Buddhist Pathways into Contemporary Nature Religion

 Buddhist Pathways into Contemporary Nature Religion

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Revised chapter draft 02 • October 26, 2026

Learning to belong to a living world

What happens when a person speaks in the voice of a threatened forest, bows toward the Earth, or learns to attend to a watershed as a community of which humans are members? These practices invite a change in the relationship between the person and the world. The living environment becomes someone or something to whom a response is owed. Across several contemporary Buddhist and Buddhist-influenced settings, ecological belonging is cultivated through such invitations. Learning to belong involves bodily attention, emotional permission, and opportunities to act with others.

In “Doing Eco-Theology in the Anthropocene,” I situated the new American religions of nature within the search for spiritual responses to ecological crisis. “Walking the Earth Path” developed that concern through an emphasis on lived practice: the movement from reverence toward ways of living that express ecological responsibility (Mellinger 2021, 2025). Buddhism complicates this project productively. It is an internally diverse family of traditions with long histories across Asia and established communities in North America. Some contemporary Buddhist experiments also participate in the religious creativity examined elsewhere in this collection.

The question here is how Buddhist teachings and practices circulate through North American nature spiritualities, and how their meanings change as people adapt them. Circulation includes exchanges among Buddhist teachers, environmental activists, naturalists, and contemporary Pagans. The resulting practices can remain explicitly Buddhist, travel into settings without Buddhist membership, or support several affiliations at once. Three pathways recur: ecological renewal within Buddhist communities, selection by naturalist organizations, and explicit combination with other traditions, most visibly Druidry. Their histories cannot be adequately described as a single stream flowing from an Asian religious source toward Western ecological recipients.

I use ecological belonging to designate a cultivated sense of participation in a more-than-human world, accompanied by some understanding of responsibility toward it. This definition distinguishes belonging from merely enjoying a beautiful landscape. It also leaves open whether responsibility is explained through compassion, evolutionary kinship, sacred relationship, or another vocabulary. The analytical task is to examine how particular practices connect these understandings with conduct.

This chapter compares published teachings, ritual instructions, organizational histories, and first-person accounts. Its evidence is documentary. A workshop manual shows what facilitators are encouraged to do; an organizational report shows how an activity is publicly represented. Neither establishes what every participant experienced or whether a practice produced lasting environmental benefits. The comparison therefore identifies forms of religious experimentation and their stated purposes without treating advertised transformation as a measured outcome.

Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects provides the central case of a portable ecological practice repertoire. Gary Snyder and Ring of Bone Zendo offer a comparison grounded in sustained communal practice in a particular place. Thich Nhat Hanh’s Earth-centered contemplations, Tzu Chi’s environmental education, and Japanese American Jōdo Shinshū temples extend the comparison into transnational and congregational settings. Climate-grief work, naturalist forums, and combined Buddhist and Druid paths then show how care and authority are reconfigured as practices cross affiliations.

I argue that Buddhist contributions to contemporary nature religion are best understood as overlapping experiments in making ecological relationships binding. Their distinctiveness lies in how they connect attention and obligation, and in who can authorize that connection. Buddhist communities renew inherited forms; workshop networks circulate adaptable exercises; naturalist authors reorganize the authority of teachings; and practitioners of combined paths negotiate more than one religious allegiance. These processes generate a field of ecological religious creativity whose significance exceeds the formation of any single new religious body.

Reinterpreting Buddhism under ecological conditions

The claim that Buddhism is inherently ecological can make contemporary experimentation disappear into an imagined timeless essence. The opposite claim, that environmental Buddhism is inauthentic because it addresses modern problems, can make religious continuity depend on an implausible absence of change. Donald Swearer’s assessment of Buddhist eco-philosophy distinguishes several positions, including arguments for constructing an environmental ethic from Buddhist resources and approaches emphasizing situated ethical responses. His discussion also takes seriously Ian Harris’s objections to deriving environmental obligations directly from a comprehensive Buddhist worldview (Swearer 2006). Harris’s own objection was pointed. He characterized ecoBuddhism as a modern American movement whose teleological world view departs substantially from traditional Buddhist cosmology, and read it as reflexive apologetics driven largely by pressures within the tradition itself (Harris 1995). The debate soon acquired an institutional home: the Harvard conference series that produced Buddhism and Ecology gathered advocates and critics, Harris among them, in a single volume (Tucker and Williams 1997).

The distinction matters for appeals to interdependence. An account of causal relationship does not itself specify what deserves protection or how competing needs should be resolved. Explaining that a forest, a logging economy, and a consuming public are connected leaves ethical and political questions unsettled. A persuasive ecological argument must explain the obligations it draws from connection. Compassion, restraint, and judgments about avoidable harm do consequential work in that explanation. Interdependence becomes ethically significant through its interpretation within particular practices and commitments.

An important distinction follows between an environmental ethic, an ecological interpretation of Buddhism, and a religion of sacred nature. A temple can reduce waste as an expression of gratitude without making Earth its central sacred referent. A Buddhist teacher can explain dependent existence through ecological examples while retaining liberation from suffering as the governing concern. A nature-centered practice more directly places the living world within a relationship of reverence, identity, and obligation. These orientations can coexist within a community, but treating them as interchangeable would make virtually any religious environmental activity evidence of a new nature religion.

For this chapter, the strongest evidence of nature-centered religious experimentation occurs when ecological relationship organizes the practice itself: when Earth becomes an addressee, a nonhuman being becomes a speaking position, or recurring attention to place becomes a spiritual discipline. Environmental work supplies a neighboring and sometimes overlapping category. Keeping both in view allows comparison without requiring Japanese American temple members, naturalists, and Druid practitioners to share a religious identity.

Bron Taylor supplies a useful comparative framework. He distinguishes spiritual and naturalistic forms of animism alongside Gaian spirituality and Gaian naturalism, and discusses Snyder, Macy, and John Seed as Buddhist-connected exemplars. His account of the Council of All Beings allows for interpretations involving spiritual presence as well as moral imagination (Taylor 2010, chap. 2). These possibilities should not become permanent labels attached to whole persons. Nor should naturalism automatically count as ecological religion. An interpretation can reject supernatural explanations while having little to say about forests, animals, or environmental obligation.

The same caution applies to sacred nature. For this comparison, sacralization concerns practices that set aspects of the living world within relations of reverence and binding concern. The question is what those relations authorize and require. A river might become an object of contemplation, a source of identity, or a claimant on collective action. Those outcomes can overlap, but their differences matter. Feeling profoundly connected provides no automatic guarantee of effective care, and reverential language deserves the same critical scrutiny as any other religious claim.

An ecological reading of Buddhism is thus an accomplishment to investigate. Teachers select texts, interpret experiences, recommend exercises, and explain why these materials address present conditions. Their audiences may accept, modify, or dispute those explanations. Religious change becomes visible in these selections and negotiations, including the continuing importance of the traditions to which innovators hold themselves accountable.

Macy and the organization of ecological feeling

The Work That Reconnects Network traces its practices through Macy’s earlier despair-and-empowerment work and subsequent collaboration. Its history locates the development of the Council of All Beings with John Seed in Australia in 1985 and describes publications as vehicles for spreading the work. It also acknowledges that People of the Global Majority challenged cultural blind spots and helped bring work on oppression into its framework (Work That Reconnects Network n.d.-c). The history presents an evolving repertoire shaped by participants as well as founders.

The network organizes its central process as a spiral: gratitude, acknowledging pain for the world, seeing differently, and going forth into action. Workshops vary in duration and content; the network also supports communities of practice and encourages repeated engagement. Its materials permit adaptation with attribution and recommend learning from experienced facilitators (Work That Reconnects Network n.d.-e). This combination of a recognizable sequence and adaptable exercises helps explain how a practice can circulate without requiring a standardized service or exclusive religious membership.

The sequence gives ecological distress a public interpretation. Pain becomes intelligible as a response to relationship. Participants are invited to recognize grief as evidence that something beyond the isolated individual matters. Gratitude prepares an acknowledgment of dependence; the recognition of pain makes loss speakable; a changed perspective prepares renewed participation. The sequence thus connects an account of the person with a practical route back into shared activity. Its proposed direction is from overwhelmed concern toward a capacity to respond.

The Council of All Beings gives ecological identification a more explicit dramatic form. Its instructions ask participants to speak on behalf of another life-form or ecological feature. Preparation can involve time outdoors, imaginative identification, mask-making, and practice speaking or moving in that role. Participants subsequently gather in a structured council. The instructions recognize variation among councils and recommend guidance from members of a tradition when using rituals that belong to it (Work That Reconnects Network n.d.-a).

The council’s proposed arrangement changes who can be represented in a gathering. A human speaker temporarily presents the needs of a being usually absent from human deliberation. This is a striking exercise in role-taking, although its authority remains problematic: a human imagination can reproduce human preferences while claiming to speak beyond them. The critical question is how a group distinguishes attentive representation from projection. Natural-history knowledge, openness to correction, and recognition of the exercise’s limits could matter as much as emotional intensity.

The contrast between speaking about a forest and speaking as a forest clarifies the exercise. In the first arrangement, the forest remains an object described by a human observer. In the second, a participant must formulate a perspective from which human activity becomes something endured, feared, or contested. This displacement can make familiar justifications less comfortable. The forest’s representative may call into question assumptions that would pass unnoticed in a discussion organized entirely around human interests. The exercise creates an opportunity for moral reconsideration; its force depends on how the borrowed voice is constructed and received.

The manual’s description of being chosen by another life-form also matters. It permits participants to approach identification as an encounter rather than as the unrestricted selection of an attractive symbol. That invitation can be interpreted imaginatively or spiritually. The ritual can therefore coordinate participation without first resolving whether a nonhuman presence literally communicates. Such interpretive openness helps explain portability, while leaving facilitators responsible for making room for disagreement and for avoiding claims of authority over traditions whose forms they borrow.

The Truth Mandala organizes another kind of encounter. Its instructions establish a bounded space for expressing distress, permit silence, discourage cross-talk and excessive comforting, and prescribe confidentiality. They explicitly describe the inner space as made sacred through truth-telling. Ritual objects help participants express different feelings; participation in the center is voluntary (Work That Reconnects Network n.d.-d). The sacred here is given a practical organization through rules about entry, speaking, listening, and response.

This detail connects the chapter with the Earth Path’s concern for lived practice. Ecological feeling receives a time, a place, and a form of acknowledgment that ordinary conversation may hurriedly repair or dismiss. Rules against cross-talk change what a disclosure makes relevant next: another participant is asked to receive the expression rather than immediately explain, dispute, or solve it. The instructions therefore locate support partly in the conduct of listeners. An ecological relationship becomes a concern that the gathering is organized to hold.

The network’s glossary brings systems thinking, Thich Nhat Hanh’s interbeing, moral imagination, and criticism of an industrial growth society into one vocabulary, set within a narrative of a Great Unraveling and a life-sustaining alternative (Work That Reconnects Network n.d.-b). Treating the work as simply Buddhism transferred into a workshop misses these additional intellectual and political resources.

The Work That Reconnects can therefore be examined as an infrastructure for circulating ecological practices: a repertoire, a public history, and means of further participation. Calling it a portable nature religion remains an interpretation requiring care. Some participants may understand it religiously; others may approach it as activist education or mutual support. Its significance for this collection lies partly in its ability to carry practices across those differences without settling them in advance.

Snyder and belonging through sustained practice

Snyder brought an ecological and political Buddhism to the Sierra foothills. His 1961 essay “Buddhist Anarchism,” revised as “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution” in Earth House Hold, joined Buddhist insight to a demand for social transformation and is often read as an early statement of what became socially engaged Buddhism (Snyder 1969). Turtle Island, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975, and the essays of The Practice of the Wild joined Zen attention to bioregional knowledge of a watershed, its creatures, and its human histories (Snyder 1974, 1990).

Ring of Bone Zendo’s history begins with Snyder introducing lay Zen practice on San Juan Ridge. It describes sitting with volunteer builders after his move there in 1970, the expansion of practice to neighbors and friends, and the eventual construction of a zendo. Visiting teachers and retreats connected this local community with wider Buddhist relationships (Ring of Bone Zendo n.d.). Its history shows the organizational labor that sustained practice requires: shared space, recurring participation, and relationships with teachers.

In an interview, Snyder emphasizes zazen, traditional chanting, translation into English, and the discipline of a well-run meditation hall. He also explains his commitment to lay life and his refusal to treat visiting monastics as inherently different from other participants (Snyder 1988). These remarks complicate any assumption that ecological experimentation necessarily weakens Buddhist continuity. Adaptation can involve explicit judgments about which forms of discipline to preserve and which social arrangements to change.

The comparison with Macy concerns how belonging is sustained. A portable workshop can gather people around a shared exercise before they return to widely separated lives. A local practice community can embed religious commitments in continuing relationships among neighbors. Neither arrangement ensures ecological responsibility. Place can become a romantic possession, while portable practices can help people recognize responsibilities they previously ignored. The difference is a question about the opportunities each arrangement provides for learning, correction, and accountability.

For the Earth Path, the significant issue is how attention persists after an exceptional experience. Knowing a place requires opportunities to encounter it repeatedly and to notice consequences over time. The social resources enabling that attention also deserve examination. Stable residence, access to land, and discretionary time are unevenly distributed. An account of ecological belonging should consider people whose relationship with place is shaped by displacement, insecure housing, or exhausting work. Belonging cannot fairly be measured by access to a retreat landscape.

Snyder’s case therefore helps distinguish ecological orientation from institutional separation. A community can contribute to nature-centered religious creativity while remaining a Buddhist practice community. Whether its members use a broader nature-religion vocabulary is a separate empirical question. The comparison becomes more useful when this difference is preserved.

Asian and Asian American Buddhist initiatives within the comparison

Thich Nhat Hanh’s Earth-centered contemplations challenge any simple division between inherited Buddhism and ecological invention. Plum Village’s instructions pair readings addressed to Mother Earth with mindful prostration, coordinated through a reader and bell master. The community is instructed to bow together after hearing the text, with time for breathing before rising (Thich Nhat Hanh 2013). Ecological relationship is given a bodily and collective form within an explicitly Buddhist practice setting.

The opening contemplation moves through a sequence of relationships: bodily nourishment, kinship with other beings, recognition of shared material existence, and promises to sustain awareness. Earth is addressed directly, while the speaker’s body is located within the processes being addressed. The literary movement joins intimacy to an account of dependence. Its ethical consequence appears in the promises that follow: the speaker undertakes to remember the relationship through continued practice (Thich Nhat Hanh 2013).

The collective instructions give this movement a temporal and bodily form. A reader supplies the words, a bell coordinates the transition, and the community bows together before returning to an upright posture. In this reading, the practice brings participants into a publicly coordinated relationship with Earth. The contemplation also anticipates forgetting amid daily concerns, making repetition necessary. Belonging is something to renew when ordinary absorption loosens its hold. This is especially clear evidence for the chapter’s argument because ecological relationship organizes both the text and the prescribed action.

The community’s account of his life describes environmental teaching, the move toward vegan practice, and the development of forms of meditation suited to shared daily life (Plum Village n.d.). The example belongs within a transnational Buddhist history. It cannot be adequately assigned to a category in which Asian communities preserve the past and Western converts alone create the future. Innovation and continuity operate through relationships that cross that division.

Tzu Chi supplies a different American setting. Its report on environmental education at Shelyn Elementary School in Rowland Heights, California, describes volunteers teaching recycling through practical exercises and connecting care for Earth with teachings attributed to Dharma Master Cheng Yen. The report concerns school activities in May 2023 and follows an earlier partnership (Wang 2023). Here Buddhist organizational resources enter a public educational setting through work with materials and habits of care.

The Jōdo Shinshū temples of the Buddhist Churches of America, Japanese American congregations whose mainland mission dates to 1899, provide the most fully documented case. Jeff Wilson finds that environmental activity in North American and Hawaiian Shin temples clusters around education, temple greening, and ritual. Awareness appears by 1970, with organized efforts emerging in recent decades through the EcoSangha and Green Hongwanji movements. Wilson traces these to Japanese resources such as mottainai (non-wasting), gratitude to ancestors, and indebtedness, combined with North American ones, including the temple’s role in community and ethnic life and the Dharma school system. He also notes a focus on the temple community rather than on wider public activism (Wilson 2024). Rev. Don Castro of the Seattle Betsuin, who called Buddhism “cosmic ecology,” wrote an EcoSangha resolution, passed by the BCA’s National Council, that calls on its temples to promote ecologically friendly behavior “in the spirit of mottainai” (Goto 2017). In 2025 the BCA reported Earth Day services led by members of its EcoSangha Committee, with environmental Dharma talks and the gatha “Precious Earth” (Ito and La Monte 2025).

The comparison broadens what counts as ecological practice while preserving the distinction between environmental engagement and nature religion. Sorting reusable materials organizes attention and responsibility through ordinary work. An Earth-directed prostration makes the planet an explicit participant in a reverential relationship. A temple service may connect environmental concern with inherited liturgy and communal gratitude. These practices warrant comparison because each makes ecological concern actionable, even though their sacred objects and religious purposes differ.

Including these initiatives changes the account of innovation. Buddhist ecological creativity appears within transnational lineages, Japanese American congregational histories, public education, and deliberately combined paths. Asian and Asian American communities belong within the explanation as interpreters and organizers of contemporary practice. Their contributions also direct attention toward intergenerational teaching and recurring congregational work, forms of continuity that a focus on charismatic authors and exceptional workshops can easily miss.

Climate grief and the practice of care

Ecological loss raises questions familiar to those who accompany suffering: how to remain present, how to respond when control is limited, and how to act without assurances of success. Halifax’s account of living by vow links her experience with dying to moral sensitivity and continuing commitment. Her formulation extends care toward a suffering planet while insisting on engagement (Halifax 2019a). This is a religious ethic of response under uncertainty, with relevance beyond end-of-life settings.

Her climate speech provides a politically explicit example. Speaking at Fire Drill Fridays in December 2019, Halifax called for organizing, voting, protest, and accountability. The phrase “a planet on hospice” appears within a quotation she attributes to lawyer Mariel Nanasi, as one possible future contrasted with systemic change (Halifax 2019b). The attribution matters. The speech supports an argument about urgent action in the face of threatened loss; it cannot establish that Halifax pronounces Earth’s death inevitable.

The distinction becomes sharper in “Three Practices to Combat Climate Grief.” Michael Kearney, Macy, Radhule Weininger, BJ Miller, and Balfour Mount explicitly favor palliative care over planetary hospice. Their account preserves uncertainty about outcomes while advocating care and efforts to save what can be saved. They bring the Work That Reconnects together with Earth-connection exercises and Buddhist-derived awareness practices (Kearney et al. 2023). The collaboration is direct documentary evidence of exchange among these approaches.

Kearney’s Becoming Forest extends the theme into a literary register, presenting deep belonging as a response to ecological grief (Kearney 2023). Fiction can make a spiritual possibility available to readers through a narrated life. It occupies a different evidentiary position from a report of a workshop or a temple program: its relevance here is the circulation of an imaginative vocabulary of belonging.

The metaphor also needs limits. A planet is not a single patient, and an account of collective illness can obscure differences between those causing harm and those most exposed to it. The relevant ethical questions include whose suffering receives attention and whether appeals to acceptance displace demands for prevention and repair. In these sources, continued action is integral to care. Their importance lies in making ecological commitment possible without demanding emotional invulnerability or certainty about the future.

This thread strengthens the chapter’s argument about belonging. Grief marks a relationship that continues to make claims even when preservation is incomplete. An ethic of care can hold together mourning, protection, and political response. Its adequacy depends in part on whether those who suffer are supported in their differing capacities to act, rather than required to display a reassuring passage from distress to hope.

Naturalist interpretations and changing authority

Naturalistic Buddhism and religious naturalism intersect, but their labels do not designate the same position. Gil Fronsdal identifies his approach as naturalistic while locating himself within Theravāda Buddhism. He describes his involvement as deeply religious, emphasizes accountability to Buddhist scriptures, and explicitly associates his approach with religious naturalism without equating them (Fronsdal 2022). Naturalism here is an interpretive orientation within a continuing religious commitment.

Fronsdal’s “Buddhism in Nature” makes a further connection by treating natural settings as supports for practice and sources of instruction about change and dependence. He connects care for the environment with care for human well-being (Fronsdal n.d.). This ecological argument must be read alongside, rather than inferred automatically from, his naturalistic commitments. The pairing demonstrates why classifications based solely on disbelief in supernatural entities are insufficient for studying nature religion.

Jay Forrest’s 2016 essay on the Spiritual Naturalist Society website proposes a different ordering of authority. Naturalism supplies the framework within which Buddhist teachings are selected and revised. He explicitly distinguishes this project from Buddhist membership; in a comment he describes the aim as creating a form of religious naturalism (Forrest 2016). This is stronger evidence for deliberate reconstruction across a religious boundary than the observation that two traditions share an interest in meditation.

Forrest’s essay must also be dated. A later Society article says that he subsequently rejected naturalism while acknowledging the influence of his earlier work (Cheruk 2024). The earlier text remains evidence of a formulation that circulated in the organization. It should not be presented as an account of his present commitments or as a position binding the whole Society. Intellectual circulation can outlast an author’s own identification with a view.

Ursula Goodenough’s “Mindfulness,” available on a religious-naturalist educational website, explicitly extends Buddhist-associated attention into awareness of evolution, molecular life, ecological fragility, and future generations (Goodenough 2003). The object of contemplation changes as scientific accounts enter the exercise. This is a substantive ecological adaptation: knowledge about living systems is presented as material for transformed attention and responsibility.

The comparison identifies a consequential difference in religious authority. Fronsdal makes adaptation answerable to a Buddhist tradition; Forrest’s historical formulation makes Buddhism answerable to an independently adopted naturalism. Goodenough brings scientific understandings of life into contemplative attention. Similar exercises can therefore participate in different projects, depending on the commitments that justify their selection and the communities to which practitioners remain accountable.

Druidry and the possibilities of multiple belonging

Zen Druidry makes religious combination explicit. In “Deep Paganism,” hosted by the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Joanna van der Hoeven connects Buddhist compassion and reduced self-centeredness with deep ecology. Her account of walking in woodland or heath brings dharma into relation with awen, the Druid vocabulary of inspiration. She describes embodied immersion in a wider living world as spiritually significant (van der Hoeven 2021).

The OBOD shop presents van der Hoeven’s Zen Druidry (2013) as a combination of Zen teachings and Druidry oriented toward the present, the Earth, and its rhythms (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids n.d.). The synthesis is offered openly as a path available to readers. Its explicit naming makes combination a feature of religious identity itself, beyond the incidental use of an exercise from elsewhere.

OBOD’s 2014 annual review supplies a separate connection: it names Macy and Chris Johnstone’s Active Hope among books inspiring spiritual activism. It also describes contemplative Druidry developing through articles and meetings (Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids 2014). Macy’s work thus enters a Druid context through a publicly acknowledged resource for practice. The evidence supports selective uptake; it does not establish the Council of All Beings as an established Druid rite.

Multiple belonging is also an organizational possibility. Highland Oak Nemeton’s public account says its grove includes people with Buddhist and other affiliations alongside Pagan members (Highland Oak Nemeton n.d.). Such an account makes exclusive membership an inappropriate starting assumption. A participant may carry a practice between settings without abandoning either. Understanding that movement requires attention to relationships and obligations, not simply a list of borrowed concepts.

The OBOD sources are transatlantic comparisons for an American inquiry, but the combination also has North American histories. Philip Carr-Gomm’s 2013 review of Zen Druidry recalls that in the 1970s the Reformed Druids of North America experimented with combining Judaism and Zen Buddhism with their path, and that the RDNA grove in Seattle formed a branch known as the Zen Druids of North America, since renamed the Emerald Grove (Carr-Gomm 2013). Celtic Buddhism supplies a second American case. Its lineage traces to conversations in the 1970s between Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche and his student John Perks; it was incorporated as a nonprofit in 1989 and maintains the Anadaire Celtic Buddhist Center on eleven acres in Saxtons River, Vermont, where the sangha erected a stone circle (Celtic Buddhism n.d.). A Tibetan Buddhist community thus marks its land in a recognizably Celtic idiom.

Multiple belonging changes the question of transmission. A practitioner may sustain relationships with two communities whose expectations remain distinct. Meditation, seasonal celebration, and ecological service can acquire different meanings in each setting. The sociological task is to follow those relationships and the obligations they carry, including moments when a synthesis requires explanation or encounters resistance. Combined paths need not erase the traditions from which they draw, although their accounts of continuity remain open to challenge.

Authority and the durability of ecological obligation

The cases can now be compared through the practical question of what carries obligation beyond the occasion on which it is expressed. In a workshop, a facilitator coordinates a temporary gathering and offers a repertoire that participants can carry elsewhere. In a zendo or temple, recurring meetings and relationships provide opportunities to renew a commitment. In an author-centered synthesis, a text may supply the principal means of continuity. These arrangements make different demands on memory, participation, and accountability. None guarantees the passage from spiritual intensity to durable care.

Portability has both enabling and limiting consequences. A practice that does not require exclusive membership can reach people who would never join a Buddhist institution. Its openness can accommodate activists, religious practitioners, and people uncertain about religious language. The same looseness can make correction difficult when a facilitator overstates an exercise’s lineage or when participants mistake a powerful experience for sufficient understanding. Attribution, access to teachers, and relationships with affected communities become practical questions about the quality of transmission.

Local continuity supplies different resources. Repeated participation can make consequences visible: what the community teaches children, how it uses resources, and whether it continues an undertaking after enthusiasm subsides. It can also reproduce exclusions. Access to land, the money and time required to attend, language, disability, and housing security shape who can sustain participation. An ecological account of belonging should include the conditions that allow some people to appear rooted while others must keep moving.

The representation of nonhuman beings raises a related question of authority. Speaking as another being can unsettle habitual human priorities, but emotional conviction does not establish ecological knowledge. A responsible practice can be assessed by its willingness to learn about the beings represented, accept correction, and attend to people whose lives are materially bound up with the places invoked. Where Indigenous ritual forms or land relationships are involved, practitioners’ permission and authority cannot be supplied by a general claim that all traditions teach connectedness.

These questions connect religious experimentation to environmental justice. A declaration of planetary unity can leave the distribution of harm unexamined. Grief about a threatened landscape does not by itself identify the institutions producing the threat or the communities bearing its immediate costs. The Earth Path becomes more demanding when reverence informs attention to unequal exposure, contested land, and collective decisions. Its significance lies in the obligations a practice helps people recognize and sustain, including obligations that disturb their preferred account of themselves.

Ecological belonging and the question of emergence

The cases support several differentiated conclusions. Buddhist communities can intensify ecological practice while maintaining their lineages. Workshop networks can circulate Buddhist-influenced exercises among people with varied affiliations. Naturalist authors can revise Buddhist resources under a different account of authority, while Druid practitioners can develop an explicit combined path. These are related forms of religious creativity with distinct social arrangements. Authority is distributed differently across them: Shin temples green their practice while keeping lineage and congregational authority, whereas workshop networks and naturalist forums relocate authority in facilitators, authors, and personal synthesis.

Their common problem is how to make relationship with a living world consequential. Attention becomes patterned through exercises; grief receives recognition; bodies are placed in relation to Earth; obligations are expressed through vows, teaching, and practical work. This comparison concerns the means proposed for cultivating belonging. It does not imply that all the cases share a cosmology or produce equivalent environmental outcomes.

The Earth Path is useful here as a question about the connection between spiritual orientation and conduct. It should remain answerable to evidence. A beautiful account of unity can coexist with exclusion, projection, or ineffective environmental action. Studying belonging requires examining whom a community welcomes, whose knowledge it recognizes, and what responsibilities follow beyond the moment of heightened feeling.

The evidence for a single new Buddhist nature religion remains insufficient. Establishing one would require inquiry into collective self-identification, sustained institutions, authority, and relationships with existing Buddhist communities. A practice’s ability to travel can sustain a broad field of participation without producing a new bounded religious body. That possibility is sociologically significant in its own right.

For the larger collection, Buddhism therefore reveals the permeability of the category of nature religion. Some experiments fit it closely; others contribute to its practices while retaining different identities. The category becomes most useful when it helps comparisons without overriding participants’ accounts of what they are doing.

American experiments in ecological belonging show people working with inherited and newly combined resources to become more attentive participants in a vulnerable world. Their religious significance lies in the relationships they cultivate and the obligations they seek to sustain. The unfinished task is to follow those obligations into ordinary life, where claims of connection encounter the demands of care.

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