The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [109]
The Voice of the Golden Goose
Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi
Sometimes the political prescriptions of religious people can seem too general to be helpful, but we should not confuse the general with the deep. The core of the world’s social and political problems is emotional, moral, and, yes, spiritual, and if real progress is to be made, it must begin at those deep levels. This essay by the Venerable Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Buddhist monk and scholar, explains the deep shift in our worldview required to address the coming climate crisis.
One of the Jataka stories, the Palasa Jataka, recounts a past life of the Buddha when he was a golden goose living in the Himalayas. The goose would regularly stop to rest in a large Judas tree, where he befriended the resident deity of the tree. On one occasion a certain bird, which had eaten the fruit of a banyan tree, perched in the Judas tree and voided its excrement into a fork in its trunk. A seed of the banyan fruit thereby germinated and began to grow into a small banyan tree.
When the golden goose next visited the deity in the Judas tree, the banyan had grown four inches and had bright red shoots and green leaves. The royal goose told his friend: “Every tree on which a banyan shoot springs up is destroyed by its growth. Don’t allow this banyan to grow in the fork in your trunk or else it will destroy your home. Remove it immediately before it tears your dwelling limb from limb.”
The Judas deity, however, demurred: “The shoot is small and harmless. It will provide shade and delightful tendrils.” The goose insisted: “The shoot is dangerous; it will lead to your harm; as it grows bigger, it will push you off your tree and even destroy your home.” When the Judas deity persisted in its decision, the goose understood it was futile to press its argument. It thus flew away and never returned.
As time went by, all happened as the golden goose had foretold. The banyan shoot sent down roots which wrapped around the trunk of its host and consumed its share of soil water and nutriment. The banyan grew bigger and stronger, until it split the Judas tree, which toppled to its death, bringing the deity’s home down with it.
This ancient tale, originally intended as an allegory for the destructive power of evil, can be read as a parable for our present-day crisis of global warming. The banyan seed represents the use of carbon-based fuels, whose emissions of carbon dioxide are invisible, odorless, and, in small quantities, harmless. Just as the banyan shoot grew slowly and imperceptibly, so these fuels, diffused into the atmosphere, produce changes that are initially undetectable. But just as the mature banyan tree destroyed its host, unrestricted use of fossil fuels menaces the civilization that depends on them.
When coal was first used to transform water into steam and thereby drive a steam engine, no one could have foreseen that this marvelous invention marked the beginning of a trajectory that would one day even threaten the prospects for human life on Earth. Yet this is precisely the predicament that we currently face. Like the deity in the Judas tree, we have had sufficient warnings: many golden geese have cautioned us about the dangers of excessive carbon emissions. Already in June 1988 a scientific conference in Toronto on climate change concluded:
Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war . . . It is imperative to act now.
In the same month, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Space Center, told Congress that it was virtually beyond doubt that burning fossil fuels was warming the Earth. He warned that if current trends continued the result would be more severe droughts and heat waves, but also heavier rains and