Buddhism Human Rights & Social Renewal

Extracts from “Buddhism, Human Rights & Social Renewal”

“The Buddha specifically mentions respect for the dignity of women as a condition that will ensure a society’s moral and material welfare…..The human will is not a transcendental but a conditioned faculty…..Once all culturally constructed barriers between oneself and other others are demolished, what arises spontaneously is an immennse sense fo anukampa, or ‘compassion’: literally, ‘pulsating along with’….The Buddha realised that if people believe permanence is real and that change is illusory they will not even begin to think about changing the conditions in which they found themselves. He insisted on the conditioned co-arising of suffering…. The Buddha declared the most dangerous of all deluded views to be the belief that the self or ego is a sovereign and immortal entity, that its body and the physical world are merely instruments of the ego’s self-realisaion. He established that such hubris is the root cause of conflict in the world.”