Dramatic Intervention: Human Rights From a Buddhist Perspective

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Dramatic Intervention: Human Rights From a Buddhist Perspective

By Peter D. Hershock

Philosophy East and West

Vol. 50, No. 1 (January 2000) pp. 9-33

Copyright 2000 by University of Hawaii Press

Hawaii, USA

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It is safe to say that concern about human rights has never been more widespread. Human rights issues are debated worldwide, not only in academic circles and in the various arenas of international and national politics but in the civil courtroom, the popular press, and the corporate boardroom. To use the vernacular, human rights is obviously a "hot topic." What is not so obvious is exactly what the issue or outcome of human rights discourse should be.

Founded on the notion of autonomous individuality, the predominant currents in human rights discourse have focused on establishing the minimum conditions of our secure and dignified coexistence while preserving a clear demarcation between the public and private spheres. But this is by no means a marriage without deep, internal tensions. Indeed, both the greatest strengths and the greatest liabilities of the liberal democratic conception of human rights are neatly encapsulated in one Supreme Court Justice's remark that "The most important right is the right to be let alone" (cited in Garfield 1995, p. 8). As conceived in the liberal tradition, human rights must at the very least insure our freedom from coercion, but for that very reason they cannot -- and, in fact, should not -- legislate whether or how much we must care about others. As Jay Garfield very succinctly puts it, "Since no one has a claim on my concern, I need not be concerned for anyone else. Compassion is ... strictly optional" (Garfield 1995, p. 9).

In what follows, I would like to offer some Buddhist resources for rethinking the issue -- that is, both the topic and the desired outcome -- of human rights. The aims of such a rethinking are twofold: first, to provide a self-consistent perspective for seeing the central issue of human rights as the wedding of personal freedom and communal flourishing, and second, to direct our conception of "rights" away from legal instruments important in the pursuit of minimal universal standards for our secure coexistence toward establishing the locally unique conditions of dramatic virtuosity in a context of creative interdependence. In the event of such a reorientation, the debate about human rights shifts from engineering universal agreement about the minimal estate or status of each and every human being toward realizing the complexly harmonious conditions under which none of us is barred from living a fully meaningful life in appreciative interdependence with all others.

Whose Rights, and in What Sort of World?
Robert Thurman opens a paper of his on "Social and Cultural Rights in Buddhism" by stating:

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We cannot isolate the legal/political/economic level of human rights discourse from the metaphysical level and the sociocultural level. A particular culture's notions of rights is not understandable without understanding what it thinks an individual is, what a society is, in what sort of universe. (Thurman 1988, p. 148)

From this, it follows that the first step toward realizing a universal human rights accord involves reaching an accommodating consensus about who we are and in what sort of world we are meeting to discuss the nature and extent of human rights. And if such an accord has proved to be intractably elusive, we would perhaps do well to attend less to the ostensive and much publicized factors of political and economic conflict than to disparities among our conceptions of reality -- especially the reality of persons.

Granted, however, the difficulty of reconciling the many extant and quite disparate views of human being, it is perhaps not surprising that efforts at reaching a universal rights accord have tended to focus on establishing agreement about the existence of a common ground on which everyone involved can comfortably place at least one foot. For the most part, it has been assumed that this shared ground consists of the "real" world of "objectively" observable facts -- the world most precisely described for us by Western science and most effectively shaped through its related technologies. That is, it is assumed that as we all breathe the 'same' air, drink the 'same' water, sleep under the 'same' stars, and suffer the 'same' ignominies of hunger, sickness, old age, loneliness, and death as members of the species Homo sapiens, we live in essentially the 'same' world and can be minimally defined through our coexistence in it.

The Buddhist teaching of interdependence and its corollary that all experience is karmic in nature jointly suggest that this is a dangerously misleading assumption. The scientifically 'real' and 'objective' world is -- like all other worlds -- an expression of certain consistently held values, a cultural artifact, and not truly neutral ground. In a now almost cliched formulation, all 'facts' are theory-laden, and uncritically assuming the contrary is to indulge in a very consequential form of prejudice. At the very least, it is to commit ourselves to realizing only a certain kind of human being -- the kind that consists of being "thrown" (to use Heidegger's wonderful term) into a world already shaped by historical and natural forces with which each of us as individuals is only accidentally and so meaninglessly related. It is also to restrict ourselves to imagining only certain kinds of human rights -- those which can be borne by such "thrown" individuals.

Contemporary cultural relativism is not a way out of this prejudice. While the relativist denies that there is a single, true conception of human nature and strenuously allows for differences in how cultures conceive what it is to be human and so what it might mean to enjoy human rights, he or she typically does so on epistemic grounds. The belief that we live in the 'same' world and have essentially the 'same' nature, albeit differently conceived and developed, is seldom critically addressed. The Buddhist teaching of interdependence instructs us to refrain from seeing anything as essentially 'this' or 'that', as either having or not having some set of fixed characteristics, or as independent of who we are and our intentions. Indeed, the

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Mahāyāna teaching of emptiness urges us not to see all things as somehow vacuous but rather diligently to relinquish those horizons for relevance by means of which we identify, and hence limit and segregate, things as such. This teaching applies as much to human nature as to the world as a whole. Whereas the cultural relativist accepts a multiplicity of (perhaps) equally apt views of human being and the world in which it takes place, the consistent Buddhist denies that there either 'is' or 'is not' something called "human nature" or "the world" about which we all have separate, if often closely related, views. To the contrary, the Buddhist sees all 'natures' as disambiguations of what is originally neither 'this' nor 'that' -- as creations, and not discoveries.

Buddhism shifts the issue, then, from either asserting one essential view of human being or accepting all views of human being as equally valid to doing our best to discern which view or views are most conducive to resolving our conflicts, troubles, and suffering. Seeing all things as interdependent and all experience as karmically conditioned is to see the world in which we actually live -- the world in which we articulate who we are -- as irreducibly meaningful. That is, the world in which we are most uniquely present can be reduced not to a bare assemblage of objective or factual states of affairs but to a horizonless field of dramatic interdependence. It is a world for which we are intimately responsible, which already expresses or evidences our patterns of valuation, and to which we may always and creatively contribute. In such a world, it is not possible in any nontrivial sense to see ourselves as autonomously existing individuals. We are, and have always been, given-together. And thus, our most basic right is not "to be let alone" but rather to see the exact nature of our always shared responsibility and to realize the greatest virtuosity possible in responding to our situation as needed.

In his prefatory remarks, Thurman goes on to suggest that the Western discourse on human rights may well be a desperate attempt to suture "the mortal wound to human dignity inflicted by modernity's metaphysical materialism, psychological reductionism, and nihilistic ethical relativism" (Thurman 1988, p. 149). I would go one step further and claim that there is a sense in which the dominant tradition of Western rights discourse is self-defeating, presuming the very condition it ostensibly works to correct. That is, Western rights discourse situates us in an institutionally mediated and yet essentially abstract space and time where our most unique characteristics and desires simply don't matter, are of no particular value. Thus, it promotes precisely the kinds of profound disregard for the difference and dignity of others that constitute the primary rationale for universal rights in the first place. In the interest of providing some justification for this claim, I want to review briefly the genesis of rights discourse in the West as a way of revealing its metaphysical contingency and opening a critical perspective on its claims to universality.

Selfhood and Rights Orientation: A Metaphysical Watershed

Rights discourse has long been a part of Western moral and political theory, so much so that it is now almost unthinkable that some notion of human rights could be absent from any theory qualifying as both morally and politically viable. But the genealogy of the Western notion of rights is far from straightforward or continuous.

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The concept of right in the West can be traced back to the Greek orektos, meaning 'stretched out' or 'upright'. The Latin rectus, meaning 'straight', is a close relative of the Greek orektos and, like it, refers explicitly to a physical state of directness -- a state opposed to that which is crooked, warped, twisted, cupped, or bent. One can profitably think here of the different grades or qualities of lumber: that which can be characterized as orektos or rectus is both eminently workable and capable of predictably bearing loads.

It is not a great metaphorical leap, then, from rectus to rectitude, from a purely physical characteristic to an explicitly moral one. Indeed, the extension of the notion of right to the moral character of persons was made quite early in the Western tradition. As Richard Dagger suggests, "By analogy with the physical sense, the primary moral sense of 'right' was a standard or measure of conduct. Something was right -- morally straight or true -- if it met the standard of rectitude, rightness" (Dagger 1989, p. 294, emphasis added). In much the same way that straight and perfectly upright or plumb load-bearing posts are conducive to the strongest and most lasting buildings, straight and upright human actions and actors are conducive to the realization of the strongest and most enduring communities.

Sometime between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, the conceptual lineage underwent a decisive transformation: what was right in the sense of morally direct and true thought and behavior permutated into a right in the sense of an individual entitlement. That is, a transition occurred whereby the conceptual pivot of what is morally "right" shifted from what is done to what is due, from actively and usefully embodied propriety in a public context to a property privately enjoyed apart from any possible changes of circumstance. Whereas the metaphorical connection between physical and moral standards is relatively intuitive, it is difficult to see what might continuously bridge the conceptual gap between what is right and what is mine by right. One possibility is to say that doing what is morally standard or right implicitly brings about an obligation for others to treat us equally rightly. That is, a reciprocity can be claimed to obtain between what we do and what we are due. A second possibility is to appeal to justice as a mediating concept, claiming in effect that actively realized moral standards bring about the kind of conditions in which everyone is treated justly and hence receives his or her due.

But, neither obligation nor justice build the kind of bridge needed to move from the moral right to the modern notion of universal human rights precisely because that notion admits of no necessary grounding in what is properly or improperly done. To the contrary, the central characteristic of the modern conception of rights is that there are things we are due or that can be claimed as our own apart from anything we are or have done. Moreover, if it is true that "what the holder of a right has is a benefit or entitlement of some kind, and at the most general level this is an entitlement to justice" (Keown 1995, p. 4), then it is hard to see how justice could provide the needed conceptual bridge without it becoming a circular one. After all, it is precisely justice that the institution of rights is supposed to deliver and guarantee.

In moving from right to rights, we move from moral standards according to which we measure our particular activities and aspirations to the conception of

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standard entitlements insuring our equal status. In contemporary discourse, these entitlements are being actively used to standardize and rank the ways in which societies define and conserve human being. That is, they are used to measure in a standard way the status of being human in a variety of local circumstances. Few if any of us now regard such measurements as problematic, but historically, judging the conditions of human being under the generic rubric of equality is of quite recent mint.

Having asked why it took so long for the notion of natural rights to appear in the West when philosophical and religious precedents for seeing all human beings as 'equal' had existed in one form or another since classical times, Damien Keown answers:

[F]or much of Western history, "rights" were closely tied to social status, and were essentially a function of position or role in society. A hierarchical social structure, such as was predominant in Roman and medieval society, is antithetical to the notion of natural rights.... It was only when the hierarchical model was challenged and replaced by an egalitarian one that the idea of natural rights began to gain ground. (p. 4)

Keown himself offers neither an explanation for the factual emergence of this egalitarian challenge nor a specific conceptual bridge linking the morally right and having rights in the modern sense. But at the very least, it is clear that even if the birth of the autonomous self -- the individual bearer of rights that are given equally and universally to all who are human -- was without any clear historical precedents, its conception was by no means "immaculate." To the contrary, there are good reasons for seeing it as having come about through a complex of concrete transformations of the European lifeworld following on the mathematical description of the world in late medieval and early modern science, and on the wings of the technological innovations that both funded and were funded by this new vision. That is, I would argue that the modern conception of human rights came about as a 'corrective' to the massive breakdown of vernacular relations and traditional lifeways that accompanied the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and for that reason is inseparable from them.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to analyze that breakdown and the ways in which the competition among the European colonial powers, in combination with the competition between religion and science, conspired to bring about the perceived need for a unifying secular vision -- the constitution of a jointly articulated and so fully shared world belonging to humanity as such. But a poignant illustration of the effect of this confluence of conditions on the conception of human being can be sketched, I think, by reference to Kant's attempted defeat of Humean skepticism.

Simply put, Kant's strategy was to propose that no outside warrant of the regularity of reason and experience was needed because there exists a universal structure of the human mind and therefore universal categories of human understanding. By themselves, these were capable of warranting the possibility of both a priori or preexperiential truths and objective science. Granted this, it was a simple step for Kant to propose his categorical imperative as the primary tool for realizing a truly moral

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world. In a nutshell, an individual good could be granted full moral status only if it was possible to translate it into an imperative statement in accordance with which all human beings would reasonably act. Thus, the individual and the common good might be wedded and a truly just and scientifically grounded society realized.

The dual stress on the universality of human nature and the central importance of individual freedom in contemporary Western rights discourse clearly reflect the biases of Kant's metaphysical and moral leanings. In much the same way that establishing some common structures of human understanding seemed necessary for Kant's proof of the possibility of scientific progress, progress in human rights discourse has for many seemed to be predicated on promoting universal conditions under which human nature -- at least in its individual expression -- might flourish. Not surprisingly, this focus on the minimum conditions of viable autonomy has been paralleled by a commitment to declaring an inventory of the basic elements constitutive of our status as equals -- the societal equivalent of Kant's categories.

This drive toward articulating the minimal universal conditions of independence mirrors the scientific method's valorization of independently confirmed observations of repeatable phenomena. But more importantly, it also mirrors the scientific disregard of all that is exceptional, extraordinary, and inherently unpredictable. What this results in, of course, is the practical denial of our differences -- a denial uttered in the same breath as the assertion of our individuality and so our separation. We may be guaranteed our individuality and equality, but only on the pain of having both reduced to fully generic characteristics. The rights-bearing individual is, after all, a bearer of rights a priori -- prior to any experience and action -- an individual whose existence is, therefore, practically ideal.

The ways in which such a conception of human being dovetails with the technologically and commercially driven creation of a nominally casteless and classless society should be relatively evident. And precisely because the kinds of technological, commercial, and civil conditions that began developing in the seventeenth century in Europe have not been realized uniformly around the world, questions have arisen regarding the extent to which the Western human rights discourse is helpful or harmful in places where similar deconstructions have not already occurred, and/or the extent to which the benefits of such a discourse can be satisfactorily weighted against the costs of development schemes that "deconstruct" the indigenous, vernacular lifeways.

Because it is based on the ideal of equality, the universality of rights means the exclusion of all that defines us as 'this' person or people, not 'that' one -- an erasure of what makes us more or less deserving, but also of what makes us more or less unique. We could say, in fact, that seeing everyone as equal entails looking beyond all the ways in which we differ -- a 'necessary' and 'beneficent' form of ignorance. First and foremost, we must ignore the historical nature of lived time -- the effects of maturation, the relevance of changing circumstances, and the importance of timing. Second, we must ignore the finally unprecedented and unrepeatable nature of our concrete situatedness, our place, and attend instead to our abstract location as members of a class or species. We now accept these moves as "self-evident." But

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the artificiality of even such a "simple" notion as that we are all equivalently members of a species becomes painfully evident as soon as we review the tortured historical path by means of which the constitutional affirmation that "all men are created equal" came even just to be legally enacted in the United States.

The shift from right to rights is thus predicated on the "realization" of a new form of ideal human being -- a being abstracted from all that actualizes our humanity, from all those particular and irreducibly dynamic relationships through which we discover who we truly are. This is the birth of the (at least ideally) autonomous self -- an individual for whom any situation or circumstance is essentially (and so merely) contingent: a being for whom compassion is strictly optional. As it figured into Western political and social discourse, equality -- the valorization of a complete absence of relevant differences in our humanity -- has had an impact as revolutionary as the invention of the zero did on mathematics. Some of the consequences of this valorization of non-differentiation have been remarkably in consonance with those of diligence in compassion -- the inclusion of all races in the American political process, for instance. But like the zero, equality is a purely conceptual entity. In the same way that zero is not a perceivable quantity, equality is not a perceivable characteristic, quality, or state of being. If equality exists, it is in a wholly metaphysical realm. And, like it or not, the same is true of those individuals who are held to be equal, always and without exception.

Granted the historicity of the view that we are all equal by virtue of sharing some essential human nature, and granted the Buddhist claim that all 'natures' are empty or in-essential, we are put in the position of assessing the overall merits and liabilities of thinking of ourselves as possessing universal human rights. The merits, I think, have been well-enough publicized not to need reiteration here. But what of the costs? In a sense to be fleshed out below, I submit that a reasonable assertion of universal human rights on the basis of our essential equality depends on realizing both practical and conceptual conditions conducive to an impoverishment of what I would call the dramatic dimension of human being -- that dimension in which we are narratively or meaningfully interdependent and not just factually co-present. To see ourselves as entirely equal is to see our selves in the abstract time and space of the world according to science and mathematics, not in the context of actual, lived relationships with one another that are always shifting according to the interweaving of our desires, our efforts, and the unexpected. That is, to the extent that we see ourselves as equal, we also see ourselves as generic. The implications of this are not, however, merely philosophical or psychological. For example, Rajni Kothari has argued that a primary reason for the failure of the rights discourse formulated on the Western model to effect truly positive change in India is that rights activists fail to "face up to [the] contextual crises arising from a development process that is statecentered" and part of a "global technological design" that leads to the "large scale erosion of the natural resource base of the people ... and the erosion of distinctive cultures, community lifestyles and the role of women in the social and economic process" (Kothari 1989, p. 26).

The failure, for Kothari, is not one of implementation, but is rather traceable to

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the genesis and historical antecedents for the Western conception of human rights as grounded on an individual ethic and taking as "a philosophical given that social formations are homogeneous and hence amenable to universal formulations of individual and community, liberty and democracy." The result is "a hiatus between theory and practice" (pp. 26-27).

According to Kothari, because the Western conception of human rights is inseparable from the emergence of a homogeneous and civil society over several centuries of intellectual, territorial, and economic struggles, and because developing states like India have assumed responsibility for bringing about such homogeneity in the interest of modernization, such states are actually proving inimical to the very diversity that has hitherto defined their national identity. Indeed, "a conception of rights based on universal norms of freedom, equality, ownership and opportunity ignores historical specificities and community contexts that define human roles and undermine the positioning of less privileged groups in society" (pp. 27-28). And so, "the imported theory of human rights is already proving counterproductive" (p. 29).

Sri Lankan rights theorist S. Tilakaratna has raised similar questions about the actual beneficiaries of human rights legislation given that both the rights themselves and their legislation make sense only on the foundation of a degree of (especially economic) development that is out of reach for indigenous populations acting without outside support. It is increasingly hard to ignore the fact that such development often means mortgaging one's material and cultural resources and entering into an explicitly dependent relationship with those who would bankroll the needed infrastructure for modernization. Tilakaratna does not see the liability in strictly economic terms, however. To the contrary, a deep concern is that adopting "development assistance" is often incompatible with resolving local problems and conflicts in ways that are locally meaningful. He concludes that "Development itself needs to be viewed in fundamental humanistic terms as a process of releasing the creative potentials and energies of the people, particularly of the poor and disadvantaged. Liberation of creative potentials is an instrument as well as a goal of development" (Tilakaratna 1984, p. 6). Otherwise, while the factual standard of living may well increase, creative and dramatic resources may undergo irreversible atrophy with the result that life is at once 'better' and more 'meaningless'.

In sum, it would seem that the transition from the right as propriety to rights as inalienable properties entails marginalizing the fully situated self. In cultures where persons are situationally defined, pressures enter into rights discourse that will thus mean entering into dangerous flirtation with dehumanization. As Roger Ames has noted:

Individual autonomy does not necessarily enhance human dignity. In fact, if dignity is felt worth, the exaggeration of individuality might be anathema to the ultimate project of human rights, which is precisely to protect and foster human dignity.... [R]eliance upon the application of law and human rights as a subset of law, far from being a means of realizing human dignity, is fundamentally dehumanizing, impoverishing as it does the possibilities of mutual accommodation and compromising our particular responsibility to define what would be appropriate conduct. (Ames 1988, pp. 212-213)

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Underlying Ames' argument is a recognition that the very notion of subjective entitlement involves the radical disparity of public and private spaces. It at once promotes and is parasitic on the notion of our independence -- not interdependence -- as individual human beings. It is hardly surprising for this reason that much of rights discourse is directed toward mediating between the claims of groups or states and those of individuals. And there is without any doubt much good that has come of such mediation. But, as Kothari points out, to the extent that our identities are culturespecific and ethnically grounded, and to the extent that cultural diversity (and not mere variety) is an essential ingredient of a viable national or international community, rights discourses emphasizing universal subjective entitlements can prove "counterproductive" -- liable to erasing the unique identities of those persons they are intended to benefit. Because the prevailing notion of human rights involves commitments to both universality and equality, the private space of subjective entitlement is, finally, generic, not unique; it is factually individual but not meaningfully personal.

Henry Rosemont, Jr., has argued, rightly I think, that if the bearing of rights is independent of what makes us uniquely differing human beings -- differing in our age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, and so on -- then "those rights must obtain for human beings altogether independently of their culture" (Rosemont 1988, p. 167). But that is a rather odd state of affairs to affirm since there are no culturally independent human beings. Moreover, since the concept of an autonomous self that bears universal rights "is overwhelmingly drawn from the culture of the Western industrial democracies and is concerned to propose a moral and political perspective, an ideal, appropriate to that culture" (p. 168), such a view of rights forces us into either the corner of cultural relativism and the evaluative paralysis it engenders or the corner of maintaining that everyone does have rights even if they are not recognized in some cultures. Either way, matters do not look good. We are compelled either simply to bear silent and inactive witness to whatever atrocities are being committed at any given time around the world or to invite charges of cultural chauvinism or imperialism by forcing all nations and peoples to adopt something like our conception of rights as a universal standard.

It seems to me that between moral and political quietism and moral and political chauvinism there is very little to choose. And yet, this would seem to be the impasse to which we are delivered by the conception of human rights inherited from the historical matrix of Enlightenment Europe. For that reason, I would like to turn to Buddhism to see in what way it might afford us a viable alternative in conceiving human rights. By providing us with a radically different understanding of what it means to be a person, Buddhism may well be able to afford us a significantly different notion of human rights -- one that emerges out of the practically realized insight that we are everywhere and at all times dramatically interdependent.

The Priority of Interdependence: Metaphysical Ambiguity and a Karmic Middle Path to Human Rights
The Buddha often said that he refrained from taking a stand on either 'this' or 'that', and in several of his early talks informed his listeners that 'is' and 'is not'

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are the twin barbs on which humankind is impaled -- the basic conditions of our social conflict. That is, lying at the roots of our suffering is a refusal to recognize the interdependence -- and so the ontological (not merely epistemic) ambiguity -- of all things.

By refusing to see any boundary or identity as objective -- including every manner of "first causes," "fundamental substances," or "essential natures" -- Buddhism not only disallows any appeal to either fixed or universal definitions of human nature, but it also denies the intelligibility of anything like an autonomous individual or a purely objective, if nurturing, environment. Thus, in the teaching of the five khandhas we are instructed to see ourselves as arising through the complex interplay of form, feelings, perceptions, dispositions, and consciousness -- none of which exists independently of the others. Granted that even consciousness is not taken to be an intrinsic property or faculty of an individual organism or being, but is seen rather as a quality of relationship between 'beings' and the 'environments' from which they can be abstracted, this amounts to a radical decentering of personhood -- a new Copernican revolution according to which the experiencing self is no longer identified as essential to who we are. Human being is irreducibly relational.

But rather than resting content with this still relatively "realistic" description of the interplay of the subjective and objective poles of human experience, Buddhism profoundly inverts the 'ontological' hierarchy of being and value by claiming that not only each of the five khandhas but the world in which they occur should be seen as irreducibly karmic. That is, value precedes and conditions existence.

According to the teaching of karma, the topography of our experience is unfailingly conditioned by our own likes and dislikes and the patterns of intention and action based upon them. Because of this, the relationships among events in our lives and our places in them are never simply matters of fact, but must be understood as always -- even if never inherently -- meaningful. This, however, is to say that we live in a world in which all things are dramatically -- and never only factually -- interdependent.

In such a karmic world, the experience of meaninglessness can only arise on the basis of ingrained ignorance. In practice, a karmic understanding of human being and the world entails realizing that no matter what our present circumstances seem to be, since they have arisen only in complex interdependence with our own projections of value -- our own acts of intentional disambiguation -- they are always open to meaningful revision. No situation is intractable.

But neither can we claim the objective existence of any limits to our responsibility. In much the same way that the clues in a well-crafted mystery are continually being reconfigured by the ongoing actions of the characters, or the way that certain drawings can be viewed as either a vase or two women in close conversation, every situation in which we find ourselves must be seen both as a result and a revelation of an intentional lineage and as an opportunity to change the dramatic direction in which it has disposed our conduct and experience.

Like the Sanskrit word "karma," drama can be traced back to roots (the Greek draein) meaning simply "to do," or "to act." And like the Buddhist concept of

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karma, drama has come to signify the performative and suspenseful interweaving of meaning and desire in the context of our all too human conflicts and passions. In drama, characters are never truly understood as autonomous individuals, but rather as members of a more or less fluid ensemble who mutually constitute each other's identities in an attempt to understand if not resolve their troubles or suffering. Just so, seeing ourselves in karmic terms invites us to realize that while our choices are crucial, who we are as persons and so the meaning of our lives is always articulated in the context of personal ensembles involved in the creative continuation of a shared narration.

As I have argued elsewhere (Hershock 1996), the movement of our narration -- our conduct -- can be oriented either socially or societally -- either toward improvisation-rich interrelationship or toward role-mediated patterns of interaction. In concrete terms, of course, our everyday lives are a mix of these orientations. Indeed, the social and societal are less like the physically opposite directions of 'north' and 'south' or 'in' and 'out' than they are like the qualitatively different directions of 'yellow' and 'blue' on the color spectrum: matters are often "shades of green." We can say, however, that to the extent that it is socially oriented, our narration is conducive to increasing intimacy and meaningful vulnerability, while to the extent that it is societally oriented, it is conducive to developing relatively fixed identities or institutions and factual security.

According to these characterizations, the current human rights discourse is overwhelmingly societal, focusing on a universal and standard concept of human being and on the realization of legal, political, and economic institutions capable of insuring its possibility -- no matter how ideal. But at the same time, if Kothari, Rosemont, Ames, and others are not entirely mistaken, this discourse and the kinds of development on which it depends also make impossible certain kinds of story, certain forms of narration. An obvious example would be the kind of narration that brings into being and sustains subsistence lifeways like those enjoyed by native Hawaiians prior to the arrival of Captain Cook. Karmically, the need for human rights must itself be seen as our responsibility and so as reflecting conflicts within our conception of human nature and personhood. Current human rights discourse not only restricts the range of possible meanings for being human, but is also dangerously inconsistent.

We can begin making sense out of this admittedly iconoclastic claim by noting that while both sociality and societality can lead to the resolution of concrete troubles or crises, because the former is conducive to developing improvisational virtuosity and the latter to regulative competency, they have quite disparate karmic complexions. Sociality means movement in the direction of skill in appreciative contribution to whatever situation in which we find ourselves, societality to skill in effectively controlling the definition and outcome of our circumstances. As dispositions in conduct and hence in both intention and action, sociality entails karma for finding ourselves in situations where we are able to make creative contributions -- a karma for unhindered appreciation and offering. By contrast, societality brings about karma for being able to control or regulate our circumstances -- a karma for being

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able effectively and efficiently to get what we want. But precisely because all things are co-dependently arisen, such karma also means an increasing disposition for being in want. It is the entire cycle of wanting and getting what we want that is karmically sedimented, not just the final phase of being satisfied. Unlike the dynamic of appreciative contribution, the patterning of our conduct toward bringing about the regular satisfaction of our wants implicates us in sedimenting the conditions of both scarcity and predictability.

While any number of people can jointly appreciate a given work of art, for instance, only one person or one group can own or control it. Societal solutions are thus liable to promote conditions that press us toward the point of selfishness and only generic community. Certainly that seems to have been the case with the rationalization of Western societies since the Industrial Revolution -- a trajectory that is becoming quite precipitous in the still-dawning Information Age and which the present human rights discourse does little to alter. From a karmic and thus narrative frame of reference, the marginalization of our uniqueness and diversity -- its modulation into mere variety -- acts as a catalyst for the atrophy of interest or care, promoting the conditions of nihilistic resignation and narcissistic indulgence. The implied inattentiveness to what deserves our appreciation signals, at bottom, our dramatic depletion -- both a blocking from and leaking away of those resources needed for leading meaningfully interdependent and not just factually coexistent lives.

It is only to the extent that we appreciate and actively endorse our differences that we conserve our capacity for always being in a position to make a difference. Human rights conceived in societal terms -- as regulatory institutions and legal entitlements meant to secure individual and yet universal and so generic autonomy -- in fact tend to perpetuate the very values responsible for making such rights necessary in the first place. In karmic terms, increasingly effective control over the conditions of freedom is inseparable from experiencing that freedom as increasingly under threat. Hence, the almost epidemic proliferation in the U.S. of both legal "rights" and rights "violations."

As a way of correcting such a negatively recursive orientation of our conduct, Mahāyāna Buddhist sūtras often direct us toward the perfection of offering as an indispensable practice on the path of awakening. For instance, the Lotus and Vimalakīrti Sūtras are filled with stories of bodhisattvas who are capable not of controlling their circumstances at will but of responding in them with unlimited skill in means or upāya. As the Diamond Sūtra makes clear, such bodhisattvas do not free other individual beings, but rather reorient conduct -- an entire relational and dramatic situation-in a meaningful and enlightening fashion. In short, the bodhisattva ideal -- and so the ideal of Buddhist personhood -- is one of horizonless virtuosity in contributory appreciation.

In keeping with this understanding of human nature, the Ch'an school -- the school of seeing directly into our own original nature or ben xing 本性 -- came to be known for the teaching of dun wu 頓悟 or "readiness and awakening." Typically translated as "sudden enlightenment," dun wu actually has nothing to do with how

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long it takes to "attain" enlightenment. Dun literally refers to the moment when a bowing servant, having heard from his or her master the nature of their most immediate task, lifts up in acceptance of the responsibility involved and goes into action. That is, dun refers to manifest readiness to be of service, manifest responsibility to the needs of the present situation. Our original nature is thus not an inherited or even achieved status but a liberating orientation of our conduct -- the expression of unabridged virtuosity in ending suffering and realizing a truly enlightening worldrealm, an intimately liberating pattern of interdependence.

Thus conceiving personhood means taking seriously the claims that value precedes being and that meaning is neither superordinate nor subordinate to the process of our interdependence but coextensive with it. It also means conceiving human rights along lines radically alternative to those assuming the objectivity of our human condition. To begin with, it must be a part of a consistently Buddhist view of human rights that it is neither through the assertion of our independent status over and against our objective circumstances nor through the cultured acceptance of our dependent status within them that dignified Buddhist personhood is fundamentally articulated. Since who we are as persons crucially consists of our unique and dramatic contributions to the movement of our narration, our primary task is neither that of asserting our autonomy nor that of distinguishing ourselves in ritual or institutionally mediated interaction, but that of appreciating or adding value to our already meaningful interdependence. Human rights, then, will serve to insure not this or that set of minimal factual conditions, but the conservation and development of our resources for dramatic virtuosity.

The Issue of Human Rights: The Meaningful Revision of our Narration
Early in his career as an itinerant teacher, the Buddha was often asked exactly what it was that he taught. Other teachers had marvelously involved metaphysical schemes, profoundly abstruse epistemologies, and an armory of often secret, mystical techniques designed to bring about the realization of radical and permanent independence from the vicissitudes of the world. Contrary to these complex systems, the Buddha claimed that he taught only four things: that all this is trouble (dukkha); that there is a pattern in the arising of trouble; that there is a pattern in the resolution of trouble; and that there is a path or means of bringing about such a resolution.

The historical unfolding of Buddhism can be seen as the always local, unique, and highly practical understanding and expression of these four truths. Here, I would like to use a story from the Therīgāthā or Verses of the Elder Nuns to focus on some general characteristics involved in the Buddhist resolution of trouble and shed some useful light on their relationship to contemporary rights discourse.

The story opens with a woman named Kisagotami wandering through her village. Her husband, once a prosperous merchant, had been murdered by bandits just a month or two previously. To compound this tragedy, her first child had then been carried off in a flood. When her second and only remaining child succumbed to fever not long afterward, she had lost any remaining ability to cope. With the corpse

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of her dead child under her arm, Kisagotami has been walking through the village for a week. Filthy and incontinent, begging whomever she meets to help cure her child, she is now shunned by all the adults and subject to the taunts and ridicule of the village children.

As the story goes, one villager takes pity on her and suggests that she visit the Buddha, who is staying with some disciples in a nearby park. After prostrating herself before the Buddha, Kisagotami asks whether he can cure her child. He says that he can, but first she must go into the village and bring back three or four mustard seeds from any house where death has not visited. Kisagotami goes off and knocks on the door of each house in every neighborhood of the village. In none is she able to collect her mustard seeds. She then returns to the Buddha and, in the course of relating her journey, attains enlightenment, her travails ended forever.

This story has been interpreted in many ways. Often, it is thought to illustrate the universality of human suffering, and Kisagotami's enlightenment is taken to result from her insight into this truth. But a fully Buddhist appreciation of the story leads us much deeper. The key to Kisagotami's enlightenment is not some privately experienced insight, but rather what happens as she travels from house to house, from neighbor to neighbor and relative to relative, asking for the mustard seeds needed to 'end her suffering'. As she is reminded of the deaths of her cousins and childhood friends, of the village storyteller, and of the blacksmith's son, whom she had once loved with all the passions that course through the limbs of a teenage girl, Kisagotami is gradually woven back into the narrative texture of village life. She is literally reintegrated into the life stories in which she has learned not only who she is, but why. By returning to the Buddha and relating these stories to him, she actively reconstitutes her own story, weaving the villagers back into her own life and with them the Buddha. Kisagotami's enlightenment is not a private experience, but rather an expression of her dramatic interdependence.

As this story makes evident, the end of suffering or trouble cannot be taken as primarily or even most importantly factual. To the contrary, both suffering and its resolution must be understood as narrative in nature -- as a function of the interruptions and healings of our dramatic or meaningful interrelationships. In the ignorance of such interrelationships, there is no true suffering, but only pain. That is, from a Buddhist perspective, suffering arises only when our narrative movement, the meaningful flow of our interdependence, is radically diverted, interrupted, or blocked. As Kisagotami discovers, the resolution of suffering or trouble is thus irreducibly connected to the furthering of our drama and never merely the separate advancement of 'yours' or 'mine'. Truly resolving some present crisis or trouble means realizing the karma -- the complex of intentions -- that has conditioned its arising and doing whatever is needed in order to insure that these conditions will not be repeated. That is, suffering can only be resolved when one both understands where one's intentions have erred and takes whatever measures are required to make sure that this is the last time that we find our narration blocked or subverted in this way.

Formulated in the most general way possible, all suffering pivots on the experi-

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ence of meaninglessness. We all know that it is possible not just to endure, but to learn and grow from even the most extreme hardships. Very often, it is in the most dire straits that we learn how compassionate we can be, how appreciative of every smallest nuance in our relationships with others. And yet, each of us also knows precisely what it is to feel that though we are still going through all the motions of living, our lives have already ended. This feeling of profound impasse, the sense that there is no point in going on, no direction promising an exciting and meaningful continuation of our story, announces not the factual nature of our situation but the extreme poverty of our dramatic resources -- our blocked or depleted capacity for meaningfully revising our situation and appreciating our unlimited intimacy with all things.

Seen in this light, the bodhisattva's vow to resolve the suffering of all beings reveals itself as a commitment to appreciating and contributing to the dramatic or meaningful extension of the interdependence of all beings. That is, the bodhisattva orients his or her conduct toward restoring narrative movement in the direction of liberating intimacy. At times this entails the provision of new perspectives on the possibilities of the present situation, and at times it may well entail removing physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual blocks to our ability to attend to the needs of our situation and contribute to its dramatic development. What is indispensable is that we come to see our situation as both meaningful and ultimately conducive to our liberation. Thus, the relinquishing of status -- far from involving a capitulation to circumstance -- is part of a skillful improvisation with and dramatic incorporation of the unexpected.

Are All Human Rights Buddhist?

As formulated in contemporary political and moral discourse, human rights accords are intended to bring about globally consistent conditions under which it is possible to minimize the sum total of unnecessary suffering. Human rights can thus be seen as a kind of insurance against certain of the most common ways in which our integrity and dignity as human beings can be and have been compromised, often quite systematically. Because the possibility of such insurance is itself technologically conditioned -- the possibility, for example, of realizing adequate food, clothing, shelter, medical attention, information, access to media, and participation in national and international political and economic practices for each and every individual -- the promotion of human rights has been inextricably bound up with establishing the base conditions of self-determination and so with development imperatives of one sort or another.

By contrast, from the sort of Buddhist perspective I've been articulating here, human rights should enhance our capacity for making the most dramatically meaningful use we can of karmically conditioned and therefore unavoidable trouble or suffering. That is, human rights should not have the primary function of promoting minimal universal standards on the presumption of our equality, but that of establishing and sustaining the conditions under which our diversity might flourish and, thus, under which each one of us might -- in our local setting -- develop our greatest

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creative and responsive virtuosity. In a very real sense, this suggests the need for skepticism about the long-range benefits promised by ubiquitous development and the "technopian" path to controlling the root conditions of suffering.

To be sure, not all Buddhist rights theorists and commentators would agree with such an approach. For example, Charles Taylor (1996) has maintained that it is possible to argue for minimal universal standards like the right to life and freedom of speech on Buddhist grounds, and L.P.N. Perera (1991) has written a monograph explaining how each of the thirty articles in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights can be supported on the basis of early Buddhist texts. In a somewhat different vein, and with considerable conceptual overlap with the approach recommended here, Kenneth Inada (1990) has argued that the human rights discourse in the West has focused almost exclusively on what he refers to as "hard relationships" in which persons are "treated as separate and independent entities ... due mainly to the strong influence [of] science and its methodology" (p. 94). He proposes that we supplement this discourse with a Buddhist view of rights developed on the assumption that "human beings are primarily oriented in soft relationships" (p. 96), which he characterizes in terms of mutuality, holism, and emptiness. According to Inada, human rights "are not only matters for legal deliberation and understanding, but ... must be complemented by and based on something deeper and written in the very feelings of all sentients" (p. 102).

Each of these views and the many more that might be cited are admirable attempts to reconcile the Western human rights discourse and some coherent set of Buddhist teachings. The reasons for such attempts are evident enough, I think, but perhaps not the possible ways in which reconciliatory success might compromise the coherence of the Buddha's core teachings. For instance, as a practical corollary of his teaching that there are no essential natures, the Buddha was adamant about taking local differences into account. Among other things, this means fully appreciating the uniqueness of every situation, every person, and so every instance of trouble or suffering. The bodhisattva's evolution of unlimited upāya or "skill-in-means" is guided by precisely this practical requirement. But taking this seriously means realizing that no two beings are equal, not even the 'same' person at different times. The question thus has to be not whether Buddhist teachings can be reconciled with the modern conception of human rights but rather what kind of rights can be established and sustained on the basis of there being no equality, no universality, no essential natures, and no autonomous individuals?

In his paper on the rights-related thought of Sulak Sivaraksa and Phra Dhammapidok (Pryudh Prayutto), Soraj Hongladarom (1994) remarks that it is Sulak's belief that "without any attachment to the individual self, without the consciousness of 'Me' and 'Mine'... there is no motive to violate any of the rights enshrined in the UN Declaration" (p. 4). For Sulak, the need for formal human rights legislation can be traced to "the imposition of the ideas of consumerism, greed, and exploitation of the environment ... perpetrated by power holders who are ... mere pawns of Western governments and multinational corporations" (p. 6). Thus, it is natural for

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Sulak "to see that human rights suffer as a result of the imposition of Western ideas rather than that human rights result because of such imposition" (p. 6).

Turning to Phra Dhammapidok's views, this radical perspective becomes even more pointed. According to Dhammapidok, the Western conception of human rights has three major flaws: first, it "resulted from a background and basic attitude of division and segregation, struggle and contention"; second, such rights "are a purely human invention and do not exist as a natural condition [and so] are not 'natural rights'"; finally, the concept of human rights is "a purely social convention, dealing with social behaviour ... [and] does not consider the quality of mental motivation" (cited in Hongladarom 1994, p. 8). Dhammapidok's contemporary Thai Buddhist conviction is that properly Buddhist human rights should not be formulated on the assumption of divisiveness, dissension, and mutual disregard; they must take into account intention or karma; and they must be directed toward promoting the fullest spiritual development of the individual. Very much in keeping with the wider net cast by the Mahāyāna, Dhammapidok significantly blurs the boundaries of 'individuality' by also insisting that a proper concept of human rights must recognize social kamma (karma), or the kamma created by a society as a whole. That is, human rights must attend to the karma being established on the basis of commitments to particular kinds of development and technological bias, and to the ways in which this karma conditions the realization of full and dignified personal and spiritual evolution.

As Hongladarom summarizes: if human rights "are applied without the right conditions of the mind, then they will only lead the people astray, and will not be effective toward realizing perfection at all. The right condition of the mind is then of primary importance" (p. 10). But with its critical emphasis on the universality of human rights, on the a priori nature of the rights-bearing individual, and on the importance of clearly demarcating the private and public spheres to insure against any untoward or coercive imposition of particular ideals or values on the subjective individual, Western rights discourse necessarily fails to meet this primary condition. Indeed, as mentioned in the introduction, while compassion may generally be confirmed a "great idea," from the liberal democratic perspective on rights it must remain strictly an optional one.

To say that all this reduces to an argument about justifications and not norms is to miss a crucial point. It may be that truly Buddhist human rights and those promoted in much of the ongoing discourse about rights will turn out to be formally similar. But precisely because their bases or justifications are not identical, we should not take this formal similarity as proof of their essential sameness. In practice, justifications of human rights are means for realizing their normative ends. That is, how we justify a right or rights can be seen as expressing the deep intentional structure of the norms they establish -- the structure of their genesis, the conditions of their arising. Given this, in spite of apparent formal similarities, rights conceived on the basis of seeing human being in terms of universally autonomous selfhood will establish a very different karma and thus the disparate experiential and dramatic consequences from rights generated out of an understanding of human being in

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terms of meaningfully narrative interdependence. Disagreements about justification are thus inevitably disagreements about the meaning of norms as well, whether or not this is convenient or rationally comfortable to admit.

Where our primary concern is to articulate the minimum conditions of our equality, human nature can only be seen as generic. What is excluded, as in scientific research, is all that is unexpected, uncontrollable, exceptional, and unrepeatable. With respect to human nature, this represents a rejection of any elitist conception of human being. And in light of such aberrations as the rise and spread of Nazi fascism, there are good reasons to endorse a moderately skeptical view of elitism. But, as suggested earlier, such skepticism practiced too blindly leaves us liable to rejecting the explicitly dramatic dimension of our relationships -- in narrative terms, we are reduced from concretely and complexly diverse characters to strictly generic protagonists and antagonists. We may achieve universal equality to some degree, but only through the atrophy or loss of all that is virtuosic and intrinsically meaningful. Being seen as equal is, in the end, to be treated generically. And that, damaging as it is to our presuppositions, is the root condition of a life experienced as basically meaningless.

As Kothari, Tilakaratna, Ames, Sulak, and Dhammapidok all implicitly confirm, rights discourses founded on the assertion of both individuality and equality are selfdefeating in the sense that they at once cultivate tendencies to recognize and deny the meaningful fecundity of our differences. Moreover, because they undermine the uniqueness of our interrelationships, such discourses promote the absence of intimately realized compassion or care for one another. In fact, by focusing on minimal entitlements -- a minimal and universal inventory of what we can call our own -- such discourses cannot but promote the institutionalization of selfishness.

Nothing could be more diametrically opposed to the values underlying the Buddhist conception of ideal personhood. If human rights are conceived in terms of establishing the conditions under which each of us in our unique way is able to express our buddha-nature -- our character as bodhisattvas or enlightening beings -- then they must serve to promote not minimal standards but the pursuit of virtuosity. The proper orientation of rights conversations would thus be toward developing an appreciation of contributory uniqueness and a cultivation of the harmonic possibilities opened up by our very differences. Far from encouraging either the universal realization of generic equality or a sterilization of our differences, human rights so conceived would foster a conservation of diversity and the dramatic possibilities it affords.

None of this is to suggest that a Buddhist approach to human rights would have us turning deaf ears and blind eyes to the material, political, and aesthetic suffering of others. To the contrary, it would recommend that we so thoroughly erase the horizons circumscribing our selfish concern that these sufferings are experienced and responded to as our own. This is accomplished not by a patronizing attempt to raise the so-called "other" to "our own level" or to a position "equal to our own," but by doing what we can to help him or her realize a meaningful reconstitution of

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his or her own narration -- a narration into which we carefully and attentively enter even as we include it within our own.

If suffering is irreducibly narrative and so inescapably cultural, so is any true resolution of suffering. There is simply no possibility of transplanting -- either importing or exporting -- generic solutions. They must be grown on site. And yet, because Buddhist metaphysics insists on our seeing all things in terms of their interdependence, while the negotiating of the breakdown of meaning in our lives must take shape locally, this will prove viable only to the extent that it also includes a willingness to keep relinquishing our horizons for what we are inclined to consider relevant. Failing to do so, we may think we have solved a problem when in fact we have merely repressed or displaced its narrative expression. And that, sadly, is just another and particularly resistant strain of suffering. Granted such an understanding of suffering and its resolution, the most basic human rights are those of becoming increasingly aware of our interdependence and living increasingly meaningful and compassionate lives.

Human Rights as Path-making

In the fourth of his truths related to the troubled aspects of our lives, the Buddha states that there is a path or practice by means of which we can bring about the resolution of suffering. Most often expressed in the early teachings as the famous Eightfold Path, this practice aims at insuring the root, narrative conditions of our dramatic liberation. Seen as providing a guide to living the bodhisattva life, the eight limbs of this path also jointly articulate the conditions of our exemplary and enlightening interdependence -- a formulation of our most crucial human rights.

Traditionally stated, the Eightfold Path includes the cultivation of an appropriate or corrective view, intention, speech, conduct, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. In the vocabulary of rights discourse, the path involves first the freedom to reduce our ignorance about our situation, to increase our capacity for considering what is relevant to our present circumstances, and to realize the dramatic nature of our interdependence.

Second, it involves the freedom to express our understanding through intentions or desires that are appropriate to our situation and conducive to the cultivation of both our own virtuosity and that of others. Here, the term virtuosity must be understood as including both improvisational and contributory expertise as well as the manifestation of compassionately moral vitality.

Third, it involves the freedom to speak in ways appropriate to our situation -- ways conducive to furthering the appreciation of our interdependence and not our ignorance or our denigration of it. In this sense, freedom of speech is not an absolute right, but one that is deeply contextual. In general, establishing limits to free speech will involve cultivating a sensitivity to the meaningfulness of elective restraint rather than the imposition of situation-independent restriction.

The path involves also the freedom to engage in appropriate conduct and the freedom to pursue an appropriate livelihood. In combination, these suggest a right to

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meaningful sociality, a right to improvise the terms of our relationships with one another and our various environments. This means, at bottom, a freedom to resist the societal orientation of our conduct -- an orientation that promotes seeing each another predominantly in terms of fixed and limiting roles and engaging one another primarily through generic media and the institutions that formalize their presence in our lives. Such an orientation not only depletes our narrative resources by encouraging an ignorance of what is uniquely present at any given moment, it shifts responsibility for the quality of our interactions from "us" to an always elusive and effectively deaf and dumb "them." Practically, this entails at the very least a right to avoid work that is dulling or degrading and a right to eschew conduct that compromises the dramatic dimension of our lives. Appropriate livelihood thus involves a movement away from fundamentally calculative relationships with labor toward work that fosters a growing sensitivity to qualitative excellence.

Central to the realization of these rights is the freedom to cultivate a sense of commitment and continued effort -- that is, a freedom from both objective/institutional and subjective/private blockages to our continuing growth and virtuosity. For example, to the extent that exposure to information technologies and mass media are correlated with a shortened attention span, an intolerance for low stimulus environments, a disruption of communally performed acts of remembrance, a reduction of knowledge from a performative and holistic process to generically stored and randomly accessed data, and a tendency to perceive things as icons that have only virtual and fleeting importance, we have a right to lives in which these technologies and media are not deemed absolutely necessary. Phrased somewhat differently, we have a right to develop deeply felt and caring relationships requiring our consistent and freely offered -- not compulsively attracted -- attention.

Finally, the Eightfold Path entails the freedom to cultivate and enjoy appropriate qualities of attention and focus in whatever circumstances we find ourselves. Because the Buddhist understanding of awareness is thoroughly relational, this means we should not only be trained to adjust our attention flexibly to our changing circumstances, but also be free from both oppressively ambient ideologies and repressively ubiquitous technologies that would effectively diminish our capacity for spontaneous and creative focus or direction and so deplete the single most important resource for cultivating a truly meaningful life.

As a whole, the Eightfold Path suggests that our most basic right is that of freely directing or focusing our own attention. Thus, while we should all enjoy a freedom from explicit, political propaganda, we should also enjoy a freedom from advertising-especially the advertising of lifestyles and unrealistic expectations promulgated to all age groups through the entertainment media. Put another way, this is a right to take our local situation as worthy of our full respect and care -- a right not to be informed that we are in want, that our circumstances are critically impoverished or impossible to orient presently in a liberating direction.

There are clearly many similarities between the directions taken by current rights discourse and those recommended by the Eightfold Path as just interpreted. What is distinctive about the Eightfold Path is that it functions systematically to insure the

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dramatic or meaningful quality of our lives and concretely enhances our opportunities for exemplary conduct or virtuosity. That is, rather than concentrating our attention and efforts on what we are guaranteed in terms of our situation, our "estate," a Buddhist view on human rights aims at establishing the conditions under which we are increasingly able to intervene dramatically in our lives in order to realize more meaningful and responsive relationships with one another. In other words, Buddhist human rights involve learning to make appropriate and liberating use of our karma. This means first and foremost a movement away from personal, cultural, ethnic, and national narratives focused on what is lacking or wanting, and cultivating instead the conditions under which appreciative contribution or offering can best flourish.

In Hard Cases Can the Differences Hold?
Now, it is very easy to remark at this point that such a view of human rights is nice in theory, but it is difficult to imagine it being concretely put into practice. Without clear and easily measured or monitored goals, and without some consistent political and/or economic fulcrum, it is hard to see how one could leverage any "abusive" government into compliance with a core set of human rights -- whether conceived along Buddhist lines or otherwise. The path might look appealing, but how are we going to get everyone moving in 'the right direction'?

Given the current global situation, any viable answer must begin with acknowledging that the question itself is problematic. The ideal of universal agreement is a historical and cultural artifact of significant standing, but by no means itself either universal or ideally suited to maintaining a diversity (not just a simple variety) of views and practices. And in actuality the call for a global human rights accord need not imply adopting a single, universally applicable set of rights. While an accord is thought of in terms of joint assent or agreement, it is most broadly a bringing into harmony -- not an achievement of unity, but rather the realization of a mutually enhancing relationship. As such, a human rights accord need not imply an attained singularity of view and purpose brought about through an integration of our diverse views on "human nature" and the conditions most suited to its fullest development. To the contrary, a rights accord should entail an abiding respect for local differences in the context of an attempt to bring about a viable world community -- not a collapse of differences in the ways we are human but a bringing together of these differences in the constitution of a new kind of community.

Importantly, a harmonious relationship is one in which the whole is surprisingly different from the sum of its disparate parts. Think, for instance, of what happens in adding a "seventh" note to an A major chord. To the extent that a rights accord is predicated on realizing international harmony, everyone involved must be willing to be surprised by exactly how things play out. To be otherwise is to use human rights as a way of setting 'objective' standards for measuring the extent to which a society is 'humane'. And that, at bottom, is to use human rights as a means of exerting authority.

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A corollary of this is realizing that all 'minimum standards' are thoroughly context-dependent. Practically, this does not exclude the possibility of agreeing to 'universalize' caloric intake or minimal working conditions. What it does exclude is refusing responsibility for bringing about the global circumstances within which such minimum standards are met as a matter of course. Such responsibility, however, cannot be undertaken in such a way that, for instance, the industrialized West effectively mortgages the future of a developing nation in order to 'help' it meet internationally recognized dietary and working standards. As Tilakaratna insists, any 'help' extended to spur or support development must do so in such a way as to release indigenous creativity and so maintain -- not elide -- significant cultural differences.

Current rights discourse has much to do with both ultimatum and compromise. It is demanding. It is about taking stands and making concessions. And, in theory, there is perhaps nothing wrong with this. At a practical level, however, demands mean the assertion of independent or dependent status. Compromises often amount to a process of mutually inflicted violence that results in little more than the form and the increased vulnerability characteristic of a growing proximity with one another, but without fostering any of the felt community and appreciative vitality that go along with the realization of intimacy. Concessions are by nature steps consciously taken in the direction of less-conflicted coexistence, but there is no history of them ever leading to the erasure of that merely factual coexistence in the realization of truly virtuosic and meaningful interdependence.

Of course, matters are seldom as simple in the real world as they are on paper. In the case of the China-Tibet crisis, for example, we have the Han Chinese-majority central government resisting Western attempts to meddle in its 'internal' affair of 'managing' the Tibetan cultural and religious minority within its (1950) boundaries. Different Tibetan groups, in Tibet itself and in exile, hold very disparate views of what an acceptable solution to the crisis would consist of and why it came about in the first place. For some, the meaning of the aggressive 1950 annexation of Tibet by China has been the unwarranted murder of nearly a million innocent Tibetans and the near decimation of Tibetan Buddhist culture. For others, the Chinese invasion resulted in part from Tibet's traditional isolationism and the failure of its leaders to take fully into account the interdependence of Tibet's future and global changes in the political and economic climate. But far from being entirely tragic, the meaning of the invasion has also been the internationalization of Tibetan Buddhist culture -- an opportunity for that diverse tradition to contribute in a very direct and unprecedented way to the complexion of the contemporary world.

It cannot be said that either of these views or the many other possible variations are inherently 'right' or 'wrong'. The Dalai Lama has maintained a nonviolent and conciliatory posture toward the central Chinese government, endorsing a "one country, two systems" approach to resolving the conflict between Tibetan rights and Chinese aspirations to unbroken national unity. Other Tibetan activists have been willing to endorse whatever measures necessary to realize a free and independent Tibetan homeland. In both cases, the solution seems distant -- a picture not yet real-

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ized. Another approach would be to recognize and embrace the fact that Tibet has in effect become a transcontinental nation. At present, China's interest in Tibet seems to be more territorial than ideological or cultural. China wants the right to rule the land in such a way as to achieve maximal benefit for all of China. In a word, its interests are nationalistic. Tibetan activism has similarly been focused on the issue of Tibet as a clearly delimited place -- a nation situated in a geographical area, the ownership of which has been in contention many times and in different degrees of intensity for the past twelve to fifteen hundred years. What would it mean to bring these narratives into harmony?

Until the present, it has been a practical given that peoples arise in complex interdependence with their locale. Indigenous lifeways are not imposed on an environment but develop as responses to it. But the intense rationalization of the lifeworld that began during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has substantially altered that relationship. It is now the case that immediate environmental conditions no longer constitute the singularly most important ground for and insurance of the meaning of a people's cultural practices. There is thus a sense in which we are entering an age when -- as the transnational corporation has already made evident -- national and so-called "natural" geographic boundaries are no longer easily fixed. Arguably, they will become increasingly less important. A possible meaning of the exile of Tibetan nationals may be the opportunity to argue for recognizing nonterritorial nationhood. In this case, Tibetan Buddhists might set the 'standard' for nonattachment to place and a capacity for realizing a virtuosic character apart from any fixed identity.

This, of course, is not the kind of "plan" that could be foisted upon Tibetans as a solution to "their" conflicts with the Han Chinese majority. The Buddhist perspective on rights roughly outlined here insists on the underdetermined, nonprogrammatic nature of all solutions to human-rights violations. If anything, it is not a means of generating policy decisions, but rather heuristics -- new ways of seeing a given crisis. In the present case, the scenario above is offered simply as a way of indicating that from a dramatic perspective, resolving the China-Tibet crisis need not center on the issue of land ownership or reestablishing regionally defined political and religious autonomy. But I also have no doubt that if the United Nations were to recognize the Tibetan government in exile as a nation enjoying the same rights as any other in the community of nations, unprecedented surprises would be very rapidly forthcoming indeed. In effect, this would be to refrain from trying to control the Chinese government and instead to engage directly and as fully as possible in appreciating the value of Tibetan culture, contributing to the legal and political continuity and vitality of the Tibetan nation, and weaving Tibetan perspectives into the narrative of the world community.

I would hasten to add, however, that none of this should be construed in any way as letting China "off the hook" for what would appear to be its forceful annexation of Tibetan lands, its wanton destruction of Tibetan monasteries, and its role in the untimely deaths of very, very many Tibetan men, women, and children. These are criminal acts that, if actually committed by China, would warrant accounting

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under the full force of any and all applicable international laws. But I would hesitate to see these as "rights violations." The rights derived from a contemporary reading of the Eightfold Path are "rights-of-way" that no one should be denied. As such, they provide seminal orientations for dramatically liberating our intimacy -- for meaningfully narrating the complexities of our sometimes shared and sometimes conflicting interests. They do not designate already given destinations, fixed states, or firmly established roads to which access can be either granted or lost. In short, they are not 'things' that can be regulated or used to regulate. Laws have been serving us in that capacity for some time and to collapse the distinction between them and rights -- and so between crimes and rights violations -- is to forfeit an important element in clearly distinguishing between our factual coexistence and our meaningful interdependence.

Returning to the distinction suggested above, rights of kind sketched here are intended to promote our enlightened sociality, not to structure better the ways in which our conduct is societally oriented. Precisely because sociality entails improvisation, social as opposed to societal human rights will appear empty or abstract in the absence of concrete situations of intimate engagement. That is, because such rights do not aim at generally ordering life but rather at realizing meaningful virtuosity, they make full sense only in local and personally committed practice, not in professions on paper.

It is my conviction, at any rate, that general solutions and universal rights will solve only generic and universal problems and conflicts of interest. Since such problems and conflicts belong to no one in particular, neither do their solutions help anyone in particular. Unless we take vigorous and ever responsive steps in the direction of conduct that is dramatically harmonious and not just some kind of ideal or factual agreement, we are unlikely ever to decrease the ideological and metaphysical noise already tormenting us. In that unfortunate case, human rights discourse will only promote precisely that -- the literal "flowing apart" of humans and their humanity, of persons and the communities through which their meaning truly flowers.

References

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Hershock, Peter D. 1996. Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch'an Buddhism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Hongladarom, Soraj. 1994. "Buddhism and Human Rights in the Thoughts of Sulak Sivaraksa and Phra Dhammapidok (Prayudh Prayutto)." Published on-line in Journal of Buddhist Ethics Online Conference on Buddhism and Human Rights. URL: http://jbe.la.psu.edu/ Published in Keown, Damien, Charles S. Prebish, Wayne R. Husted, eds. 1998. Buddhism and Human Rights. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon Press.

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