Abstract

Like Buddhism, environmental ethics encompasses a wide variety of approaches, positions, and traditions. The seminal works of the field most of which were written by North Americans, Scandinavians, and Australians often gave the impression that environmental ethics is primarily about our moral relations with the wilder parts of the biosphere. In certain respects, the ecological conception of the world chimes with the worldview of early Buddhism. First, that worldview of the Buddhism is in one sense of the term, naturalistic. Second, the worldview of early Buddhism is holistic. In environmental ethics, for its part, nature is often contrasted with the human or human‐made world rather than with the supernatural. One way to consider the relations between Buddhist philosophy and environmental ethics is to ask what value Buddhist philosophical traditions have attributed to or, for theorists of a realist inclination, discovered in nature.