Dharmic Environmental Ethics: Tree and Animal Worship in Indian Tradition

Abstract

Dharmic environmental ethics, deeply rooted in the ancient Indian philosophical and the religious traditions, offers with a  holistic, value-oriented, and spiritually grounded framework for ecological consciousness as well as conservation. Something that is inherently tied to the life of a human being and that cannot be regarded as an active resource that could be utilized can be regarded as something divine and incredibly valuable to nature as a property of Dharmic approach to nature. This viewpoint is heavily opposed to current anthropocentric worldviews of the late industrial society that tend to incompletely balance the human utility with the ecological balance.

The present study examines the ethical foundations of environmental consciousness embedded in Indian cultural practices, with particular emphasis on tree and animal worship as significant expressions of ecological reverence. Through predominantly primary sources, the Vedas (and those particularly consisting of the Rigveda and Atharvaveda), the Puranas, and other of the Dharmashastric texts, and on the example of folk traditions and oral cultural practice the paper can narrate how this signifies that the traditions are used to explain a divine union between man and nature. These sources depict that trees, animals, rivers and forests have come to have spiritual connotations and thus, creating spirit of preservation inhibiting and co-existing.

By critically analyzing this tradition of text and cultural practices, the article asserts that the practice of tree and animal worship has been primordial in nature of functioning as an aboriginal method of environmental protection, and has been utilized in the safeguarding of the biodiversity and carrying ecological balance. The practices are never ritual or symbolic but an ecological ethic and inherent in nature and they determine man in his relationship with nature.

The Dharmic environmental ethics is one such viable and applicable alternative paradigm that is being used amid contemporary global environmental crisis of climate change, deforestation and depletion of biodiversity. The study, therefore, implies that re-appraisal of these ancient ecological values and re-defining the same can equally teach some useful lessons and meaningful examples to guide the contemporary environmental protection and sustainable development