About 500 years before the birth of Christ a prince was born into the Shakya clan in what is now southern Nepal.  It was foretold that the boy, Siddhartha Gautama, would either become a great ruler, or a great sage.  Desiring the former, his father kept him cocooned in a royal pleasure palace, his every physical want and need catered for.

Siddhartha grew up, a marriage was arranged to the beautiful Yashodhara and they had a son, Rahula.  But Siddhartha was not content and wanted to see what life was like outside the palace.  His father, Shuddhodana, agreed that he could make four trips outside the palace but ordered his servants to prevent him from seeing anything unpleasant or ugly.  However, during his first three trips he saw an old person, a sick person and a corpse.  Until then he had known nothing of old age, illness or death.  His charioteer explained that all beings suffered thus, sooner or later.

Siddhartha was appalled and began to fall into a state of despair at what he saw as the futility of life.  He then made his fourth visit into the outside world and saw a wandering mendicant, a poverty stricken holy man who nonetheless radiated a sense of inner peace.  Siddhartha made a decision to take up a spiritual life and fled from the palace, leaving his previous pampered existence and his family behind.

He studied for many months with a well known teacher, then moved on to another and so on, eventually joining up with five other ascetics.  Together they wandered around what is now northern India, clad in rags, fasting and meditating.  But still Siddhartha did not find the answers he was looking for.

Close to death, he wandered down to a river to meditate.  A young girl took pity on him and offered him a dish of milk and rice, which he gratefully ate.  As some strength began to return, he realised that asceticism would not bring him the answers he sought anymore than had his sensual existence in the palace.  There and then, he vowed to use his new found strength to break through and find the answers he sought.  He sat down beneath a bodhi tree, vowing to sit in silent mediation and not to rise until he attained enlightenment.

And the answers came to him.  That, clearly, the world was full of suffering, or unsatisfactoriness.  That there was a cause of this suffering or unsatisfactoriness.  The cause was, put simply, the desire for things to be other than they were,  And, most significantly, Siddhartha realised that there was a means to end these feelings, a cure for the ills of the world.  That cure was the path of the Middle Way, a path of neither extreme hedonism nor extreme asceticism, the Noble Eightfold Path.

Siddhartha was, of course, Gautama Buddha.  More than two thousand years later his teachings are still followed by millions around the world and, arguably, are even more relevant today than they were two millennia ago. The environmental crisis of this planet calls for radical action, and a fundamental change in our ways of thinking, acting and existing.  And that is where Green Buddhism comes in.

Fundamental to the Buddha's teaching is the concept of inter-connectedness.  Nothing happens in isolation from anything else, every cause leads to an effect, every effect becomes a new cause.  Furthermore, the Buddha taught the importance of cultivating compassion for all beings, promoted a simple lifestyle, sharing and responsibility for actions.  It follows, therefore, that caring for the environment is a natural part of the Buddhist path.

In short, Green Buddhism aims to deepen our relationship to the planet and all life upon it.  Just as the Buddha said that a man shot with an arrow does not ask the name of the person who shot it, but seeks help to have it removed, we need to stop endlessly debating climate crisis and to start taking action.  Buddhism offers the means to do this from a platform of compassion and equanimity, working on both our inner and outer worlds together.

At an individual level we need to make conscious choices in the way we lead our lives.  The practice of a Buddhist lifestyle naturally leads in this direction and it also helps us to become compassionate activists, working to resolve climate crisis through love and understanding rather than through anger and aggression.  This outward expression of Green Buddhist ideals is not separate from the inner expression; there is a need to open from within to the whole web of life, to experience a warm and intuitive appreciation of the natural beauty which is everywhere.