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 moveme...