Episode
Vishvapani - A member of the Triratna Buddhist Order
- Podcast
- Thought for the Day
- Published
- May 26, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 192
- Processing state
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- http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0nnc2wx
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Summary
Good morning. An odd group gathered this weekend at the Hay Festival for a simple but moving ceremony. Local authority officials joined storytellers and puppeteers beside the River Wye to launch a charter declaring that the river has rights – rights to perform its natural functions and be free from pollution. It’s the latest expression of a global movement demanding that the law sees ecosystems as living entities rather than human property. I love walking the Wye. It winds 150 miles along the Wales-England border through lush pastures and rocky gorges. Yet, there are concerns that some industrial farming practices while not necessarily illegal are polluting the river and that species like salmon and native crayfish that depend on it are disappearing. The charter recognises an ecologist as the river’s official representative at rive r management meetings. The Wye can’t tell us what it wants, so she’s charged to present what the river needs to flourish, setting aside human interests and preferences. This legal arrangement gives form to something we’ve long felt but struggled to enact. The poet William Wordsworth, who celebrated the Wye, sensed that people and rivers belong to something more fundamental, "more deeply interfused" as he writes. But I think the thirteenth century Japanese Buddhist teacher Dōgen Zenji saw most clearly what that perception really means. Dōgen knew that a river can be seen as a resource, a place of inspiration, and presumably it’s something quite different to the fish. But all these perceptions fall short of a more elusive reality. As Dōgen writes, “It's not only that there is water in the world, but there’s a world in water.” We typically live as though we were separate — each of us the centre of our own world, bending what surrounds us to our…