What is Ecology for a Chan Monk?

CHINA HUMANITIES

SPEAKER: Natasha Heller, University of Virginia

The “ecocritical turn” has reached premodern studies and Asian humanities, but both contexts present significant challenges. Although the nonhuman world and the experience of it would have been different in meaningful ways a millennium ago, can we understand “green readings” of Buddhist literature? Is it possible to recover “environmental thought” from the poetry of Chan monks? To think through these questions, I will consider four sets of poems authored by Zhongfeng Mingben 中峰明本 (1263–1323) about living in different places: on a boat, in the mountains, on the water, and in the city.