WISDOM
Tsoknyi Rinpoche
‘Everyone’s mind here becomes busy with trying to establish some basic stability and development. When we hear about such big global issues, it doesn’t really click immediately. Eventually it will.’
JS: Rinpoche, what is your take on the issues of global warming and energy supply?
TR: Well, the question is, who will provide the solutions? People here in Nepal live hand-to-mouth, so where are they going to get anything alternative? You will have to supply us with it. It’s like this: you make the changes and then we will use it: “My grandfather didn’t use lots of energy. My father didn’t use it. Now I’m using a little bit but you are making such a noise about it—so bring alternatives to us and we will use them.” When I talk to people here about this, they have this hatred inside about the global warming issue. Indian people really get angry. It’s like the nuclear issue. “You people already have nuclear, but we can’t make a deterrent while you have 20 times as many weapons.” People here feel resentment about being advised: “Don’t cut wood, don’t buy kerosene.” So how do we cook our food? The fire will not come out of thin air. You say we cannot cut wood, it is bad for the environment. Now you say avoid kerosene, it’s also bad. Over here we’re talking about the food level. It’s about survival, not about choice or comfort.
JS: Governments in Asia are not levelling with their people about the tremendous risks to food and water supplies now caused by an economy based on coal.
TR: Government people here also think like this: We didn’t use so much fossil fuel, and now we hear, “Let’s share the suffering.” This needs education. In this part of the world, you always need to give chocolate first. Simply inviting great experts from America to give a lecture on the environment and saying please come…. nobody will come. People think, “What will we get? Will we get food or tea? Will we get a designer pen or pencil? OK, then we’ll go.” Or they think, “We are facing such day-to-day living problems, why is it our job to listen to a great environmentalist’s lecture?” You always have to give something in order to transform something like that. In the West you pay for things. “Such and such a lama is coming. I’ll get a ticket to go and listen.” Here it is completely different.
JS: In the case of global warming, though, everyone is going to suffer. Even if you are in the richest suburb in Santa Barbara, now it can burn down, and we just saw such wildfires recently. There could soon be great scarcity of water, as is happening in the S.E. of America now.
TR: I don’t know what is to be done—maybe if there were some kind of hopeful plan, from the developed nations that would benefit people in their day-to-day lives, something affordable and accessible, like fuel-efficient stoves.
JS: There will have to be major funding for alternative energy by the rich countries to the poor ones. India and China have the opportunity to commit new wealth and potential new international funding to Renewable Energy. But they are still building coal-fired power plants, the worst cause of global warming.
CS: Nepal has so much potential for wind power, with the highest mountains in the world. Is the price that much different between renewable energy start-ups and coal-fired power plants?
TR: The Nepalese government doesn’t have money in any case.
CS: Couldn’t they apply for international funding?
TR: That will go into corruption. (laughter)
DS: What about carbon-offset schemes? When we came here on British Airways, we clicked a button on their web page that calculated the carbon emissions our return flights were generating and how much money it took to offset them by investing in alternative energy or reforestation.
TR: OK, so?
JS: Recently there have been a lot of scandals in carbon-offsetting projects in India. It was reported that 2/3 of the money received from carbon offsets ended up in corruption. We thought that Buddhist monasteries, which are a leading influence in Nepalese society, could get involved in some offset-related alternative energy projects.
TR: Our monastery is very high and windy. I have the most windy place. Every day. A little less for two months of the year.
JS: A proposal might be drawn up to seek funds to establish a demonstration wind-turbine or solar photovoltaic system at the monastery.
TR: Happy! Anytime! We have a lot of good sun. But here, if you go through someone who does the whole project, who is responsible for the whole job—then it’s OK. But usually it’s done in pieces: you give money here and there for parts of the job; someone comes to put up the support poles and a few months later they fall down and you can’t get anybody to take responsibility or fix it.
DS: Companies in Europe are penalized under Kyoto if they create excess carbon emissions. They have to pay carbon-offsets in undeveloped countries. This might work with a credible application to the right place.
TR: I think funding an entire project is the best. Here we will trust it if some kind of foreign person is involved and does everything. If money is poured into the local system, it’s gone.
DS: Offset companies come in and do the whole thing. They are accountable for the project and the funds spent, beginning to end.
TR: That would be good.
DS: They might welcome suggestions for a project that has integrity—that Western people can believe in. These companies offer a choice where travellers can place their contributions: why not offer an option for putting alternative energy in a leading Buddhist monastery in Nepal? Why not offer Buddhist travellers the option to offset their flight emissions in a way that is meaningful to them?
TR: That would be very good. You might explain it this way. Deep down every Buddhist practitioner would like to live peacefully. Appreciation for the natural world is very strong. You cannot have a peaceful mind if the environment is unstable. It is all related. I think there are many Buddhists who would be interested in this, deep down. And it will help our basic economy. I am already paying a lot, and it’s increasing by 15% every year. So if you can reduce this financial drain while helping the environment, I feel Buddhists would support this.
DS: If your foreign students travel a lot, and want to counteract the effects, they could make a a carbon-offset scheme working with your monastery in the East. Once one monastery does it, others will follow. Monasteries are leaders of society here - other people will get the idea.
TR: Solar and wind have great potential in my locations. I always thought about the strength of the wind.
JS: It’s a question of placing turbines correctly. It’s applied science.
TR: These are the solutions.
JS: Nepal could adopt a system so when you are not using the electricity, it goes into the grid and you are compensated towards your bill. Germany introduced this law and it created thousands of quality new jobs.
TR: Talking to the government here is a waste of time. But making it a goal for individual monasteries could make it happen by example. After you make it happen at one monastery, using one company that does everything, people will start to wake up. That will change the government. It would be good to talk to young, influential lamas….global warming isn’t a political matter. It would be good if we could show them Al Gore’s movie. Has this kind of problem happened before in the history of the planet?
JS: Yes. There was a rapid global warming event 55 million years ago.
TR: What was the event?
JS: Runaway global warming caused the earth to become very, very hot, leading to a mass extinction; a die-off of many, many species of plants and animals.
TR: Why did it become so hot? Human activity?
JS: No, modern humans are only 200,000 years old. We don’t know the full chain of causation, but the fossil record and carbon chemistry of that ancient time show that natural gas was suddenly released from deep under the oceans. It caused a tremendous increase of greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere.
CS: Who lived on the earth then? Were the dinosaurs already extinct?
JS: Our pre-human, reptile and early mammal ancestors. This was long after the dinosaurs were wiped out in an earlier event that didn’t involve global warming.
TR: How do they know?
JS: The fossil record shows that 55 million years ago there were abundant living forms, and then suddenly, everything crashed by 75%. It took million of years to recover the diversity of living forms. That is the ultimate danger we could face too.
TR: 75% of human beings could die?
JS: More. Six out of seven by the end of this century is one scientific projection, if you include exhaustion of fossil fuels as well as global warming.
TR: Maybe this global warming could be disproved one day?
DS: No way, too late.
TR: Just joking! (Laughter)
JS: The eminent scientist James Lovelock formulated the Gaia theory. It shows how our climate is maintained by energy exchanges between the Earth and all living beings. The climate is a manifestation of interdependent origination. He recently said that the huge amounts of carbon gas we have put up into the world’s atmosphere since 1950 is now causing a ‘morbid fever’ for the Earth.
TR: Fever?
JS: A ‘morbid’ fever is one that can lead to ‘heat-death’. He said this could happen because America and China won’t let go of fossil fuels in time. The current American administration says they can’t sign up because China and India don’t have to. China and India say we aren’t going to give up coal, because we didn’t put most of that carbon gas up there in the first place.
TR: Not Russia?
JS: Russia did sign Kyoto. They have plenty of oil and a lot of gas left, but they did sign Kyoto, and their signature put the treaty into general use.
TR: And the oil-producing countries? Did they sign? Maybe they didn’t produce so much carbon pollution, but they are the source of the oil.
JS: Saudi Arabia and Iran signed up. Actually, ‘Peak Oil’ is happening right now—that’s why oil prices are so high. Lovelock’s ‘worst-case’ for the climate is that a fever will take hold and play out this century. Only a small area around the North Pole could be habitable by 2100. The sea level will inundate all the coastal cities and 1/3 of the fertile land. Politicians, economists and industrialists don’t understand basic biology—if you dry the water out of the soil, crops will fail. The human population could collapse to a billion or less.
TR: By the end of this century?
JS: Yes, and the survivors wouldn’t be 30 million having a nice time, because their home planet will be so ecologically degraded.
TR: Lonely.
JS: The great Harvard biologist Edward Wilson says we should call it the possible, future Age of Loneliness.
TR: Lonely because not so many people?
JS: Lonely because so few other species of animals and plants remain. Maybe 40% of what there is now. Nowadays if we have a special Buddhist teaching or conference, we often say it is for ‘world peace’. The reality is that there is zero possibility for world peace if we have runaway global warming. Peace is a subdivision of world biological harmony, isn’t it? If you have biological chaos, peace cannot ever happen, because agriculture will collapse. We need teachers who have the power of contemplation to take a lead. It is completely consistent with Buddhism that we attempt to defend sentient beings from this imminent crisis and bring some kind of wisdom into the debate. Genuine solutions already exist, after all.
TR: I really like this Solutions part. Tibetan Buddhism has some problems because everything is newly established. We had to just run out of our homeland. Everybody was concerned with making a new base. There are still many problems. We still cannot settle down in one place, and call it our place. We are staying in Nepal, but here there are significant political problems. Everyone’s mind here becomes busy with trying to establish some basic stability and development. When we hear about such big global issues, it doesn’t really click immediately. Eventually it will.
CS: Isn’t it important to know about the changing climate, weather and water, especially when you are responsible for caring for those who live at your monasteries and nunneries?
TR: I have 2 nunneries in Nepal and about 40 monasteries in Tibet, 30 of them nunneries. Some monasteries put up solar in Tibet, but it’s quite costly. One of my friends set up his whole monastery with solar, but that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. About 200 people can use that power, but only for lighting and refrigeration, not cooking.
DS: The price of photovoltaic cells will come down a lot in a year or two. What about underground basins to collect rain water, monsoon water, to guard against times of drought?
TR: I have one here in Nepal.
JS: We have met senior Buddhists who seem not to have thought about this issue.
TR: In general, Buddhist practitioners think, “It’s samsara, and samsara always has this kind of thing happening.”
JS: Not this kind of thing. Except every 55 million years. (Laughter)
TR: They are a little bit short-sighted. In one way it’s beautiful because they are not clinging. In another way it is short-sighted, because they don’t think ahead as practitioners. Some teachers are busy supporting monasteries, and some understand it perfectly. I am mixed. I understand it, but I am also busy with my nuns. I really want to do this kind of socially-engaged work. But my front page is my monks’ and nuns’ survival. If I do a little bit of other work, I start to feel guilty; first I must take care of their food.
Recently I spent 200,000 rupees for a sick monk to get hospital treatment here (in Nepal). I felt very happy for that person. Later I thought, that was about $3000 and I could have helped more people in Tibet with that much. I have to arrive at a place where the basic survival needs of the monks and nuns are taken care of. Then I can go into other work. Why do something else when this monastic sangha is my direct responsibility? Many lamas face the same problem. The Vatican has major endowments and investments, so they can tackle global warming. (Laughter) Whatever money we receive is spent for survival—on food or clothing or blankets, with nothing left over. So I am trying to create a trust or an endowment to ensure basic needs. Then I can do something else.
JS: One could create a scheme to attract specific funding for energy efficiency and renewables.
TR: I think you will interest teachers who have responsibilities for monasteries if you can help them to reduce their electricity bills with alternative energy. Then they will wake up and be interested. A 3,000 rupee bill will become a 500 rupee bill, plus it will help the environment.
DS: And wouldn’t we rather know than not know, what is coming down the road? If people are aware of hostile climate change (which is only going to increase), then when a new monastery is built, or an old one restored, they will build tanks to store monsoon water and so forth.
JS: We find that the more meditation retreat we do, the more sensitive we become to this situation. You can’t help it. As soon as you come out of retreat, you are going to see more clearly, not less clearly. (Laughter). Do you consider we should work for solutions to global warming more on the spiritual or physical plane?
TR: Both are equally important. Spiritually, from the Buddhist point of view, whenever we pray, we pray to balance no and chu. No means the container, universe or environment; chu means what’s inside, the beings. Our prayers include aspirations for averting natural disasters due to an imbalance of the 5 elements: earth, water, fire, air, and space. They also emphasize reducing the 5 poisons: ignorance, hatred, desire, pride and greed, as well as increasing the virtues of loving-kindness, compassion, and wisdom.
This root concern for the environment is already in our prayers, already in Buddhism—in the teaching of interdependent origination. So Lamas have traditionally balanced the elements in the environment by building stupas, planting treasure vases, blessing the land with rabney ceremonies, raising prayer flags, making tsa tsas, etc. We have worked really hard, from the time of King Ashoka, even from the time of the Buddha. But now no has taken on a new meaning and we are facing a modern, sophisticated challenge. Before, disbalance in the environment was due to natural causes. Now, big environmental problems are being created by humankind. It will take a little time to understand the reasons for this. Averting global warming will require new education and new understanding. We will need new prayers. I am sure, after we fully understand the issues, Buddhists will come to the forefront and work not only on the spiritual, but also on new, physical solutions. I am very much concerned about all of this. I will pray, and I will try to influence whomever I can reach, especially monks and nuns.
Interview by J. Stanley, D. Stanley, & C. Schlenger;
Swayambu, Kathmandu, Nepal: November, 2007
Tsoknyi Rinpoche was recognized by Gyalwang Karmapa XVI as a reincarnation of Drubwang Tsoknyi, a renowned master of the Drukpa Kagyu and Nyingma traditions. He was brought up by Khamtrul Rinpoche. His other principal teachers were Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, his father Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, Adeu Rinpoche, and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. He is the abbot of Ngedon Ösel Ling in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal, and the largest nunnery in Tibet. Rinpoche is considered an exceptional meditation teacher. He teaches internationally and is the author of Carefree Dignity and Fearless Simplicity.