ABSTRACT
Human rights issues in which Buddhism has a direct involvement feature regularly in the news. Global media coverage of the progress of the Olympic torch on its way to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in April of 2008 kept the issue of human rights in Tibet in the public eye, as did the accompanying violent riots in Lhasa. These scenes were soon followed by a reminder of the repression and denial of democracy in Burma in May of the same year as the military junta at fi rst refused to allow aid relief into the country following the inundation of the delta region caused by Cyclone Nargis. In another Buddhist country, Sri Lanka, human rights violations have occurred constantly in the bitter and prolonged struggle between Sinhalese and Tamils in the northern part of the country, and became particularly severe as the civil war reached a climax before the government victory in May 2009. Examples could be multiplied, but my purpose here is not to catalog contemporary hotspots so much as to signal the importance of human rights in general for Buddhism in the world today. Leading Asian and Western Buddhists now routinely express their concern about social injustice in the Western vocabulary of human rights, but what I want to ask here is how appropriate is this language for an Asian tradition that historically seems to lack concepts of both rights and human rights? It seems some intellectual bridgework needs to be put in place to connect contemporary Western notions with traditional Buddhist teachings, and this is what I will attempt in this chapter. In speaking of “Buddhism” I should make clear that I am writing with reference to what might be termed “mainstream” Buddhism as opposed to the Buddhism of any particular school or region. It is hoped that the arguments and conclusions reached here are broad enough to apply to all major schools.
