Buddhist Resources in the Race Against Global Heating

Beginner’s Mind as an Antidote to Misguided Certainty and the Status Quo

Abstract

Indigenous scholar Kyle Whyte notes the limitations of embracing a “crisis epistemology” which seeks a clear, instrumentalist solution to a problem based on conceits of certainty rather than embracing an integrated view of ecological complexity with an eye toward genuine restoration, sustainability, and justice. If crisis epistemologies lack creative and nuanced engagement with possible futures they easily perpetuate, if unintentionally, destructive colonial industrial-growth paradigms that have brought humans into conflict with the biosphere. This essay explores the problem of certainty and the way that Buddhism offers an alternative to colonialist “crisis epistemology.” The value of uncertainty is manifest in Buddhism as a recognition of the nature of saṃsāra as marked by impermanence, dukkha, and no-self (the trilakṣaṇa) and comes out explicitly with the “don’t know mind” (buzhi xin 不知心) of the Chan tradition. I examine the application of these ideas within contemporary engaged Buddhist communities, considering how they have seized upon uncertainty as exemplified in “don’t know mind” to generate “wise hope” or “active hope” and move beyond despair into effective activism. I argue that Buddhist comfort with uncertainty provides an antidote to the instrumentalist conceit of certainty and opens space for transformative activism.