Summarizing Bhikkhu Anālayo's Most Recent Book on Climate Change

Here I provide a summary of Bhikkhu Anālayo’s recent publication Mindfulness Between Early Buddhism and Climate Change. @Sphairos kindly notified the community of this publication a few days ago. Go here and scroll down the page to download a free PDF copy.

I am in gratitude to Bhikkhu Anālayo for gifting us with this most recent book. It is prolific in content (401 total pages). As such, I’ll post two additional entries to this thread to complete the summary within the next few days.

Overall Summary of the Book and Part I (BethL’s first post)

(1) Book’s Purpose

This book follows his earlier book Mindfully Facing Climate Change (Anālayo 2019e). He uses the new book to summarize his most up-to-date thinking on “Defining ‘Early Buddhism’” (Part I) and “Mindfulness” (Part II). Much of this is available in already-released publications but this provides a convenient summary. It also gives him another opportunity to fine-tune his comments on those two topics.

A key concern of my earlier publication had been to ground a concern with climate change in early Buddhist thought, leading me to the perhaps bold claim that “through mindfulness practice the challenge of climate change can become a path to awakening,” and “every step taken along this path can serve to diminish pollution both without and within” (Anālayo 2019e: 157). A central purpose of the first two parts of my present book has been to substantiate the position taken in my earlier book…

(2) Part III looks directly at climate change

…the present third part mainly takes up selected information from a range of different areas connected to climate change.

(3) Part III also introduces the new initiative called GALA

I propose to formulate a way of facing climate challenge with the help of the acronym GALA. Behind this acronym stand the following terms: Global Awareness Local Action. This motto intends to point to a way to face climate change that is in line with the four noble truths, and that relies on mindfulness by combining local action with an orientation provided through awareness of the global challenge.

The purpose of GALA is to inspire, encourage, and foster such self-reliance—by taking mindfulness as the refuge—in the face of the challenges posed by climate change (and related problems). The main idea is to offer a contribution to the range of initiatives and forms of activism that are already in place through mindful engagement based on the ethical orientation provided by the four noble truths, and to facilitate community building locally and via digital means. I am fortunate to have found three colleagues and friends to collaborate with me in this attempt: Rhonda Magee, Rebecca Henderson, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. The four of us share in having been or still being professors in our respective disciplines (my colleagues in law, economics, and medicine respectively), and we also are practitioners dedicated to the cultivation of mindfulness under an overarching framework of growth in the Dharma. The GALA initiative will be part of the environmental efforts undertaken at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies.

(4) Relevance of Early Buddhism (Part I of book)

It is relevant:

The worldview of early Buddhism reflects several aspects of ancient Indian cosmology. From the viewpoint of the potential of this worldview as a backdrop to facing climate change, a key question would be: Should the traditional religious setting of early Buddhist teachings be considered just irrelevant baggage, better to be dropped as extraneous to contemporary needs? Or could an appreciation of the framework it provides instead be relevant in some form for better understanding the challenges of climate change, and at times perhaps even help reorient attempts to confront it?

Nature of reality:

In the present case, be it Mount Meru or Mount Himālaya, the main point of their employment is to drive home the lack of stability and impermanent nature of even solid, large mountains. The lesson as such, even if expressed in a way that at first sight seems just an outdated myth, is a significant one and deserves to be taken seriously.

No omniscient Buddha:

Hence, adopting a text-historical perspective on the attribution of omniscience to the Buddha is of considerable consequence. Closer study reveals the historical lateness of the idea that the Buddha claimed to be omniscient… The point is only that, when assuming the traditional role of a teacher in the ancient Indian setting, the Buddha is depicted as doing so in an open and flexible manner that left considerable room for personal freedom and uninhibited investigation.

On trying to shoe-horn mythology into climate science:

It would not be doing justice to the oral nature of these texts and the symbolic significance of numbers in the ancient setting if one were to start computations based on a literalist reading, contrasting the time span required for this succession of kings with our knowledge of the evolution of species and the age of this planet.

Ignore rebirth?

From an early Buddhist viewpoint, following the eightfold path of practice does not require accepting rebirth on blind faith. There is sufficient scope for personally taking an agnostic position on the matter. At the same time, however, there is a need to acknowledge the ubiquity of rebirth in early Buddhist discourse for arriving at a proper understanding of the type of teachings reflected in these texts. A central concept in the background of the notion of rebirth is karma, literally “action,” which in its early Buddhist setting stands for the doctrinal affirmation that the ethical quality of the intentions motivating one’s deeds will have repercussions to be experienced sooner or later, in the present or in future lives.

Karma and evolution:

Yet, the early Buddhist teachings on causation in general eschew mono-causality, envisaging whatever happens instead as the result of a network of causes and conditions. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution therefore does not obviate the law of karma. Instead, the law of karma can be visualized as operating within the framework provided by the evolution of species, in the sense that one’s former deeds will influence one’s rebirth among a particular one of the species extant at a particular time. Alternatively, one’s former deeds may result in being reborn in another realm. Another problem comes up in relation to the role of karma as moral responsibility, which also does not function in a unilateral manner in the sense of excluding the possibility of receiving help from others.

Social aspect of morality:

The affirmation of moral responsibility of an individual does not imply that one cannot help others, something that is possible in various ways and therefore not confined to the idea of transferring merit. In fact, to assume that the Buddhist position was that one cannot help others in principle would be contrary to the very essence of Buddhism as a historical institution, which has its starting point in the compassionate decision of the Buddha to teach.

Understanding the nature of awakening:

In a recent monograph study (Anālayo 2023e), I have tried to provide a perspective that covers key passages on the nature of awakening in early Buddhism… from a comparative perspective the idea of four levels of awakening emerges as an integral dimension of early Buddhist thought…

It follows that there is no problem with the notion that already the stream-enterer is endowed with the eightfold path…

Understood in this way, the tendency in the early discourses to highlight such firm confidence, together with solid ethical conduct, reflects the importance accorded to the personal transformation to be expected from the gaining of stream-entry. … The early discourses clearly distinguish between the confidence that results from realizing stream-entry and manifestations of confidence in general, qualifying the former by using specific terminology, here rendered as “experiential confidence.”

Doctrine on self:

An emphasis on the doctrine of not self is not a product of an elitist predilection among scholars; its centrality is quite evident in the early texts. The belief that this centrality is somehow contradicted by the obvious fact that lived forms of Buddhism rely on the notion of an individual subject results from a misunderstanding…

This leaves little room to posit either a compatibility with belief in a self or a restriction of self-notions to identification with the aggregates. Moreover, instructions on the absence of a self are such a recurrent feature of the early discourses that the idea that the Buddha just did not provide a positive or negative answer to this question is not particularly compelling…

In view of the above evidence, it is simply unconvincing to profess that the early Buddhist discourses fail to present a rejection of the existence of a (permanent) self. The agreement among the parallels in the above cases is conclusive evidence for “early Buddhism” in this respect. An attempt to go beyond that and identify some sort of pre-canonical Buddhism that differs substantially from such agreement remains similarly unconvincing.

Doctrine on conditionality:

As the doctrinal counterpart to the teaching on the absence of a self, conditionality in early Buddhist thought has a similarly comprehensive range of applicability. The idea that dependent arising is confined to matters of the mind does not reflect the position of early Buddhist thought accurately…

Even though deeds of course originate in the mind in the form of intentions, their verbal or bodily actualization goes beyond what is purely mental, and such actual deeds form the condition—to be discerned by those who have a vision of “dependent arising”—for becoming a brahmin, instead of birth. Elsewhere the physical body is also qualified as being “dependently arisen,” which thus constitutes another instance of the full Pāli term being applied to what is more than just a matter of the mind…

In sum, it seems fair to conclude that the principle of specific conditionality that informs presentations of dependent arising is of general relevance. This is not to deny that the overarching concern of this early Buddhist teaching is indeed the human predicament and its root causes in the mind. The point is only that its application cannot be confined to the workings of the mind alone…

The basic principle enshrined in this way is hardly a novel discovery. Even animals must be able to recognize certain specific conditions required for their own survival, such as where food can be found or how predators can be avoided. The significantly Buddhist perspective on the matter lies in applying this basic principle to the human predicament in the understanding that the entire gamut of subjective experience is merely the result of conditional relationships, with no permanent entity found anywhere in addition to or apart from these.

End Part I Summary

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Helpful review. Thank you.

I have to admit this phrase is a big turnoff for me. The idea that a planet-wide catastrophe that could lead to death, destabilization, and suffering for countless humans and other beings can be viewed as a “path to awakening” just seems such a privileged view that since I read that in one of his previous writings on this topic I have lost interest in reading anything by Bhikkhu Anālayo.

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This has been the basic motto of the environmental movement since the 70s. In the past 50 years it has done nothing to stop climate change, and it won’t start now. I believe that one of the reasons people distrust environmentalists is because we don’t tell them the truth. And the truth is, everything we have done to stop climate change has failed.

I’ve been involved with the environmental movement since I was a teenager. And what this has shown me is that the only entities with the power to do anything are governments. If you want to meaningfully do anything to prevent or lessen or slow down climate change, then lend your hand to putting as many climate progressives as possible into federal parliaments.

This. Mindfulness and meditation help us to cope, and obviously in a certain respect suffering can stimulate insight. But how about we substitute for “climate change”, and say “through mindfulness practice the starvation and protracted, agonizing deaths of millions of children can become a path to awakening”, then … it doesn’t have quite the same ring.


As it happens, I started writing my novel on climate change last time I was in Europe, and now I’m going again. I was teaching a retreat in Belgium, and each day the bushfires were consuming my country. If anyone is interested, here’s my take on it all.

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It would be helpful if modern day conservatives stopped their denial of it. Thatcher recognised the issue back in the 80’s. For some reason in today’s world environmentalism is seen to be a left wing thing, but conservative thought historically has been concerned with it. Tolkien is an example.

Margaret Thatcher - UN General Assembly Climate Change Speech (1989)

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John Ruskin spoke about climate change in England in the 1880s !
He was also quite conservative.

Greed and selfishness is not unique to any “wing”.

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I blame the govt’s ( left & right - two wings on the one bird imo) who submit to lobbying for fee & favour by the greedy globalists grubs who are more interested in money than doing the right thing.

I wish they all knew rebirth was a reality coz whilst they often don’t appear to care about us - or even their own descendants - they might think twice about what they are setting themselves up to return to if they can’t extend their care factor beyond themselves.

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I’ve liked your post coz the couple of things I’ve read from this monk didn’t resonate with me either, … but in some sort of defence, I sometimes refer to people coming to Spiritualism as having been thru ‘a baptism by fire’ … where life has gotten so painful ( like a burn) that they have started turning to other sources for hope and solace as a starting point.

Ultimately, they need to look within instead of externally, but it can be a good stepping stone to have someone hold their hand (and even extend a life line in some cases), until they can find a place of enough peace to then turn that search inwards.

If the world goes to :poop: too suddenly tho, I also feel like there won’t be enough hands to hold to lead them to the place where they are ready to let go and look within for that first step on the way to awakening …. And then imo, there is also a long road between awakening and enlightenment and not everyone is going to be able to traverse it in a single life time anyway.

Seeds are always good tho if people choose to water them whilst plucking out the weeds. It’s just unfortunate that often the catalyst seems to be negative. It looks that way where I come from anyway :slightly_smiling_face:

Through practice of ‘right thought’ (sammā saṅkappa), the challenge of climate change can become a path to awakening.
‘Right thought’, one stage of the eightfold path, is thought of detachment (nekkhamma saṅkappa), thought of non-malice (abyāpāda saṅkappa), and thought of non-harming (avihiṃsā saṅkappa).

Indeed. There’s certainly a “natural” strand of conservatism that cherishes nature and dislikes economic excess; Tolkien is a good example, he really doesn’t fit in modern categories, which imo is one of his strengths.

But I don’t think there’s any mystery to the shift: it’s oil money.

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Yeah imagine being oil capitalist that greatly contribute to global warming, and die.

And then reborn in the same world, but the world is already +10°
Uncomfortable and full of disasters.

Karma.

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I have a friend who is now elderly. He is a Buddhist. When I visit he and his wife we usually end up watching news from international sources on their big screen T.V… Last time there was a piece about some climate change related environmental disaster. He said to me that while he feels for young people he had a hard time relating to it as he would soon be gone. I reminded him of rebirth. His reply to me was that he wouldn’t remember this life and how the environment was better during it.

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Yeah, idk about that.

Heck, even in just a half-decade here in Thailand I’ve already noticed the rain coming more infrequently, the forests thinning out, the soil washing away…

From the climate models I’ve seen, even if humans stop adding more carbon to the atmosphere tomorrow, things will continue to get steadily worse and worse for at least the next century as different, large systems slowly adjust. And that’s not even to mention the various negative feedback loops such as arctic melting (which then leads to more sunlight being absorbed, which leads to more melting…) which can cause things to just keep getting steadily worse and worse all on their own.

The climate isn’t a binary.

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This follows on the OP. It is the second of three posts.

(5) Reinforcing the centrality of meditation and mindfulness

This is the longest of the book’s three chapters. It reads as a response to several critiques of meditation and mindfulness as taught in certain contemporary Western settings – some more recent than others. The particular focus:

  • Ingram, Daniel M. 2008/2018: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book, Revised and Expanded Edition, London: Aeon.
  • McMahan, David L. 2023: Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds, New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Purser, Ronald E. and David R. Loy. 2013: “Beyond McMindfulness,” Huffington Post, 1.7: 13.
  • Thompson, Evan 2020: Why I Am Not a Buddhist, New Haven: Yale University Press.

This chapter is so thorough and well-documented that it is too dense for a cursory read. I did more than a cursory read but less than a full-on study. It’s best that I use his direct language for the main takeaways:

On Meditation:

…meditation was certainly not considered confined to monastic practitioners in early Buddhism or even just exclusively meant for them [as demonstrated in the first five MN chapters]. The textual evidence surveyed above makes it reasonable to consider the contemporary spread of lay meditation in Asia and elsewhere to be a revival of an ancient Indian antecedent, rather than an innovation.

On Mindfulness of Breathing:

It follows that there is a need to distinguish between being just mindful of the breath and the cultivation of the four satipaṭṭhānas in relation to the breath. In the scheme of sixteen steps, the instructions take just being mindful of the breath—which in itself is a bodily phenomenon—as their starting point in order to proceed to all four satipaṭṭhānas. This in turn can lead to a cultivation of the awakening factors, and these can then issue in letting go and gaining knowledge and liberation. This whole trajectory would stand in the background to what the Buddha reportedly presented to Ariṭṭha as a more detailed or superior way of practice.

On Satipaṭṭhāna:

An understanding of the Satipaṭṭhāna-sutta from the viewpoint of its historical and cultural setting—a chief aim of McMahan (2023)—needs to distinguish between different historical layers in the evolution of Buddhist thought.

On the Body Scan:

In Myanmar such body scanning or sweeping through the body came to serve as a tool to enable a direct experience of the teachings of the Abhidharma. By this time, the body scan appears to have become an independent practice in its own right, and mindfulness of breathing has come to serve as a preliminary to such practice. Moreover, the attention directed to the body in this way has become more detailed, as the purpose of the body scan is to foster an apperception of subtle sensations as a corroboration of the continuous arising and passing away of subatomic particles in the body (and by implication in any other manifestation of matter).

More recently, the body scan has come to serve as an entry point to secular mindfulness practices aimed at reducing the stressful dimensions of pain and disease. At this stage, mindfulness of breathing has receded still further into the background, being no longer required as a preliminary and only serving as an optional supplement. The body has in turn become still more prominent. Moreover, the potential of the body-scan meditation to alleviate pain, or at least to diminish mental reactivity to pain, has also become considerably more prominent.

On the Body Scan and Energy:

In this way, practicing according to the instructions given by U Ba Khin led S. N. Goenka to being cured of the debilitating pains of migraine, which convinced him of the efficacy of the meditation practice he had learned. The effect achieved in this way could well be a byproduct of an improved circulation of qì achieved through repeatedly undertaking the body scan.

At any rate, it seems fair to propose that the approaches taught by Mahāsi Sayādaw and S. N. Goenka for intensive vipassanā meditation in a retreat setting can stimulate the qì, although both teachers do not appear to be fully aware this. Such unintended side-effects can clearly be beneficial—such as when to all appearances resulting in the cure of a headache—but this is not invariably the case (see below p. 198 and note 215), a situation that is aggravated when repercussions of intensive and repeated stimulation of the qì are not accurately understood for what they are.

On the Dangers of Mindfulness:

If used with the required circumspection, mindfulness practices can have an advantage over other forms of meditation that also can have adverse effects, as the very cultivation of mindfulness can provide a means, or at least an additional support, to facing mental difficulties that have arisen. In other words, when evaluating the possibility of mindfulness practices to lead to psychosis, their potential for treating psychosis also needs to be taken into account, as evident from a meta-analysis of relevant studies. Thus, although mindfulness is definitely not a panacea, at the same time learning to face the unpleasant and skillfully working with it are integral dimensions of its potential.

Taking advantage of this potential needs to be coupled with a clear recognition that specific problems related to trauma or mental illness require enlisting professional help. At times, this entails setting aside the practice of mindfulness in order to handle a problem that has surfaced, until it becomes possible to resume mindfulness practice again.

In fact, the above discussion is decidedly not meant to pretend that mindfulness or any other meditation practice are entirely unproblematic. The point is only that there has been a tendency to overstate the case, based on borrowing an apparent authentication strategy employed by Daniel Ingram to argue the unconvincing case that simple mindfulness practice runs the same risks as intensive insight meditation. This is definitely not the case…

On the Secular Employment of Mindfulness:

In sum, the premises of the “McMindfulness” critique taken up for examination here appear to reflect a lack of acquaintance with relevant ancient Buddhist antecedents. Judging from the textual sources, already at the time of the Buddha mindfulness was intentionally employed for health benefits. The relevant narrative even involves regular payments for the delivery of instructions in this Mindfulness-Based Intervention, and all of that without the Buddha being on record for voicing any objection. This provides a significant precedent for the secular employment of mindfulness for the purpose of health benefits.

End Part II Summary

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Climate change is happening much faster than I ever anticipated. They always talk about with Earth, geology and environmental factors everything happens so very slowly.
But I can say without a doubt now that here in New York we have seen significant warming over the past 10 years or so. I mean we have had a week of 80 degree F temps at the end of October. And that’s been increasing year after year. It still gets plenty cold in January/February but also overall there is significantly less snow.

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Indeed, yes. On the retreat I just taught, one of our yogis was from Valencia. I had to interrupt her retreat to let her know her city was being washed away. (Her home is outside the flood zone.) There’s no escaping, the accelerations are cascading and multiplying in every area. I arrived in Norway as the news was breaking about the AMOC—the current that brings warm water to northern Europe from the tropics, moderating climates from Ireland to Norway—turns out to be much more fragile than thought. Its collapse has gone from being a remote possibility to being basically a tossup over the next few decades.

Thanks Beth, I appreciate you taking the trouble to share with us!

I’m not sure what the Venerable is referring to here? Could you give us more on this if it’s no trouble?

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I believe the reference is to SN 3.13.

Yes as @EddyP notes it’s specifically SN3.13.

Ven. Anālayo spends quite some pages on Purser’s criticism of Jon Kabat-Zinn and MBSR (McMindfulness). He then follows it up with this reflection on King Pasenadi’s apparent habit of overeating.

The mindfulness practice taught by the Buddha to King Pasenadi specifically calls for noting one’s measure with food; it is not presented as part of a meditative program aimed at progress to awakening. Moreover, it is taught to someone who does not appear to have had the kind of firm ethical foundation required of disciples who dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to progress on the path to liberation. Finally, the actual implementation of this mindfulness practice involves payment. The fact of such payment is mentioned explicitly in the presence of the Buddha, who in the narrative setting features implicitly as willing to collaborate by teaching the verse on mindful eating to the young brahmin, otherwise the latter would not have been able to act successfully in a way that to all appearances moves intriguingly close to the role of a mindfulness-instructor.

What emerges from this episode puts into perspective the assessment by Wilson (2014: 112) that “[t]he teachings set forth in the new Western literature on mindful eating represent a radically new application of Buddhism (though it is usually presented as if it were traditional).”

He has mentioned this aspect in SN3.13 over the years in his mindfulness teachings so it’s not a new reflection vis-a-vis this book. It’s notable that he’s using it now to refute Purser (whose particular tone and overall perspective he summarizes nicely).

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A conundrum that I heard someone speak to recently is this: For people born into this generation, it will feel normal. So normalization – through no fault of their own – may dampen a sense of urgency and radical shift to low-carbon lifestyle. As we’re still a long ways away from a low-carbon world.

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FWIW, I’ve seen the opposite. With my son and his friends, and the younger adults and youth I see at work, I don’t find a lack of urgency. My son is a lot more urgent than most of the middle age and senior adults I interact with. What I see is their not knowing how to make things better. (Which, unfortunately, leads to hopelessness in many. I know some young adults who have very bleak outlooks on their future.)

But my son and his friends and the young people I work with saw the student protests didn’t lead to change. They know having to use crappier straws won’t lead to change. They know niche books like Venerable Analayo’s won’t lead to change. They see there is a massive systemic problem, with built-in short-term motivations for the players to make poor choices for the climate.

They are urgent. They just don’t know what to do. And I don’t know what to tell them, as I’ve been reading about and thinking about what’s going on with Climate Change probably 15+ years now, and I haven’t figured out anything that will lead to change.

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Oh right, interesting argumentation, I hadn’t looked at it in that way!

That’s the nub.

IMHO, the only thing that stands a chance of making any meaningful difference is to put a majority of climate progressives in federal governments. International processes are a waste of time as they are not enforceable. Individual efforts are a waste of time because demand for fossil fuels is almost infinitely elastic. Protests have no effect, as those in charge just sneer from their offices and go about their day. Technological improvements just make it worse, as increase of supply stimulates an even greater increase of demand. Lobbying politicians is a waste of time, as they are who they are and are not going to change their basic values.

Power, whether we like it or not, is vested in governments. They are the only entities that can make laws, administer them, take money from the rich, break up their companies, nationalize extractive industries, and for those who are an imminent threat to all of us, put them in prison. They can make the changes that are needed, they just don’t want to.

I was just rereading the history of Technocracy, the pre-war anti-semitic movement whose leadership included Joshua Haberman, Elon Musk’s grandfather. They wanted to replace human work and government with machines, and it was quite a big deal for a while. But it came to an abrupt end, as the Canadian government outlawed the movement, arrested Haberman and threw him in jail, while the US refused him entry. If only they’d do the same for his grandson.

I think we who want to stop the destruction of the planet are often uneasy with the exercise of power, and unhappy to think that it has come to that. I loathe it, personally. It makes me sick. But I honestly can’t think of any other path forward.

So for what it’s worth, tell your son that my advice is, stand for parliament in the next election. We need people in power who want to stop the destruction of the world. He can’t be worse than the ones already there.

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