Permaculture and the 'Pure Land'

"If you know what life is worth/You will look for yours on Earth" --Bob Marley

"Pure Land" Buddhism is a popular branch of Mahayana Buddhism which is found throughout East Asia, including Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. It is based on the worship or veneration of Amitabha, which roughly translates as the celestial Buddha of Immeasurable Light and Life. And--like Christianity--it is soteriological in emphasis; that is, it focuses on something analogous to the doctrine of salvation in the afterlife--the idea that this world is incorrigibly corrupt, but if we have faith and are well-behaved while here, and devout in our meditation, devotion to Amitabha, and adherence to the Precepts, we will go to the Pure Land after we die and live joyfully forever with Buddha Amitabha in a kind of Buddhist heaven.

--And for this very reason, I have no use for Pure Land Buddhism. It strikes me, like the Christian concept of heaven, as a compensatory myth for those--the vast majority of ordinary people--who are traumatized by, and therefore in deep denial about, the inescapable reality of death, and hence the extinction of the only "self" they have ever known up close.

I am fortunate, I suppose, not to share this consuming anxiety about death and impermanence--at least, not to the degree that affects most people. So I don't need a compensatory myth about Heaven or the "Pure Land" or anything else. One of my favorite moments, for example, in an interview with Permaculture founder Bill Mollison, a few years before his death, was when a young German student asked him what he thought would happen after he died.  With his usual belly-laugh, Mollison replied,

"You die, and somebody lays you down.  Flies come and lay eggs in your orifices...and maggots eat your body, and crawl off and bury you in the soil, and the wind blows, and slowly you disappear into the surrounding country." And it didn't bother him a bit.

While his own quirky and charismatic personality may largely account for this nonchalance, I can't help thinking that his lifetime immersion in Permaculture theory and practice had a lot to do with his ease and comfort with his own impermanence. Living close to nature, and applying the patterns he observed there to his own design principles and practices, Mollison discerned (rightly, I think) that the Earth is already the "Pure Land" and that to reinhabit that land, all we need to do is to observe, study, and apply the regenerative principles by which ecosystems self-organize, grow, and diversify, recycling everything and wasting nothing. Just as he saw through the delusional "Man/Nature" dichotomy that afflicts our dysfunctional civilization, Mollison also, by his immersion in Nature, was able to see through the equally delusional "life/death" and "self/other" dichotomies that go along with it.

And by studying and applying these Permaculture principles ourselves, we too can (re-) inhabit the "Pure Land" while we are alive, and peacefully let go, allowing ourselves to be recycled and re-absorbed into it when we die.