Beyond the Dhamma: Cultivating More-Than-Human Sustain-abilities Through Buddhist Stories in Thailand
摘要
This chapter discusses an experience in literary education for sustainability in a Thai university using stories of previous births of the Buddha, or jātakas, as a way of encouraging the development in students of an embodied, affective, experienced, relational sense of becoming-together with other co-inhabitants of the Earth. The textual history and cultural background of the jātakas is presented in order to argue for the need to go beyond traditional interpretations and uses of these stories in pedagogies grounded on humanistic ontology, including the moral didactics of Buddhist education. The case study of two jātakas, “The tigress” and “Others sow,” serves to illustrate the potential of situated and dialogical pedagogical invitations that incorporate stories of this kind as part of a posthumanist or post-anthropocentric pedagogy, with the aim of cultivating more-than-human sustain-abilities (vulner-ability, attend-ability, and response-ability) in the classroom.