Buddhists. William R. LaFleur investigates the soteriological role of na-
ture according to the twelfth-century Buddhist monk Saigy ̄o, whose use
of natural ‘images’ in his poetry serves to “create a union of the subject
and the real object of his image-ing, that is, the Reality itself.”^4 K ̄ukai
(eighth/ninth century), founder of Japan’s Shingon school of Buddhism,
explains the Buddhahood of plants:
The Dharmakayaconsists of the Five Great Elements within which
space and plants-and-trees [s ̄omoku] are included. Both this space and
these plants-and-trees are the dharmakaya. Even though with the physi-
cal eye one might see the coarse form of plants-and-trees, it is with the
subtle eye that the subtle color can be seen. Therefore, without any al-
teration in what is in itself, trees-and-plants may, unobjectionably, be re-
ferred to as [having] Buddha [-nature].^5K ̄ukai posits the identity of the Buddhist Absolute, the dharmakayaor
‘body of the dharma’ “with all forms and things in the phenomenal,
mundane world.”^6 For K ̄ukai and Saigy ̄o, concrete phenomena in nature
have a soteriological function, at once symbolizing and participating in
the Absolute.
Plants are one of the four basic elements in Lakota metaphysics as
explained by Lakota elder Wallace H. Black Elk. The four elements are
fire, water, rock, and green. Greenrefers to the plants that Grandmother
Earth grows out of her body. Black Elk describes being in the woods, ex-
periencing the plants breathing and communicating among one another:
“I am part of it,” he says, “so there’s a chemical language. I was happy
there knowing I was related to them.”^7 Black Elk is conversant with the
discourse of Western disciplines, in which he identifies fours ‘languages’:
the scientific, legal, psychological, and religious. Here he uses the word
chemicalto invoke a context of relationality in which living plants ex-
change life-force with other participants in the web of life.
Ecologically, community pertains to the relations among all the en-
tities that constitute nature. Life and health in biological terms (for the
person as ‘the body of food’ in Hindu terms) depend on the nourishment
extracted from other life-forms within the food chain. In human social
life, health and healing depend in part on relations with others. In this
connection, Kalupahana says that early Buddhism did not seek to “en-
able a person to attain spiritual health and not be part of this world.”
The disease of suffering, caused by craving, is not merely an individual,
psychological matter; elimination of craving requires reforms at the level
of community:
170 religious therapeutics