Peter D. Hershock
\nEast-West Center
\nAsian Studies Development Program<\/p>\n
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\u2019s institutional approach to change and opening concrete possibilities for a dramatically Buddhist approach to changing the way societies change. <\/p>\n
Read article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ISSN:1076\u20139005 Volume 6, 1999 Changing the Way Society Changes: Transposing Social Activism into a Dramatic Key Peter D. Hershock East-West Center Asian Studies Development Program 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 … Continue reading Buddhist Approaches to Social Change<\/span>