
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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Archaeology, Religion-and-Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities Archaeology, Religion-and-Ecology, and the Environmental Humanities
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Buddhist “Landscapes” and Monastic Gardens Buddhist “Landscapes” and Monastic Gardens
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Monasteries, Reservoirs, Lowland Rice Agriculture, and Rainmaking Cults: “Local” and “Translocal” Landscapes and Representations Monasteries, Reservoirs, Lowland Rice Agriculture, and Rainmaking Cults: “Local” and “Translocal” Landscapes and Representations
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Forests, Rock-Shelters, and Hilltop Monasteries: Human, Nonhuman, and “More-than-Human” Entanglements Forests, Rock-Shelters, and Hilltop Monasteries: Human, Nonhuman, and “More-than-Human” Entanglements
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Notes Notes
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further reading further reading
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12 Buddhism and the “Natural” Environment
Get accessJulia Shaw is Associate Professor in South Asian Archaeology at University College London, Institute of Archaeology. Current research interests include South Asian environmental and socio-religious history; archaeology as environmental humanities; religious and medico-environmental worldviews and disability studies; interfaces between environmental archaeology, ecological public health, and global climate-change activism. She has been conducting archaeological fieldwork in India since 1998 and directs the Sanchi Survey Project. She is author of Buddhist Landscapes in Central India (Routledge, 2007), articles on topics related to the archaeology of Buddhism, Hinduism, socio-ecological history, land and water governmentality, and landscape survey archaeology and remote-sensing; and editor of four special volumes of World Archaeology (Archaeologies of Water; Religious Change; Environmental Ethics, and Medicine and Healthcare).
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Published:19 May 2022
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Abstract
This chapter explores archaeology’s contribution to scholarly understandings of Buddhist attitudes toward the “natural” environment and the relevance of such material for global discourse on the contemporary climate-change and biodiversity crises. It draws on evidence from central India for monastic engagement with food production, land and water use in lowland zones, as well as attitudes toward, and engagement with, upland forested areas, including the monastic occupation of prehistoric rock-shelters clustered around hilltops that were developed into architectural monastery complexes during the late centuries bce. Both sets of evidence need to be viewed together in order to address critically text-based discourse on Buddhist environmental ethics with its predominant focus on Buddhist attitudes toward the suffering of animals and the “beauty” of “nature,” over and above human-centric variables, and to reassess art-historical discourse on monastic gardens as arenas for transcending and viewing “nature” from a distance. Such an approach also helps to break down socially constructed polarizations between “peripheral” forests and “productive” lowland agriculture that have long since shaped discourse on India’s religious, political, and environmental history.
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