Ritual Responses to Roadkill: Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist Practices of Animal Care and Ecological Ethics in the Anthropocene

Across the world’s expanding road networks, millions of animals are killed by vehicles each year. Despite its scale and visibility, roadkill is widely normalized as an inevitable byproduct of modern transportation infrastructure rather than examined as an ethical or religious problem. This paper asks whether Buddhist ritual traditions offer resources for transforming how humans perceive and respond to roadkill in the ecological conditions of the Anthropocene. Drawing on ritual theory—particularly Catherine Bell’s understanding of ritual as a practice that reshapes perception and social relations—alongside Buddhist cosmology and road ecology, the paper argues that roadkill should be understood not merely as an infrastructural accident but as a form of everyday ecological violence. Examining Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist practices of animal care—including animal release (fang sheng 放生), chanting rituals, and funerary rites for animals—the paper shows how ritual cultivates attentiveness, mourning, and ethical responsibility toward more-than-human life.