"Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives" kicked off today. Most of class was dedicated to a discussion of Myōe's "Letter to the Island," which turned out to be a great starter text, but before that I tried to set up what we were doing with some books. The top three are our main sources of material; I brought along Mannahatta to make the point that our thinking should be "grounded" where we are. The course gambit, expressed in the book pile: academic work, introduced in the new (2024!) edition of Grounding Religion: A Field Guide to the Study of Religion and Ecology, should be grounded in the place we are, Turtle Island, with Braiding Sweetgrass helping us learn to recognize our dependence on and obligations to the land and our non-human kin, but also watered by the Dharma-Rain of Buddhist traditions. It'll make more sense in practice!
And speaking of practice, students' first assignment is to write a "Myōe letter" of their own - personal, addressed to a nonhuman they already have a relationship with, modeled on Myōe's. In an announcement explaining the assignment, I wrote
I hope you left our discussion with a strong sense of just how weird Myōe's text is, a first taste of how challenging (and enlightening) Buddhist perspectives can be. I hope you also got an appreciation that "Buddhism" is no one thing but a vast world of ideas and practices from many times and places, often in disagreement, and often, on first reading, very weird. Myōe's letter doesn't just seem weird to us because we're reading it in English translation most of a millennium after it was written, with scant to no knowledge of its sources and context. It was meant to seem weird to the contemporaries who might read it, too. How absurd to write a letter to an island!! But is it just performative?
Your assignment, to write what I'm calling a "Myōe letter," is also very weird, indeed weird in ways you'll appreciate only when you actually sit down to write it. (I'm a firm believer in learning by doing, for pedagogical as well as Buddhist reasons. Talking about religion, especially a practice-based tradition, gives you at most the illusion of understanding it.) To be clear, I'm not asking you to be Myōe or Buddhist or Japanese or to address a Japanese island! The task is for you to write a personal letter to an island or tree or other nonhuman with whom you already have a relationship. Even if you may already hug that tree or dance your thanks to that piece of land, writing a letter is a weird thing to do, so, for the benefit of that mountain or river or whomever, include a few paragraphs, as Myōe does, articulating what an odd thing you're doing in writing the letter and why. If you find this impossible to do, find words for that too. (I can tell you about a woman who, invited to talk to a plant, tearfully apologized to the plant for not being able to speak to it.) We can talk about the assignment in class Thursday as well, but only if you've started to do it. ;)
