología del combustible fósil):
“65. As pointed out by Vaclav Smil, population levels are dependent on available energy resources, and “only rising inputs of fossil fuels into cropping could support both larger population and higher, and better, average food supply.” Vaclav Smil, Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 112.”
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“Buddhists were the first to develop the technology of crystallizing sugar and subsequently spread it across Asia.⁷² ”
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“Buddhists were instrumental in making sugar a part of the Chinese culinary, ritual, economic, and agricultural worlds.⁷⁴ ”
“74. On the role of Buddhists in spreading sugar and other foodstuffs, including rice, across Asia see Sucheta Mazumdar, Sugar and Society in China: Peasants, Technology, and the World Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 1998), 20–23; Rachel Laudan, Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 102–131.”
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“From there, both the plant and the tradition of tea drinking spread to East Asia along with the Dharma.⁷⁹ Tea culture not only transformed whole cultures but also radically altered the landscape.”
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“The interconnected processes of urbanization, commodification of the frontier, and agricultural expansion together form the standard explanatory model of the Dharma’s success across Asia.¹”
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“Buddhist scripture may be the most urban-oriented of all religious literatures.⁴”
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“Of the 4,257 teaching locales mentioned in the early Buddhist canon, nearly all (96 percent) are in urban settings. And of the nearly 1,400 people mentioned in these texts, most (94 percent) are identified as residing in cities.⁵ ”
“5. Chakrabarti, “Buddhist Sites Across South Asia as Influenced by Political and Economic Forces,” 194. See also K. T. S. Sarao, Urban Centres and Urbanisation as Reflected in the Pāli Vinaya and Sutta Piṭakas (Delhi: Vidhyanidhi Oriental Publishers and Booksellers, 1990).”
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“The ideal worlds they envisioned, such as the paradise of Sukhavati, were highly unnatural, lacking even nonhuman animals. ” (Pág. 300)
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“these paradises (which seem to have parallels in medieval European thought) are clearly in accordance with the attitude glorifying civilization.”⁷”
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“earnest student of yoga, depending on moral habit and based on moral habit, develop the five controlling faculties.”¹⁰ ”
Compara a un urbanista con un meditador, o, en el diseño de una ciudad con la práctica de la meditación.
“10. Horner, Milinda’s Questions, 46.”
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“Richard Hoffman, for example, has argued that small medieval European cities had an environmental footprint that covered an area more than a hundred times their actual size.²³”
“Hoffman, “Footprint Metaphor and Metabolic Realities,” 296.”
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“Buddhism brought the chair to China. With it came many changes from architecture to clothing: “The position of windows, screens and ceiling heights all underwent dramatic changes, as did clothing, gestures, and the ways in which people interacted and perceived each other indoors. Entire industries withered and died with the rise of the chair while other enterprises rose up with it.”²⁶”
“26. Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture, 227.”
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“As James Duncan has observed, “landscape … is one of the central elements in a cultural system, for as an assemblage of objects, a text, it acts as a signifying system through which a social system is communicated, reproduced, experienced, and explored.”¹ ”
“1. James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 17.”
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“In order to become a Buddha, kings devoted themselves to building religious structures, such as monasteries, dagobas and vihara, which would enrich the religion, as well as to public works such as irrigation tanks which would benefit the people.”³”
“3. Duncan, The City as Text, 38. In earlier periods this Buddhist landscape transformation involved the creation of cave temples, 1,200 of which were made during the first centuries of Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Robin A. E. Comingham, “Monks, Caves and Kings: A Reassessment of the Nature of Early Buddhism in Sri Lanka,” World Archaeology 27, no. 2 (1995): 222–242.”
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“Such transformation exerted political and religious control but it also produced a specifically Buddhist culture through landscape.⁴”
“4. Fabio Rambelli, Buddhist Materiality: A Cultural History of Objects in Japanese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1.”
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“In ancient India, Buddhists were the first to build with stone.¹²”
“12. Erdosy, “The Prelude to Urbanization,” 10.”
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“Eastern Jin (317–420 CE) 1,768 temples
Liu Song (420–479 CE) 1,913 temples
Qi (479–502 CE) 2,015 temples
Liang (502–557 CE) 2,846 temples²”
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“despite such evidence that Buddhist institutions were fully engaged in these ecologically destructive activities, this environmental devastation is rarely brought to bear on the history of Buddhism or the history Asia.” (Pág. 334)
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“the Japanese “placed far greater value on satisfactions derived from control and mastery over nature,” even more than Germany or the United States.²”
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“Buddhists were protocapitalists who exploited the natural world relentlessly as they pushed into the frontier.” (Pág. 338)
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“As the secularization thesis becomes less and less defensible, the study of religion needs to be taken more and more seriously.” (Pág. 340)
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“Buddhism was an ideology that drove Buddhists to extend the Dharma all over Asia. Through such processes as agricultural expansion, urbanization, and commodity exchanges, they transformed the natural world as part and parcel of the Dharma’s institutionalization.” (Pág. 341)
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“Elverskog overturns eco-Buddhism narrative by showing how Buddhists across Asia transformed the environment by commodification, agro-expansion, and urbanization.” (Pág. 346)
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“I do think that, as we experience our environmental collapse, we will witness moments of sublime beauty, which gives me some consolation.”
Brett Walker
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“Donald S. Lopez Jr., From Stone to Flesh: A Short History of the Buddha ”
Jiyul Sunim
“Richard Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo”
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Concepción, 16 febrero 2022
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