practice compassion, starting from the family, and go on to the community, then national and also international [levels]. If we practice compassion, then things will be much easier. The problems won’t go away, but it will be much easier.” In this way, she thought it a misconception that human rights must be imposed on a society. “We are all born with certain basic rights, we are all human,” she said, adding that what she takes from Buddhism is a search for the middle path as a human rights model but admitting that “it is difficult to determine which is the middle path, especially because societies tend to be in the extremes, including Thailand, like a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. Which is the middle one?”
Khunying Amphorn and Saneh have published their thinking along these lines under the title Human Rights in Thai Society, and Saneh has also published Buddhism and Human Rights. He, too, insists that human rights are available in Buddhism, so that they are not an import, not grafted on to Buddhism, but arise, as it were, naturally and harmoniously with Buddhism.
Buddhism and the National Human Rights Commission
Saneh, like Khunying Amphorn, argues that the guidance Buddhism offers human rights is to direct them toward the cultivation of good and that “there is no need to search for a place for human rights in the Buddhist tradition. Freedom is the essence of Buddhism” (Saneh 2002, 57). He notes, however, a conservative potential in the popular understanding of Buddhism that emphasizes personal salvation and supports the status quo (Saneh 2002, 60). In a broadside against patron-client relations (which are typically understood through the prism of persons’ relative kamma), he criticizes the claim that it is necessary—either as a matter of nature or of history—to submit oneself to one’s “superior group ‘who knows better’” (Saneh 2002, 74). Rather, he takes freedom in Buddhism to contrast with liberal notions insofar as Buddhism looks inward for freedom, and liberalism looks for freedom from external constraints.15 The obstruction, in Saneh’s view of Buddhism, is “one’s own ego and the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion” (Saneh 2002, 68; see also 77). The grounding of human rights in Buddhism, in this view, begins with the idea that individuals are neither a means (as in patronage) nor an end (as in the pursuit of individual merit) but rather that “although men may not be born ‘free’ [because born into an ephemeral world of suffering], they are equal in dignity and rights, that is to say, dignity and rights to their own salvation or freedom” (Saneh 2002, 76).
In Saneh’s view, the route to this salvation, the Noble Eightfold Path (right view, right thought, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentrations) essentially concerns conduct and, therefore, training (in higher morality, mentality, and wisdom). In this connection, he cites the Buddha instructing his disciples, “I, monks, do not say that attainment of profound knowledge comes straightaway; nevertheless it comes by gradual (doing of) what is to be done, a gradual course. In this connection, one having faith draws near, he comes close, he lends ears, he hears Dhamma and learns it by heart … being self-resolute, by means of body he realizes the highest truth itself” (Saneh 2002, 77, cited from Humphreys 1987, 89).
Saneh summarizes the ethical weight of conduct as follows: “It is this principle of human conduct which is inherent in the essential meaning of the law of kamma. In contrast to what tends to be popularly mistaken as a matter of simply individual affairs and salvation … Buddhism stresses as a matter of principle the individual’s responsibility for all his deeds and actions” (Saneh 2002, 79). I draw attention to three things at this point. First, Saneh pits his claims against a popular, mistaken emphasis on individualization of salvation. Second, in the passage Saneh cites, learning is a matter of overhearing—overhearing the highest truth, which one realizes through dispositions of the body, which is to say conduct. Third, the emphasis on conduct is simultaneously an emphasis on the social, both in learning and in deeds. Khunying Amphorn, we saw above, made similar arguments—that the popular emphasis on individual merit is a misguided understanding of Buddhism, that there is a matter of overhearing the truth in Buddhism (also the truth of human rights), and that the path to salvation is social insofar as conduct and the learning of conduct are social. These points are important here in that they show the binding of Buddhism and human rights to be more than a maneuver within the politics of human rights but also a move in the politics of Buddhism; they show the emergence of human-rights-as-Buddhist to be a matter of a certain kind of overhearing that finds them not to be named as such in Buddhism but available latently, or obliquely, yet nonetheless available for discovery as one among the truths of Buddhism; and finally, that conduct, the realm of the social, is constitutively part of Buddhist teaching and practice, as Buddhadasa’s followers maintain.
Human Rights Politics, Buddhist Politics
At the beginning of her contribution to Human Rights in Thai Society, Khunying Amphorn argues that human rights are deeply sedimented in Thai history, within Thai beliefs and Buddhist teachings of compassion and mutual helpfulness.16 “Truly, there have been ideas and promotion of human rights in Thai society that go far back, even if they did not use the words, in line with our traditional customs, and based fundamentally in beliefs and religion, especially Buddhism, which taught people to live together with kindness, to sympathize, to help one another. We see here the ancestry of human rights” (Khunying Amphorn and Saneh 2000, 1 [my translation]).17
She also reiterates the pride Thai should feel in the progress their ancestors made in the direction of human rights by following the middle path and the five precepts of lay Buddhists. She cautions, however, that modern life, particularly as manifest in materialism and consumerism, has undermined the spiritual development of the past (in Khunying Amphorn and Saneh 2000, 10). It is difficult here, as with Saneh’s contrasting of freedom in Buddhism and Western liberalism, to find a simple way to map their positions with respect to the poles of progressivism and conservatism.18 This has something to do with the emergent quality of human rights.
The formulation of human rights within Buddhism (Buddhism, here, in a heritage vanishing under consumerism) simultaneously presents human rights as emergent, conditioned by an age-old Buddhism that did not name its work “human rights.” Two things stand out here. The notions of freedom and liberation that Saneh depicts find their ground in Buddhist ethics rather than a liberal lineage. Second, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn propose a model of human rights protection that follows the practice of the Buddha in that it does not seek to confront violators with their guilt but rather to help awaken would-be violators to the moral implications of their actions.
Given this starting point, what are the implications of thinking of human rights through emergence?19 In one direction, we find human rights latent in Buddhism and in Thai customs and traditions dating to King Ramkhamhaeng in Sukothai (in the 1200s), and yet, in another direction, they only take the name “human rights” in the present.20 They are conditioned by this past (hence the orientations of liberty, freedom, and awakening). Finding human rights latent in the past, in Buddhism, only takes place, however, in a time and place of manifest human rights, and reading them back into their latent state alters the traditions in which we find them. That is to say, finding human rights within Buddhism and proposing a novel end for it (in human rights) alters the picture of Buddhism as well as of human rights.
One way we can characterize the discovery of human rights in ancient Thai traditions and beliefs, perhaps Buddhism above all, is the unfamiliar appearing familiar or the familiar appearing as unfamiliar. Such a discovery is not neutral with respect to these traditions and beliefs, and emergence, here, is invasive, as the claims that Saneh and Khunying Amphorn make are not only moves made on the terrain of human rights (bringing them home by linking them to a familiar ethos). They are also intrusions into debates about the politics of Buddhism, which is to say, Saneh and Khunying Amphorn make claims about morally sustainable action and teaching within Buddhism. In the environment of the NHRC, then, we may also see the memorial for Phra Supoj (hosted, recall, by fellow follower of Buddhadasa, Phra Kittisak) as similarly maneuvering in debates both about human rights and
