Peter D. Hershock, East-West Center, Asian Studies Development Program.
摘要
While many Buddhists are rightly committed to working in the public sphere for the resolution of suffering, there are very real incompatibilities between the axiomatic concepts and strategic biases of (the dominant strands of) both current human rights discourse and social activism and such core Buddhist practices as seeing all things as interdependent, impermanent, empty, and karmically configured. Indeed, the almost startling successes of social activism have been ironic, hinging on its strategic and conceptual indebtedness to core values shared with the technological and ideological forces that have sponsored its own necessity. The above-mentioned Buddhist practices provide a way around the critical blind spot instituted by the marriage of Western rationalism, a technological bias toward control, and the axiomatic status of individual human being, displaying the limits of social activism’s institutional approach to change and opening concrete possibilities for a dramatically Buddhist approach to changing the way societies change.
目次
Caution on the Tracks: Recognizing the Possibility of Technological Barriers to the Meaning of Social Change 156 Social Activist Strategy: Legally Leveraging Institutional Change 160 Giving up the Ghost and the Machine: A Buddhist Critique of the Technologies of Autonomous Selfhood 162 Emptiness as Horizonless Interconnection and Mutual Relevance: Freeing Ourselves from the Ideal of Factual Autonomy and the Costs of Dramatic Anonymity 165 Activism in Buddhist Perspective: The Disparate Karma of Social and Societal Strategies 168 Opening the Borders: Taking Responsibility for What Society Means 175 Notes 179 Works Cited 180
