Concept and Experience of Nature in Japanese Buddhism

In Theravāda Buddhism, as in the whole of Hinayāna, of “Lesser Vehicle”, nature is present mostly on the symbolic level, for example: a tree, the lotus flower, many sprouts and lianas, a rhinoceros, a tiger, the lion’s roar, etc., are symbolic expressions, metaphors for the Buddhist spiritual and ethical messages. However, in the Buddhist “Great Vehicle”, Mahāyāna, especially in its Chinese and Japanese variants, the relation towards nature is essentially mod­ified, probably also due to the influence of Daoism, but in the core of these new teachings is principally the belief in a shared “identity” between saṃsāra and nirvāṇa, i.e., that the world and salvation are the “same”. In the cosmic landscapes of Avataṃsakasūtra, shining worlds of Buddhas and bodhisattvas not only glow in all rainbow colours, but they also sound in wonderful tunes, they are fragrant with heavenly perfumes, and so on. Dōgen, the founder of the Japanese sōtō Zen Buddhism, writes that mountains “walk” and rivers “stand”, and we can also find wonderful descriptions of nature in other variants of Japanese Buddhism (in the texts of Kūkai, Shinran and others). This modified attitude towards nature is beautifully reflected in the “classical” haiku poetry (Bashō, Buson, Issa), in woodblock prints (Hokusai, Hiroshige), and in a very special and sublime sense of beauty in the Japanese art of gardening, where na­ture is subtly harmonized with the symbolic language of the Buddhist tradition. At the end of this contribution, I raise a larger question of whether this relation with nature yields not only the essential difference between the Buddhist Lesser and Great Vehicles, but also between Indian and Chinese and Japanese cultures themselves.