Tashi Black – Reflections on Buddhism and Environmental Collapse
Gampo Abbey Director, Trinkar Ötso, in conversation with former Gampo Abbey resident and temporary monastic, Tashi (Adam) Black.
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Trinkar:
You left Gampo Abbey about five years ago now, that’s a significant amount of time to look back and put things in a different context. What stands out as your highlights or your learning moments, or your ups and downs?
Tashi:
To be honest, I really remember my time at the Abbey with pretty much nothing but fondness. I have no desire to go throw everything out and take robes again and go back, but it stands as such an important period of my life. I think five and a half years on, I’m still unpacking a lot of the benefits. But even beyond that, I just think back with a lot of pleasure and satisfaction with the time I spent in robes, the kind of visceral feeling of waking up.
I loved going to Morning Chants. I loved the breakfast ritual, and I loved the 8 am to 11 am practice period. I pretty much never missed any of those. And because I didn’t have a Vajrayana practice, I was in the main shrine room the entire period, and I still rember the power of being in that room and the way the shrine room is held by the space around it, which is so vast and dramatic with the bay and sometimes the whales and whatever weather is going on.
I forget who wrote this, but I was reading some Buddhist book, this is years and years ago, and the writer was talking about the importance of holding your hermitage in your heart. And it’s really powerful that I have an actual, literal, hermitage that I can model the one in my heart after. I know what it’s like to live in a dedicated practice space. And I can conjure up that feeling as support when I need it, which is pretty often.
[Here is] one of the things that really originally motivated me to go there. I was living in Dallas, I had kind of embarked on the path of Buddhism, had a pretty strong personal practice, and I liked my life just fine. I worked at a nonprofit that I enjoyed, had good friends, family relationships, and I had this feeling that the 20 minutes of sitting I did in the morning and the 20 minutes in the afternoon were kind of the most important thing I did all day.
The reason the Abbey held such appeal for me is I just kept asking myself this question, what would it be like to be in a place where that’s actually a collective first priority? Everyone kind of agrees, at least in theory, this thing that is usually relegated to the margins of modern life is actually the thing we should be focusing on, whether it’s for the rest of our lives or just for a little while.
And so looking back on that, I still feel the same way, that was exactly it. That was exactly what I needed to have the experience of really putting that first. Even though I decided that monastic life wasn’t for me in the long run, it’s kind of this steady thrum of support, even when things are busy or crazy or honestly, really sad, just with what’s going on in the world and smaller personal challenges and tragedies that we all deal with. The practice kind of echoes, and they’re very supportive echoes. So that’s sort of a long-winded way of answering your question and related things around it.
Trinkar:
While you were here, you developed a particular interest in environmentalism and Buddhism, the intersection of those. Tell me about how that arose.
Tashi:
Yeah, how did that arise? There was that aspect of it, the interest in environmental issues kind of becoming stronger while I was at the Abbey, but there was also sort of the reverse of that, which I don’t think I told many people about. I remember the moment I decided, okay, I actually really do want to do this monastery thing. It’s something I’d been aware of for a long time, but kind of thought, yeah, in the future when that’s possible, I’d love to do it. And I remember the moment that turned from a theoretical possibility to like, oh, I’m actually going to at least try to do this. And it was on a walk I had with my brother. We were on a family trip and we were just walking along the road kind of in the woods. It was a fairly rural place we were staying, and I was just talking to him about, I think it was the Uninhabitable Earth (David Wallace Wells)
It was an issue of New York magazine that came out in 2017. I had read that and I remember it lays out when we talk about global warming, environmental crises, we kind of focus on the two degree centigrade of heating as the critical threshold. And what is different about his article is he says there’s nothing holding us to two degrees. It’s not like we either get to two degrees or we don’t get to two degrees. It’s feasible we could have two degrees, four degrees, six degrees, eight degrees of warming in the next 50, 100, however many hundred years. And so he basically takes this question of, okay, what would it look like at these various thresholds? Obviously it’s very speculative and people have criticized his article for various reasons, but I just remember how viscerally that drove home the truth of what we’re facing, or at least the possibility of an uninhabitable Earth, at least by humans. So not Earth scoured clean of all life, but catastrophic loss across however many hundreds, thousands of species. And so in some way that is still kind of obscure and subtle to me, taking in the reality of that possibility is what motivated me to go to the Abbey. It was a sense of it’s time to look really deeply just at this thing called life that I have and really examine what’s being asked of me, how to rise to the times we’re living in, and nothing clear has come out of it really.
I deepened the inquiry while I was at the Abbey. It was through my friendship with Ngejung (Ngejung Holoboff, former Abbey resident and Head Librarian and now our off-site Office Manager) more than anyone who would stock these wonderful eco dharma books in the library and was always open to talking about that stuff. And you were too. But yeah, there was a little core of people at the Abbey that I felt I could really go deep with and talk about the possibility of collapse, whatever that means.
It was this interesting kind of two-way flow of taking in that information is what gave me the motivation to make the big shift required to go into monastic life and look deeply at everything. At my spiritual relationship to the world and myself and at this sense of “what is my calling?” What obligations do we have as humans living in these times? And yeah, I’m still figuring out the answer to those questions. I’m still kind of haunted by those questions I think in a positive way.
I think it was Chögyam Trungpa who talked about the refuge vow as a kind of haunting. And I’ve never stopped thinking of it. I think monastic life is kind of a heightened version of that. I feel haunted by my time at the Abbey in a way that I really love, because one of the things that shifted for me, was that I think it came home to me just how much suffering there is unfolding in the world and how you can’t really turn away from it. There’s sort of this process that goes on through the deep practice at the Abbey where I think certain parts of you just soften and open up. And so there are these parallel processes of the impact of that suffering coming home to roost, which would be intolerable if there weren’t that parallel process of developing that kind of soft resilience of being able to be with that, the equanimity and the compassion. So your heart breaks, but it doesn’t disintegrate.
There are these parallel processes of the impact of that suffering coming home to roost, which would be intolerable if there weren’t that parallel process of developing that kind of soft resilience of being able to be with that, the equanimity and the compassion. So your heart breaks, but it doesn’t disintegrate.
That heartbreak has really informed the last five and a half years for me. When I left the Abbey, I didn’t know what was specifically next for me, but I knew I couldn’t just get a job at a software company or a bank or whatever. Not to disparage those professions at all, but I knew whatever I did had to be some kind of answer to the suffering in the world. And it’s been evolving ever since then.
While I was at the Abbey, I started volunteering for One Earth Sangha, this Buddhist environmental organization, and then eventually became a Web Producer and then a Special Projects Manager, and then Assistant Director. And then eventually I decided I needed a change, and so I stepped down and now I’m kind of in the next phase as a freelancer.
I work for a number of people who are doing these kinds of interesting projects. There’s one woman who has a prison mindfulness program where she visits New York City jails, specifically Rikers Island and with a group of volunteers and teaches mindfulness programs there. I just designed a website for her. And then there’s Johann Robbins who started the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center. I designed a new website for him. And then there’s New York Insight Meditation Center, and I think it’s really powerful to have a place, especially in a city as intense as New York, where people can come and find some stillness.
Yesterday I helped staff a day-long silent retreat, and it was really powerful just hearing people reflect on what that day of stillness had opened up and unlocked for them. So all of that is to say that I think my trajectory after the monastery has been kind of determined by that haunting nature of my time there, and I really wouldn’t have it any other way.
Trinkar:
And how do you describe how immersion in dharma has impacted your perspective on environmental issues?
Tashi:
I think more than anything, it’s drastically complicated it, which is very inconvenient sometimes. It is really possible to be very black and white on environmental issues like – oh, we just need more solar panels, or we need to transition away from fossil fuels. I think all of that is true, but I think living at the Abbey helped me sink into a different kind of understanding of karma. This whole web of every cause and every effect, and the fact that everything has 10,000 consequences and each of those consequences is informed by 10,000 causes. There’s a hopeful aspect of that. Hope is kind of a dirty word in Buddhism, so maybe there’s a different way of putting it.
There’s this sense of everything counts. I remember this as one of the guiding philosophies at One Earth Sangha, that activism can look an infinite number of ways. It’s not just marching on the streets and waving placards or chaining yourself to the gates of a fossil fuel plant. Teaching your neighbors how to start a community garden or teaching a program at an elementary school, or even just joining your local community supported agriculture, there are lots of ways these things can manifest. And because the poly crisis is so large and dense and interconnected, there are a million points of entry. So you can kind of find what it is that most calls to you and therefore where you’ll be most effective. But the other part of it is, I think I kind of realized this is not a problem that will be solved.
There’s a book called Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, and she talks about problems versus predicaments. Problems have a solution or multiple solutions. Predicaments are just these really thorny situations we find ourselves in, and we can navigate them in various ways, but solving them is not always on the table.
Realizing there’s quite a lot of warming already locked in, even if we went Carbon Zero today, there’s a lot of environmental poisoning that’s already been done. There’s a lot of species that have already been lost irretrievably. And so my view of the situation has gotten darker in a lot of ways. I’m starting to think about collapse and how that might come, and how we’re already experiencing collapse. You just look at the state of democracies around the world and you can find signs that all is not well in a lot of arenas. And you look at some of our really complex and vital systems that are in crisis as well, healthcare, education, these really fundamental things that are sending up all of these warning signs that collectively we, and I include myself in this, are practically ignoring. We might give lip service to how important this is, but in terms of meaningful action, that’s kind of stymied by the fact that a lot of us are just really just trying to get by day to day.
So it’s tempting to think that there are easy solutions to these problems, and in some cases the practical steps are fairly straightforward, like, if we could only just move to renewables and practice soil restoration and all these things. But the problem of how to motivate a sufficiently large swath of the populations to take this on as a core value – it’s not a solvable one.
I think solutions may emerge naturally. Another thing from Machado de Oliveira’s book that I really love is she says, there’s a saying in Brazil where she’s from that in a flood situation, if the water is at your knees, people will still be trying to walk and wade, essentially. It’s only once the water reaches your hips that people start to swim. And so it’s a sense of the activist community talks about like, oh, we just need to spark this mass shift in ways of thinking and living, but in some really important ways that doesn’t happen until it becomes a necessity.
I think we’re creatures of instinct in a lot of ways. It shifted my understanding of the nature of the crisis and what we do in response to it. So I’m thinking a lot now about resilience and community. The phrase that has popped into my head and is kind of reverberating there without finding an outlet just yet, is pro-social survivalism. There are these survivalist courses, but they’re all very individualistic and kind of hostile. The base assumption is everyone’s out to get you, and it’s you versus the world. And so I’m really curious about this. I haven’t found any offerings that are like – how do you really take more control over the basics of human survival and thriving in a way that is cooperative, in a way that is nurturing of community, and in a way that could plant the seeds of something healthier to come from this really extractive system that we’re embedded in.
How do you really take more control over the basics of human survival and thriving in a way that is cooperative, in a way that is nurturing of community, and in a way that could plant the seeds of something healthier to come from this really extractive system that we’re embedded in.
And so this is just a little seed that’s kind of buried in my brain and it bothers me. It’s irritating, but it’s because it wants to sprout. And I haven’t quite figured out which direction to go in yet. I think this is an inquiry over the next few years for me, and it’s something that I’ve really been moving toward since my time at the Abbey. I think this too is one of the great gifts of the Abbey or really any kind of intense contemplative environment or even just a sufficiently strong personal practice. It strips away your ability to ignore things. It’s kind of the shadow side of building awareness. You don’t get a choice in what you’re aware of, you’re aware of what’s there, and I think that’s actually really beautiful.
Trinkar:
Thus arises the practice of making friends with what’s there.
Tashi:
Exactly, yes. And it’s a constant unfolding for me. I’m still working with that five and a half years on. It feels like I’m getting closer to the bones of reality, and it’s really uncomfortable sometimes, but the alternative is kind of unthinkable, to get farther away from what’s real. It’s no solution.
Trinkar:
This phrase you’ve used, everything counts. I’ve heard people question what value Gampo Abbey is offering to the world by being in this remote area and somewhat isolated from a larger community. It’s not a new criticism, but how have you reconciled that for yourself?
Tashi:
Oh my gosh, that’s a no-brainer for me. I have never once entertained that as a serious critique of a place like the Abbey, because I have lived the impact myself. First of all, I can deconstruct it on a couple of levels. People often use this phrase like, oh, how is it being back in the world after going to the Abbey? It’s like… it’s so silly to me. There is no part of the world that is not in the world. And so the fact that there is a group of people having incredibly deep practice at the monastery, and it’s not like those people have been lifted out of this plane of existence. Everyone at the Abbey has friends and family who are not there, and you’re not cut off from contact with them.
I remember when I was doing my, actually both Yarnes while I was there, I would do a newsletter where I would summarize all of Ani Pema’s teachings. So after each of the six weekly talks she would give, I would do a writeup of my takeaway. And I sent them to a dozen, 15, or 20 of my closest friends and family, and they were really interested in them. So even if I had never left the monastery, those ripples would still be spreading out. I think of reality like an infinite pond. You drop a pebble in and the ripples just never stop spreading.
But then of course, I left the Abbey, and so without Gampo Abbey I never would’ve worked for a Buddhist environmental organization. I wouldn’t be working at New York Insight Society supporting many people. So pretty much on every level, this idea that Gampo Abbey is removed from reality, and therefore what you’re doing there doesn’t matter, it doesn’t pass the laugh test for me.
I think it’s so powerful in every way because it’s kind of like a stone in the current of this river of, not to put too fine a point on it, extractive capitalism that really expects you to produce and contribute and extract as much value from your own labour and just keep feeding the machine that is destroying the Earth. And so you could look at a stone in the river and say, Hey, that stone’s not doing anything except maybe diverting the course of it over however many years.
Or look at a tree and say that tree’s not doing anything. I think whenever somebody makes that observation, it says more about who’s making the criticism than about the object of critique. I think the power of the Abbey is self-evident. And I remember one of the other things I remember in one of our little closing circles during my last residency there, it was Thaye who compared Gampo Abbey to the Velvet Underground. Apparently there’s this story in the music community that only a few dozen people ever saw the Velvet Underground perform live, but every single one of them became a famous musician. That’s how I feel. You don’t need to have firsthand experience of it in order for its effects to reverberate. And I’m lucky enough that I did, and I think about it pretty much every day.
Trinkar:
You left just in time for the pandemic.
Tashi:
I sure did.
Trinkar:
And any thoughts on how you were prepared by your experience for the pandemic?
Tashi:
Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things Gampo Abbey, and really just the depth of the practice helped me with, was just always letting go of expectations of what life is going to look like. You just never know from one day to the next how things are going to change. And I think if I had moved to New York with a really fixed vision of what that would look, like, oh, I’m going to go out on the town, I’m going to be out, taking in culture, things like that. I mean, I’m kind of introverted, so I probably would not have those wishes anyway.
There really is a kind of training in finding satisfaction wherever you are and really appreciating the richness regardless of how broad your physical horizons are. The Abbey felt vast to me, even when we had six feet of snow outside and you couldn’t go anywhere. It just felt like there’s kind of fractal possibility. The closer you look, the wider the vista just in here, in your heart and in your mind. And so I think having that access to inner richness was really helpful when things felt very confined. Not that the pandemic wasn’t difficult, but I think it was a lot less difficult for me than for some other people.
Trinkar:
And if anybody asked you, would it be a good idea to go and do a period of training at Gampo Abbey?
Tashi:
I often tell people when they ask me, How was being a monk? I say, I would recommend it to anyone. It’s impossible to predict what you’re going to get out of it, but it can open up some sealed boxes of treasures. Just stuff you had in your basement that you never would’ve guessed was there.
I think I just happened to be kind of in the right place for it in my life. I think I’m being a little too glib. I would not recommend training at the Abbey if you’re really feeling the need to escape from something because I think whatever you’re trying to run away from will meet you face-to-face when you show up. And it just so happened that I was in a great place to meet what was waiting for me at the Abbey, and that’s not true for everyone at every point in their lives.
I would not recommend training at the Abbey if you’re really feeling the need to escape from something, because I think whatever you’re trying to run away from will meet you face-to-face when you show up.
It requires openness and a sense of humour. If you’re expecting to get something specific out of the Abbey, I would not recommend it because that’s the one thing you’re not going to find there, the specific outcome you’re looking for. But I think if you’re feeling curiosity and if you’re feeling a yearning to go deeper and to see what’s there, then you will absolutely find it. Yeah, it’s such a powerful thing, and I just wish everyone had that as an option. I think it would be really powerful and transformative,
Trinkar:
Because you and I always talk books, I wonder if you have any current favourite books for people who are interested in the intersection of dharma and environmentalism?
Tashi:
Oh, Susan Murphy has a really good book, called Minding the Earth, Mending the World: Zen and The Art of Planetary Crisis. and what I remember most from that book is the last section of it is an exploration of several different koan, and I think one of them, it’s actually just a poem by a Pure Land Buddhist from the 11th century named Issa. And in Japanese, it goes ( here Tashi speaks fluent Japanese and recited the poem)… , and the translation she presents is “This dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world. And yet.” And then she quotes Gary Snyder, the Zen Buddhist and poet in his commentary on the poem, where he says, that the phrase “and yet” contains the entirety of the Buddhist path.
This dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world. And yet.
Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828)
That’s the book that really sticks with me. But the other one I really recommend in terms of coming to grips with collapse is Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira that I mentioned earlier. That one’s very powerful, difficult, but also liberating.
Trinkar:
You always leave me with a good list.
Tashi:
And then of course, the entire works of Robin Hobb, which had nothing to do with Buddhism, of course.
Trinkar:
It does bring up an interesting point about the role of literature, including sci-fi and fantasy literature in particular, expanding our minds of the “what ifs.”
Tashi:
I think Ursula LeGuin writes beautifully about that. She gave this speech in 2014 where she was really taking speculative fiction writers to task for just kind of reifying capitalism, but in space, you use credits instead of dollars, and you’re a space miner or a space marine or space police officer. She says speculative fiction authors have a moral responsibility to imagine better worlds, not in a rose-tinted glasses kind of way, but what would a realistic utopia look like.
Trinkar:
And something that started while you were still here at the Abbey and which has continued for over five years now, is being involved in supporting Ani Pema’s online courses through Shambhala.com.
Tashi:
Yeah, gosh, it just felt like the luckiest thing that landed in my lap, I think it arose from me being that annoying teacher’s pet student who’s just always raising his hand in the Yarne lectures, and I don’t even remember whether it was Ani Pema’s idea or Ivan’s (Exec VP at Shambhala Publications) idea, but once that Yarne retreat was crafted into an online course, Ivan approached me and asked if I would be willing to be a discussion moderator in the online version of The Sacred Journey about the bardos and phases of life and death, and I loved those teachings so much. It felt like such an amazing opportunity to revisit them and to talk about them with people online, and it was so much fun. People just lit up in that online course. Even when it was relaunched, it was still wildly popular. People love death.
Trinkar:
Once you left the Abbey, you were invited by Shambhala Publications to be the designer of the online course for Ani Pema and some of their other authors.
Tashi:
It’s one of my favorite yearly projects. I feel really fortunate to to do that work
Trinkar:
Thanks so much for chatting with me Tashi. I sincerely hope that you’ll be able to come back for a visit someday soon.
Resources on Buddhism and environmentalism, climate crisis and ecology
Click here for a sample bibliography of books. There are, of course, many other formats for learning about this area, including podcasts, films and live discussions.
