Buddha's Maritime Nature: A Case Study in Shambhala Buddhist Environmentalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to articulate the environmental ethic of one Shambhala Buddhist community in Atlantic Canada. Shambhala Buddhism is a Westernized form of Tibetan Buddhism founded by the charismatic Tibetan teacher, Chogyam Trungpa. (2) In 1977 Trungpa decided to relocate his community, then based in Boulder, Colorado, to Halifax, capital of Nova Scotia, where Shambhala International's headquarters are now housed. In attempting to fulfill their founder's dream of Shambhala, or an enlightened society, Trungpa's followers have had a significant socio-economic impact on Atlantic Canada, particularly in the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (Swick). Environmentalism is an aspect of that impact that has yet to be fully explored. This study involves investigating one environmental initiative of the Shambhala Buddhist community and describing the values, beliefs, and motives that inform that project. In particular, this paper focuses on the ethic of Windhorse Farm, a sustainable community located in New Germany, Nova Scotia and established by Shambhala practitioners Jim and Margaret Drescher. The overall aim of this research is to contextualize the ethic underlying Windhorse Farm vis-a-vis Shambhala and Buddhist ethics, and to consider these results in light of theoretical issues raised within academic treatments of environmental Buddhism, in order to shed light on those issues and to illuminate the relevance of such treatments for the practice of environmental Buddhism. The results presented here are based on interviews with the Dreschers and other Shambhala practitioners, participant-observation in Shambhala and Windhorse programs and retreats, and content analysis of Shambhala documents and publications. (3) As a study that focuses on particular environmental projects and the communities and individuals involved, this is a study of what has been called or ethics. As such I am compelled to be mindful of certain features of this approach to religious ethics, some of which have been usefully outlined by Robert Orsi and Maria Heim. The first relevant feature is the importance of recognizing that it is impossible to abstract moral decision-making from local circumstances and conditions, which include, among other things, complex personal histories and personalities, social circumstances, and cultural factors. In other words, more transhistorical and translocal factors such as Shambhala Buddhist teachings interact in complex ways with local and particular conditions to inform moral perspectives and decisions. Taking this complexity into account means that rather than seeking the Shambhala environmental ethic, and taking particular Shambhalians to be convenient representatives of this, I seek to explore the nature of the ethic that underlies their work and to articulate in what ways it is and is not informed by the Shambhala teachings. To put it succinctly, I need to be mindful of the fact that individual Shambhala practitioners are more than just Shambhala practitioners. So, for example, in Margaret Drescher's approach to gardening and food production at Windhorse, which has been informed by beliefs and values from a range of sources, including organic gardening, permaculture, and biodynamics, and which cannot be understood as reflecting Shambhala Buddhist beliefs exclusively. A second factor to take into account in an empirical study is the recognition that there is a temporal aspect to morality (Heim 583). This entails acknowledging, for example, that the Windhorse ethic has changed over time, and is still evolving. This is of course one of the challenges, but also stimulating aspects of dealing with living humans as opposed to conveniently dead authors: they can and do change their minds, so the work takes on a dynamic quality that undermines any attempt to make definitive claims. This supports Robert Orsi's point that the study of lived religion provides both a way to study religion and a critique of the discipline of Religious Studies at the same time (174), for by highlighting the shifting nature of religious phenomena it belies the tendency in Religious Studies to reify and essentialize traditions such as Buddhism. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".