Hence my concern: we may, in our efforts to adopt Buddhism as an alternative to the worst in our own culture, end up divesting Buddhism of one of its most essential aspects. In doing so we may coincidentally and quite unwittingly denude Western Buddhism of the very aspect of Buddhism that we need to confront the magnitude of the present environmental crisis. But why, we may well ask, would contemporary Buddhism, especially Green Buddhism, develop this tendency to disavow or even deny a crucial element of traditional Buddhism? Part of the answer to this question lies no doubt in the historical fact that the forms of Buddhism that initially attracted the widest popularity in the West, and especially in North America, were forms in which we see a relatively greater emphasis on the horizontal, relational dimension of the tradition, forms in which one might initially overlook the importance of the developmental aspect.. This is most obvious in the Western appropriation of Zen, for example, especially in its most popularised forms, those based on the writings of D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts. It is, however, no historical accident that it was these particular forms of Buddhism that initially prevailed in much of the West, and consequently I see this as simply another symptom of a deeper circumstance, one that has more to do with our own cultural history than with that of Asian Buddhism. What I am suggesting is that the Western cultural sensibility driving the critique of our own history of environmental practice is also significantly shaping how we see Buddhism, even influencing which forms of Buddhism strike us as the most attractive. This same Western sensibility, moreover, is also driving us towards a significantly distorted view of Buddhism, one which in its fear of hierarchy leads us to imagine the solution of our problems in a 'Buddhism' free of any vertical or hierarchial structure.

The key to my argument lies in the degree to which many of us within the circle of Green Buddhism are extremely uncomfortable, even mortified, by any aspect of Buddhism that is in any sense hierarchical, so much so that some of us feel the need to redefine Buddhism, to purge it of anything that even vaguely resembles the Western forms of environmentally callous elitism and privilege we seek so desperately to flee. The motivation here is understandable and, in part, even commendable, yet its excesses are nonetheless deluded and the outcome may well be disastrous-for Western Buddhism certainly, and perhaps even for Western environmental ethics more broadly. How has this come about? We have identified in our own cultural history an unquestionable tendency towards attitudes of exploitation and domination of nature, and we have rightly associated those attitudes with cultural institutions of hierarchy and privilege. The unwitting and often quite unconscious mistake we make, however, comes when we assume that all forms of hierarchy are the same. We assume that any and every manifestation of hierarchy leads inevitably to the dead-end of domination and exploitation, and so we have even banished that now dreaded 'h-word' from all forms of polite conversation. And, as Western Buddhists, we reassure ourselves that any apparently hierarchical element in our cherished Buddhism must be a mistake, perhaps the later corruption of some monastic elitists. Or perhaps we see it simply as an historical anomaly, one that can and indeed should be quickly swept under the carpet. But is this unconsidered assumption that all forms of hierarchy lead to attitudes of domination and exploitation actually true? And even if it appears to be true within the (limited) context of our own cultural history, can we simply assume that it is true in other cultural traditions as well? Is this not actually the height of cultural arrogance? And are we not overlooking the very difference between Western and Buddhist traditions that I noted when discussing the fundamental 'permeability' Buddhist hierarchial thinking has in the context of the six sa.msaaric life-forms? I would answer affirmatively to all of the above, and I would submit that our fear of any vertical dimension to the spiritual life has become so strong, that we are literally terrified of being confronted by the fact that Buddhism is integrally hierarchical.

Consider the following passage written by Gary Snyder, one of the most influential and respected Green Buddhists, someone who has influenced much of my own appreciation for the 'Green' implications of Buddhism. Feeling the need to distinguish a Buddhist sense of spiritual 'training' from what he sees as a more artificial notion of spiritual cultivation, Snyder observes that:

'The word cultivation, harking to etymologies of till and wheel about, generally implies a movement away from natural process. In agriculture it is a matter of 'arresting succession, establishing monoculture'. Applied on the spiritual plane this has meant austerities, obedience to religious authority, long bookish scholarship, or in some traditions a dualistic devotionalism (sharply distinguishing 'creature' and 'creator') and an overriding image of divinity being 'centralised,' a distant and singular point of perfection to aim at. The efforts entailed in such a spiritual practice are sometimes a sort of war against nature-placing the human over the animal and the spiritual over the human. The most sophisticated modern variety of hierarchical spirituality is the work of Father Teilhard de Chardin, who claims a special evolutionary spiritual destiny for humanity under the name of higher consciousness. Some of the most extreme of these Spiritual Darwinists would willingly leave the rest of earth-bound animal and plant life behind to enter an off-the-planet-realm transcending biology'. 7