Environmental Activities in North American and Hawaiian Jōdo Shinshū Temples

Abstract

This paper documents and analyses environmentalist activities in North American and Hawaiian Jōdo Shinshū temples. I argue that such activities primarily cluster around three themes: 1) educational efforts, 2) temple greening, and 3) ritual activity. Jōdo Shinshū environmental awareness began to appear by 1970. However, concerted organized efforts at preventing environmental destruction and inculcating ecological consciousness in Buddhist practitioners only emerged in recent decades, best represented by the EcoSangha and Green Hongwanji movements. The forms of engagement pursued by these movements are significantly shaped by a confluence of Japanese and American/Canadian historical and cultural forces. On the Japanese side, these include the cultural attitude of mottainai (“non-wasting”), gratitude to ancestors, and indebtedness. On the North American/Canadian side, these include temples as sources of community organizing and ethnic identity, the post-Carson environmental movement, the Dharma school system, the tendency to apply efforts inwards toward the temple community rather than toward activism in the wider public, and the particular mix of communal activity and individual responsibility that defines the North American and Hawaiian Jōdo Shinshū approach to Buddhist practice.