Rev. Danny Fisher

My latest “On the Buddhism Beat” post is now online over at Shambhala Sun Space.  I do hope you’ll take a look.  Below is just a taste–a story emerging from Bhutan this week.

The Kingdom of Bhutan’s forestry department has warned Buddhist citizens not to cut down anymore trees to make poles for flying prayer flags. According to tradition, one should ideally erect 108 poles in order to fly prayer flags so that the dead will find their way to the Dharma in the next life. The problem, though, is that the forestry department calculates that at the current rate (165 trees cut down daily for the poles, with another 550 felled each day for other uses), Bhutan’s forest will be completely depleted within twenty years. Not only does this have environment implications, but it carries consequences in terms of Bhutan’s much-celebrated emphasis on “Gross National Happiness”: as the BBC reports, the kingdom’s constitution “stipulates that the country must have at least 60% forest cover.” In response to all of this, forestry officers are now limiting the number of prayer flag posts to 29 for each person. In addition, they hope to convince citizens to move toward the use of bamboo for the poles. (As the BBC further notes, however, previous efforts to make the switch to steel poles didn’t work.)

Read the whole thing here.