By exploring lived ecological experiences across seven Buddhist worlds from ancient India to the contemporary West, Roaming Free Like a Deer provides a comprehensive, critical, and innovative examination of the theories, practices, and real-world results of Buddhist environmental ethics. Daniel Capper clarifies crucial contours of Buddhist vegetarianism or meat eating, nature mysticism, and cultural speculations about spirituality in nonhuman animals.

Buddhist environmental ethics often are touted as useful weapons in the fight against climate change. However, two formidable but often overlooked problems with this perspective exist. First, much of the literature on Buddhist environmental ethics uncritically embraces Buddhist ideals without examining the real-world impacts of those ideals, thereby sometimes ignoring difficulties in terms of practical applications. Moreover, for some understandable but still troublesome reasons, Buddhists from different schools follow their own environmental ideals without conversing with other Buddhists, thereby minimizing the abilities of Buddhists to act in concert on issues such as climate change that demand coordinated large-scale human responses.

With its accessible style and personhood ethics orientation, Roaming Free Like a Deer should appeal to anyone who is concerned with how human beings interact with the nonhuman environment.

Roaming Free Like a Deer: Buddhism and the Natural World, Daniel Capper, Cornell University Press, Paperback, 300 pages, $36.25

Daniel Capper, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches Asian, Native American, and comparative religion both on-campus and through study abroad. Along with a number of articles, he authored Learning Love from a Tiger: Religious Experiences with Nature and Guru Devotion and the American Buddhist Experience. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in religious studies from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in Religion and the Human Sciences from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

CONTENTS: Roaming Free Like a Deer
Acknowledgments		vii
Note on Transliteration		ix
Introduction		1
1.	Some Methods of Buddhist Environmental Ethics	20
2.	The Buddha's Nature	37
3.	The Clever Bee of Sri Lanka	63
4.	Beautiful Thai Buffaloes	88
5.	Eating the Enlightened Plants of China	115
6.	Japanese Water Buddhas	141
7.	Releasing Animals in Tibet	165
8.	Natural Persons in the West	191
Conclusion		214
Glossary of Terms and Concepts		225
Notes		231
Bibliography		263
Index		281