LiveScience.com; Wisdom Quarterly
Are humans causing a mass extinction on the magnitude of the one that killed the dinosaurs? The answer is yes, according to a new analysis -- but we still have some time to stop it.
Mass extinctions include events in which 75 percent of the species on
Earth disappear within a geologically short time period, usually on the
order of a few hundred thousand to a couple million years.
It's happened
only five times before
in the past 540 million years of multicellular life on Earth. (The last
great extinction occurred 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs were
wiped out.)
"It's bittersweet, because we're showing that we have this crisis,"
study co-author Elizabeth Ferrer, a graduate student in biology at the
University of California at Berkeley, told LiveScience. "But we still have
time to fix this."
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Can Buddhism save the world?Prof. David Loy, Bunkyo Univ., Japan (thezensite.com)
Nelson Foster's important article "How Shall We Save the World?" raises
questions that are crucial to engaged Buddhism:
Why has institutional
Buddhism been so conspicuously ready to accommodate inequalities and
tyrannies? How did Buddhism serve [living] beings, much less save them, by
withdrawing from society?
...Buddhism not only arose
in India, it still flourishes in many South Asian countries. How much
did (and does) institutional Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia
exemplify the same social and political indifference as East Asian
Buddhism?
And what do the differences between [western] and eastern
Buddhism reveal about the cultural appropriation of Buddhism?
Both
questions should be of special interest to us western Buddhists
concerned about the acculturation of Buddhism to a very different type
of civilization.
The little I know about South Asian Buddhism suggests a more
complex situation than the one Nelson identifies in East Asia. A book by Steven Collins analyzing Buddhist ideology in pre-modern South
Asia, Nirvana and Other Buddhist Felicities, emphasizes a tension in Buddhism's social role.
[Older] Pali texts were sometimes used to rationalize an exploitative status
quo by emphasizing karma and rebirth to "naturalize" social hierarchies
and elites (including the privileges of the monastic Sangha), [sometimes falsely]
drawing parallels between buddhas and rulers (kings as bodhisattvas).
But other readings of Buddhist texts support a very different ethics
that challenged the role of rulers and viewed all violence, even state-sponsored
punishment, as immoral.
The tension between these two [readings] seems to have been
fundamental: Whereas Buddhist texts from all periods defend the authority of
kings, others from all periods show that all kings are bad.
"There
is no single and simple 'Buddhist' view of society, ideal or actual.
Society, one might better say, is a prime site for the work of Buddhist
culture, an inexhaustible fund of material on which the antagonistic
symbiosis between clerics and kings could draw, to express both sides of
the relationship" (496). More
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