ABSTRACT
The relationship between contemporary practices concerning human rights (discourse, advocacy, enforcement and so forth) and Buddhist thought and practice has been extensively debated in recent years (for an overview of the debate, see S. B. King 2005: ch. 5). It is widely acknowledged that human rights were not explicitly recognized or endorsed in traditional Buddhist texts. For example, according to Goodman, “premodern Buddhist ethics simply has no concept of rights” (Goodman 2009: 216). And yet human rights are endorsed and advocated by most (though not all) socially engaged Buddhists today—including each of the four proponents of engaged Buddhism discussed in the last chapter. These two phenomena—the absence of direct recognition of human rights in the tradition and their importance for socially engaged Buddhists today—are part of the background of a recent philosophical debate about whether Buddhism is compatible with human rights. Some scholars have argued that there is a basic affinity between Buddhism and human rights—and perhaps, more strongly, that Buddhism can provide a basis for human rights. Other scholars have argued against this and have maintained that there are important features of human rights—the concept of human rights and especially the role they play in contemporary political affairs—that conflict with or are in serious tension with Buddhist moral perspectives. Another part of the background of this debate is a broader discussion about whether human rights are compatible with “Asian values” (see Bauer and Bell 1999) and an even broader conversation about whether human rights have universal validity as opposed to having validity only in the Western world (see Renteln 1990). In this chapter, we will briefly review the concept, history and contemporary disputes about human rights, and we will then consider arguments first favoring, and then challenging, their compatibility with Buddhism. As we will see, this debate is one of the frontiers of Buddhist modernism, of reflections about the role Buddhist moral thought might play in the modern world.
