Buddhism, Political Engagement and Human Rights

If you’re practising Dharma, you practise it for enlightenment. Not for rights, not for freedom, not for justice, not for healing, not for getting better in a worldly way. Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche

Recently, some internationally renowned Buddhist teachers have expressed restrictions or criticisms regarding the notion of human rights. While these criticisms are valid and appropriate from a decolonial or geopolitical perspective, as well as within a framework strictly related to personal practice, the risk misinterpretation in the Brazilian context is immense.

This is because Brazil has a specific history of abuses that human rights are supposed to protect against, or that were in fact considered when such rights were conceived—starting with the buying and selling of human beings, but especially during the more recent military dictatorship, and continuing after it with countless daily injustices and bloodshed. While the notion of human rights may not seem to effectively protect us from these abuses, here in Brazil criticism of human rights is often made under the pretense of returning to those “golden times” when domestic workers did not need to have labor rights, and it was seen as acceptable to beat up an insolent black person or a university student reading Karl Marx. Either this or the mostly middle-class clamour for “cruel and unusual” punishments for criminals—“human rights for the right humans” is what they say.

Not only do we have these ghosts haunting us, but we also currently have this far-right memetic ideology, virulently mostly influencing the fragile mentality of the middle class. This middle class is inheritor of a certain subservience to the values of the elite—which it identifies itself with and believes to belong to when employing cleaning ladies or mistreating waiters. An elite the middle-class recognizes as a partner, or at least as an aspiration to look forward to. Their vision of themselves is that of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as Steinbeck put it. After all, how can they live without maintaining at least an expectation of potential exploitation? Or without the appearance of superiority? All this under the daily aegis of the banality of evil—the hypocritical coalescence of charity for the fallen with the very boot that stamps them down.

This same middle class often sees the incipient attempts to integrate the brown, mixed-race, and marginalized populations into society, education, and consumerism as leniency toward criminality. Since, obviously, recourse to crime is concentrated among those who are effectively excluded—at least recourse to violence that does not involve luxury car hit-and-runs, political assassinations, or, let’s not forget, the all-pervasive white-collar crimes.

More directly, this seems to imply, for this effectively squeezed Brazilian middle class—though for reasons unrelated to the most oppressed—a sort of loss of its own social standing. The middle class feels it is losing its titles and privileges, and sometimes even the physical and mental spaces that seem to remain untouched in a segregation that was never quite overt here but continues to create bubbles of superiority—such as the environments of airports or universities. Here, I can provide the anecdotal example of my own family, where most members are on the brink of food insecurity, and yet many still believe they belong to the elite, even if only in relation to their neighbors and housekeepers.

In other words, according to the average middle-class right-wing handbook, “law and order” implies a vigilante delusion not unlike that of the slave owner who used the slave catcher to punish and make an example of the disobedient or runaway slave. This delusion often has included the very president of the republic, if he perchance learned to speak correct Portuguese only later in life, or if happened to be born a woman and was tortured by the dictatorship. That sort of rabble, completely unacceptable: our rabble, however... quite acceptable.

The supposedly compassionate hand that calls for the defense of people against the arbitrariness of others ends up yearning for that same power of arbitrariness. Lex Talionis, vendetta, “the only good criminal is a dead criminal”—none of this in any way compatible with the teachings of the Buddha.

Buddhism and Politics

Some views that we identify as political are truly incompatible with Dharma practice. For instance, when politics separates a group (such as Jews, or even the “elite” or a middle class that sees itself as superior, as I have admittedly put in this text) and creates a bias that irrevocably demonizes any person or group of people, it hinders the unconditional and vast compassion of the Mahayana, or the pure view of Vajrayana, if that is your poison of choice.

Certain political agendas work by demonizing opponents or by reducing complex individuals to mere holders of ideologies, sometimes without concern whether they may be victims of those ideologies themselves. This can be extremely destructive within the Buddhist community since it is our nature to label people and be involved in discrimination, especially when “those people” themselves defend various forms of violence and discrimination.

“We will not allow intolerance towards tolerance,” and vice versa, are complex and quite contradictory statements. The crucial point here is to neutrally identify the ideological root that is incompatible with the Dharma and, from there, follow Chandrakirti’s example: “If perchance someone’s ideas were destroyed whilst I expounded my reasoning, it was never my intention for that to happen.” ¹Paraphrasis of Madhyamakavatara VI, 118: “The analyses in this treatise are not given out of an excessive fondness for debate. It is not our fault if, in the course of this teaching, other philosophical systems come to be destroyed.”

But the reasoning is there, clear and shining: if the person feeling upset is not merely a replicating automaton of fake news, they understand the Dharma as something that necessarily challenges our tendencies. They know that Dharma is something to which we must constantly open ourselves, allowing its influence increasingly over our minds. It is understood that those fixated on ideas to a point that they cannot change their thinking are not suitable or receptive vessels for the teachings.

In this context, when we say that Dharma has no political bias or side or does not engage in politics, that is a political position. When the political neutrality of the Dharma began to be proclaimed in Japan, Buddhist temples immediately collaborated in the war effort, siding with the nationalists, allies of the Nazis. Politics, in its ideal form, which is the attempt to live ethically in community, is inescapable—at least for those who do not live in isolation (as a true hermit, because monks generally live in communities). To be frank, this accusation of isolation is common regarding Buddhists. It is one of the stereotypes used against us: someone disconnected from the world, living on a mountain, apolitical, “neither left nor right, moving forward.” Realization as the pinnacle of non-engagement: the great neutral one, the Buddha.

The Enlightenment philosopher Hegel, when confronted with a representation of the Buddha, in the arrogance of his racism, immediately concluded that Asians glorified a mentally deficient person, or, as they said, an alienated one.

People who claim that Dharma is apolitical nod dangerously toward these stereotypes.

In fact, while the Buddha may be free of biases, he is not free of compassion for all beings. Despite the uninformed stereotype, he never disconnects. He begs for food—to encourage generosity and to signal that one does not need to be a prince to attain enlightenment—he teaches, accepts the spaces offered by the elites, walks through streets and forests, and teaches without discriminating between the poor and the rich, people of other religions or philosophies, or beings “good” or “bad”. Not only does he act this way himself, but the entire community he leads does the same. He established rules for them and set up a system of succession. The Buddha never exempted himself from working tirelessly for the benefit of others, without any discrimination—he taught the ignorant and the wise, at least one serial killer, false teachers, envious enemies, kings, and people without caste. He taught all of these and never, at any time, advocated for guns or promoted ineffective medical treatments during epidemics, nor did he sow distrust toward effective treatments. On the contrary, he discouraged hunting, fishing, and the use of intoxicating substances and taught things that improved people’s mental and physical health. He never taught anything that would harm beings—quite the opposite.

Right Motivation

But what happens when an indisputably great figure like Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche explicitly states that the practice of Dharma is not about seeking “rights, freedom, justice, health”, how can we understand this?

Let's begin with the issue of health, since through understanding the impermanence of compounded phenomena, we understand no health can ultimately be sustained—therefore, health cannot trully be a primary Buddhist goal. Health is also the best place to start because rights, freedom, and justice are much more abstract and self-contradictory concepts.

It is known that in certain high-level teachings of Tibetan Buddhism, practiced by near-Buddhas, where life and death are revealed as mere ripples on a vast, boundless, luminous expanse, there may be recommendations not to attempt any medical treatment. If they don't even try to produce or correct meditation (or the absence of meditation), why would they take aspirin or undergo chemotherapy? At this level of realization, all the pains of pancreatic cancer are merely the ecstatic blessing of the guru. I am not being ironic or sarcastic in any way. As a Buddhist practitioner, I accept that this is how things are, and that there are indeed people like this, and they must recognize it like that and act accordingly.

Similarly, I can clearly understand that I am not quite at this level of practice, and if I have an asthma attack, I just take antihistamines. Alas, if it’s too hot, I turn on the air conditioner! I fully understand that this may or may not be integrated into my Dharma practice, and it certainly isn't configured as an essential element for it. Still, this behavior occurs, and one could say, it makes sense (just as it would also make sense to forgo air conditioning for environmental activism). Moreover, I once saw a Buddhist teacher skip a few lines of a text recommending not to take medicine, saying, “In this country, this is illegal, so I won't teach this here”—even while speaking to a small, intimate group of deeply devoted students.

In the same way, I believe no Buddhist teacher, at least in the Mahayana, would refuse to pray for anyone’s well-being, especially for a student or acquaintance of a student who is struggling with health issues. Or refuse to pray for the long life of their own teachers and others, which also involves a practice somewhat similar to Dharma—let's keep this uncontroversial—for a worldly goal. One can go further: isn't one of the essential characteristics of Tantra precisely the integration of mundane or temporary goals, without contradiction, in total union with the ultimate goal?

We can easily understand these considerations. If a person has a non-Buddhist motivation, such as solving their own problems or even the world's problems, their practice obviously won’t be Buddhist. However, if amid their greater motivation, which is compassionate and inclined toward wisdom, they also aspire for temporary benefits for themselves and others, it’s clear there’s no issue.

Within that understanding, however, lies a difficult aspect. Causal efforts, like taking care of physical fitness, earning money, supporting a family, engaging in political activism, therapy, or changing the car's oil, can seemingly consume all our resources, especially time. So where is the Dharma practice, that one that really looks like Dharma practice? Honestly, what happens to most of us is that we don’t really believe in “non-causal efforts.” We increasingly seek only clear causal efforts, common-sensical ones to boot, and this limited mindset ends up occupying every aspect of our life and time. In other words, we spend our lives building things for this very life, or planning for the next weekend, and with that, we absolutely drain all the available time and energy. We have nothing left to offer to the Buddha. This is something that as Buddhists we describe as a kind of demon that blocks Dharma practice.

In principle, with trust in the Dharma, we lack nothing. And if we do lack something, we have the resources to face that lack with a certain composure, perhaps even grace. On the other hand, anything that arises that we manage to integrate into the Dharma, no matter how temporary or seemingly mundane, becomes an ornament of realization. And if this applies to health, football, or art, it also applies to political views and action.

Conceptual Proliferations

Now we enter a more abstract category: justice, freedom, rights. There is the rub.

The problem is that these ideas fall into what Walter Bryce Gallie called “essentially contested concepts.”²Check the wikipedia article about it.

For example, you cherish your individual freedom, but then along comes a coal mining corporation that claims to be a person too. As a person, it has legal rights to individual freedom the same as you do. And its freedom seems to be having its operation going right next to your house, where you live with your human family and pets.

Since the corporation is nothing more than the sum of intentions of a group of people sealed in a contract, if we define a person as a collection of intentions, logically there’s no difference between you and this collection of rules, wills, machines, and operations. The sum of a group of people individual wills can only be a person, right?

Well, at least that’s what the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled as fact: a corporation has, just like you, the right to freedom of speech—even though it has no consciousness or lungs, and not exactly the type of will and need that are considered healthy among non-psychopathic human beings. For the Supreme Court, concepts like “person” or “freedom” are well-defined—whether that definition benefits certain interests, well, that is the contradiction.

Since money itself, for the same Supreme Court, is also viewed as a “form of expression,” corporations can make campaign donations and use their outsized power not only in the economic sphere but also to shape policies who will favor and protect their rights. They can argue, for instance, that in the clash between your freedom to breathe and the freedom of all those contractual wills to make money, maybe you need to be more libertarian and not try to restrict others' freedoms. You want to breathe at the expense of this honest breadwinner? You rascal tyrant! Your freedom is no greater than anyone else’s!

Let’s not even get to the PR side of things, where the corporation uses the power of many intelligent humans to design ideologies which justify and foster its activities. Of course, coal is a much-needed resource, clean energy is not enough, and do not even think about degrowth, both of economy and energy consumption.

All this is entirely legal. The difference between you and Apple seems to boil down to a few minor details: you being a few dollars poorer, perhaps a bit less influential, consuming fewer resources... You need things like food, water, and non-toxic air, a roof over your head, and decent healthcare—if not free, reasonably priced. Meanwhile, Apple—aside from tons of resources extracted in extremely polluting ways—seems to need your heartbeat, facial features, the clicks you make and how long you hesitate between them, and access to your entire field of vision, so they can allot off your mind to the lowest bidder among countless partners devoid of lungs, hearts, or conscience. It does that also hiring several extremely capable humans to work in a highly organized and intensive manner to exploit every second of your awareness even better. Technological feudalism, now you pay to franchise your own mind.

Not to mention the fealty you pay to the Lord: the iPhone 16 Pro, with one more optical element in the camera and a 20Hz increase in screen refresh rate. If it were a Church offering some kind of illusory emotional satisfaction, you’d complain, as the good libertarian Enlightenment thinker you think you are, still you accept it as business as usual. Yet when you go on X (formerly Twitter) to demand more freedom of speech, what you’re really doing is working for the increasingly unchecked and unrestrained action of these colossal black holes of capitalism.

Even though it's assumed that politicians have the duty to create regulatory mechanisms and ensure the freedoms of these corporations won’t infringe on the freedoms of beings possessing consciousness and lungs, certain needs like uncontaminated water or reasonably clean air, “operating temperatures” in which our bodies, adapted for the pre-Anthropocene era, can function, etc., no longer seem guaranteed in the long term. What am I saying? The air right now, the temperatures, the fires, the floods, the power outages—things aren’t guaranteed at this very moment! Yet, there are still the ones, supposedly possessors of lungs, who are in principle against regulations! Brainwash!

Sometimes, if you're of a certain skin color or if your ancestors didn’t exploit, steal, and kill enough, these things aren’t even guaranteed in today's U.S., for perhaps most people. The so-called “First World“ didn’t used to have a significant portion of the population living in tents, poisoned by the pharmaceutical industry, dragged from one place to another by fires or hurricanes, precariously working gigs for algorithms. “First World” is now the VIP backstage bubble of the 1%, and even they can’t escape encountering some degree of misery and human suffering while they doomscroll this Information Age, otherwise stuffed with beautiful people and cats.

Then you think, as a compassionate Buddhist, “fighting for freedom is essential,” but freedom is a complex set of contradictory things. While you fight for freedom of expression, the results of that struggle are appropriated by powerful contracts that mechanically and inexorably strive to profit progressively more, regardless of the externalities they cause. No one is against freedom of speech—at least no one who expresses themselves. On the other hand, everything we understand as the concept of freedom can be abused by people who want to lie, defame, speak rudely, or speak pointlessly. And all this to sell more cars, vapes or smartphones. To burn the world down and saturate it with pesticides. And not just that—all done by people conniving in contracts and algorithms who use this unrestricted freedom and money to design how other people’s worldviews and intentions.

But the concept of freedom being abused is nothing new. What does Buddhism, in particular, have to do with this?

The problem is that when we engage in politics at this abstract level, it’s no longer like when we seek health for ourselves and others—a limited and imperfect but still quite good motivation. When we engage in essentially contested concepts, we open the door to unproductive conceptual proliferation in our minds and in the minds of others.

In other words, we spend a great deal of time fighting for freedom, only for that freedom, if achieved, to be used to imprison us even more in algorithms. And don’t even think about trying to fight against freedom.

Buddhism may not have a specific name for this phenomenon, where words and ideologies are used to confuse and trap us more and more in what really doesn’t matter. But we have always known that concepts can imprison us.

The Practical and Theoretical

So, someone might think, “But politics is about action. It’s not just about combating memes or conspiracy theories on social media or in bars. Politics is about going to the streets and engaging in direct change.”

This depends largely on the clarity a person has regarding the Dharma.

Shantideva said it’s better to put on shoes than to try and cover the entire earth in leather. The most compassionate, and indeed political, activity is transforming one's own mind—reducing mental afflictions, especially prejudices, and recognizing when we’re spinning in a hamster wheel of inherently contested concepts. From this transformation, we provide an example to others, and potentially, our communication becomes more persuasive, making us more credible.

In other words, the anti-capitalist and anti-corporate discourse from earlier may even be somewhat compatible with Buddhism and the motivation for people to find values greater than exploiting the world for profit. Bud discussing these issues many times makes our minds just more entrenched in our own ideas. Without convincing anyone who isn't already on our side, we may just encourage others to endlessly repeat the same causal mantras. It certainly doesn’t open minds to the Dharma, which could liberate people from the consumer mentality instilled by the corporate-feudal virus and even from the paranoia of conspiracy theorists. Only the Dharma can remedy a mind obsessed with a handful of themes, which only heightens frustration with everything and everyone—a frustration fed by many people and robots alike, both at the right and, unfortunately, we must confess, at the left of the political spectrum.

In my own region (Porto Alegre), recently there was a flood larger in scale than the one caused by Hurricane Katrina. As in the U.S., much of the problems faced involved a lack of political will, both from the current administration and past administrations. Some Buddhists may say what happened was just karma, and those who suffered did so because of karma. While this is true, it doesn’t help much beyond our own minds. It doesn’t help others and doesn’t help the focus needed to prevent future tragedies. However, instead of just reflecting on karma, some Buddhists could also show compassion for the human species, presently so consumed by an insatiable hunger for many things. In my state, this includes mainly the excessive consumption of meat, cars, and agrochemicals.

If ideology is responsible for making us believe above all that we have the freedom and right to consume, then every act of consumption is entirely our responsibility. But we know blaming people for seeking happiness in the wrong places is pointless, so maybe we should blame big corporations or misguided political motivations that created, allowed, amplified, or at least catalyzed this situation. On some level, this could even make sense to a Dharma practitioner. At least we can remind ourselves that freedom is self-contradictory.

But, let me repeat and be clear: none of this is actual Dharma practice. At best, it doesn’t prevent Dharma practice or take too much time away from it. This kind of causal thinking keeps us trapped in the cycle of conditioned existence. And within this cycle, in a definitive sense, there is no true solution to any problem. In fact, the more real the problem, the less solvable it is.

People who get upset by this truth should remember the very real burnout they suffer because, in the democratic process, each of us feels responsible for everything that happens. Democracy is the responsibility of every person who participates in it, whether voluntarily or not. How lucky we are that the process is deeply imperfect, and our actions are so insignificant! Imagine if each of us truly had unalienated and complete responsibility for the total situation of things? The world is full of people carrying its weight on their shoulders, and what has that done for us?

When it comes to capitalism, truth is we lack self-compassion: capitalism turns everything into a business, and we even start using maximum efficiency when examining our own minds. We become both the boss and the exploited worker. The same person is victim and victimizer, for the sake of efficiency.

Even revolutionaries under capitalism must revolutionize more and better than everyone else.

Some people say capitalism and democracy are inherently incompatible. But we can certainly say they are the gasoline and match that burn away the examined life, or any possibility of genuine practice. At every moment, we need to defend our own interests and constantly prevent others' arbitrary interests from gaining precedence. Sisyphus wouldn't trade his task for this, even if he got a better hourly rating.

Burnout comes from knowing we fail at every moment. With every imperfect purchase (and none of them are perfect), every time we don’t confront the Uber driver’s right-wing ignorance, every time we have to listen to someone defend Elon Musk, every time we can’t get along with our family because they just aren’t reasonable, the world feels like our responsibility. This type of engagement, promoted by progressives and those concerned about issues like transgender people’s use of public bathrooms, is always heralded as necessary. Here's the challenge from Shantideva: 1% of the energy applied to these endless, unsolvable worries would surely lead to enlightenment if applied to the Dharma.

And, definitely, Buddhism is not apolitical. Yet in it, we don’t have responsibility over the entire world—at least not in the sense described here.

In samsara there is no solution whatsoever

This does not mean we stop acting. What the bodhisattva renounces when taking on universal and unrestricted responsibility is burnout itself. This seems counterintuitive, we need to examine it.

The fact is that conditioned things are inherently unsatisfactory, and nothing is more conditioned than social, economic, and political relationships. Even someone relatively ignorant of the Dharma knows that their candidate, if elected, will do things they don’t like—let alone the other candidate.

The term “politics” itself implies working with the imperfect—what is possible within what is wanted. Therefore, it necessarily involves giving up ideological purity for pragmatism. Anyone who says they don’t do this is lying—perhaps also for pragmatic reasons. Besides the obvious corruption of using power for personal gain, there is this inherent corruption of politics, which we need to be more lenient with. Now, wait—don’t judge me for saying this! Equating pragmatism with some level of corruption is inherent to social relationships—and this is because things are composed and therefore inherently unsatisfactory.

Refusing to compromise one’s own values to make things work isn't necessarily acting in self-interest—which in Dharma would be the sign that motivation, and thus, ethics has gone wrong. In fact, we could say there’s some corruption in standing firm on one's own values and being unable to deal with the world's imperfection. This confusion between ideological purity and “getting your hands dirty” is at the core of what makes politics so superficially distasteful that even Buddhists, so concerned with not making distinctions between the pure and the impure, struggle to accept it.

Revulsion towards politics comes from not recognizing the nature of samsara. We still think samsara has a solution somewhere, in some place or time. We still believe in the “good” politician who walks the talk, who acts upon what we presume are his beliefs, not machinations and complexes of dubious interests. And this happens because we don’t truly understand samsara.

Now, a politician would already be “good enough” if they at least didn’t focus solely on self-preservation or self-benefit. We need to be realistic; the highest possible idealism in politics is the lowest common denominator.

We can’t have a res publica in a society where even the most public figures face little punishment for ethical misconduct. And surveillance and punishment, as mentioned above, impose too heavy a cognitive load on us, so it will never change. Thus, modernity, if only due to cognitive and population density, operates on a foundation of distrust—and it is hard or impossible to change that. Trust, and politics of trust, is only feasible in tightly knit, small communities. But this is well known since the Enlightenment, or even before.

I can see moral purists from the Brazilian middle-class turning their heads away from my statements. Interestingly, this is their attitude when their candidate is not in power. Most people have an emotional bond with the news cycle, candidates, and the consistently unreasonable interpretations of the week’s events. This type of engagement, it’s easy to say, is incompatible with the Dharma. In almost all cases, at least. It resembles gossip, slander, and harsh speech. By nature, it’s divisive speech. And this when it’s not flat lies—people fight endlessly just because they enjoy fighting, to defend their own stance and feel right, and thus they behave just like hypermodern politicians: they say anything, the more outrageous, the better. The further from the facts, the better. The important thing is to speak louder and draw more attention. What you want to win is not the argument in terms of rational debate; what you want is to dominate the news cycle—occupy space in your opponent’s mind—for as long as possible. Like a YouTuber, what you want is to hack the algorithm—once enough attention is focused on you, you might then align yourself with the pragmatic interests attentions swarm to.

This kind of behavior is everywhere, and it’s best to avoid it. Don’t engage. Ahimsa. Let the other person’s empty words fall flat on their own, let them make fools of themselves.

Engagement with all these distortions is not dharma; there’s no point in protesting. Not understanding that samsara has no solution, and that solutions are temporary, pragmatic, imperfect—and that they deserve care, even in the political realm, though perhaps not primarily in the political realm—this is something we can align with Dharma.

In a sense, there is a similarity between politics and the bodhisattva’s practice. Both are inherently pragmatic. The bodhisattva, to engage with the world and benefit beings, compromises. Or apparently compromises, as the endless flexibility of the mind never truly buys into the narrative of ignorance—the ignorance that doesn’t understand there’s no solution in the causal games of the world, within the world’s causal rules. The bodhisattva is then the politician who doesn’t compromise—doesn’t yield, doesn’t negotiate, doesn’t settle for consensus, doesn’t reach middle ground—when it comes to the true nature of things and the ultimate benefit of beings. With everything else, with what doesn’t truly matter, they can be even more slippery and promiscuous than the worst politician. The Buddha even grants the cold-calculating spy double-zero license, while he works against the enemies of the Queen of Wisdom in the empire of ultimate unobstructedness. (Or tell me what I misunderstood from the Vimalakirti Sutra.)

Rights

Let’s ignore justice, leave that to karma—impersonal and incomprehensible. Another self-contradictory concept is “rights.” Neither in Roman Law nor in Common Law do we have a concept of “rights” in the abstract. What we have are the concepts of duty and of what is just, due, or correct.

Of course, when we’re talking strictly in a legal sense, a right is part of a contract. There, it’s specified, and if violated, like with a duty, it can lead to some form of punishment, such as a fine or termination. Anyone who’s ever rented something, or clashed with a telecom company or insurance provider understands these aspects.

Even in these situations we understand that to enforce the contract in our favor, it most times requires effort, work, and resources. We are often in an asymmetrical relationship with the other party. That’s why common contracts have specific laws anticipating asymmetries and trying to limit them. But even in this realm, where rights are relatively clear, effective, and often come with simplified appeal mechanisms, we understand that dealing with rights and duties is a stressful complicated headache. Sometimes you’d rather replace the faucet yourself than to contact the landlord to arrange a repair. Sometimes it’s easier to switch providers than to demand reasonable service. And so on.

Then, within this mundane but realistic and practical concept of rights, we get the broader abstraction: the “social contract,” where inalienable rights emerge—rights you supposedly have without signing anything or giving anything in return. Rights you receive from the UN or something similar just for being born on this planet. Wow, great. I’m not a nobody after all; someone in the Enlightenment thought of me, and now my drinking water might be full of lead—but at least according to some benevolent European dude from the Enlightenment, in principle, I have the right to clean water! That’s some comfort.

I got sick; it’s wrong that I don’t have access to proper treatment, even though, for various reasons, those responsible for providing the treatment are occupied with other priorities, real and ethical, or invented and corrupt. Who knows. It’s better than nothing that this is considered somewhat wrong, isn’t it?

With the natural progression of things, it might improve for my children and future generations. In three or four years, I can avoid voting for one of two candidates, steering away from the one who seems not to care about the issue that concerns me, even though any benefit from a possible change at this level won’t be viable in my personal case, but maybe in time for future similar cases. At least it’s something, this grand promise of the Aufklärung.

The problem seems to be that by framing rights positively, as entitlements, what we’re doing is something akin to what the right-wing calls “virtue signaling,” while shifting the responsibility to fulfill these rights onto anyone but ourselves. It’s a sleight of hand, pulling something out of a hat, which does more for the self-promotion of those who claim to support these rights than for their proper and effective fulfillment.

Systemic Theism

The central problem of entitlements can be summed up in a common Portuguese expression: “É muito cacique para pouco indígena”, too many chiefs and not enough indigenous people. The general meaning is that too many people believe they have too much power or too many rights, making power ineffective or nonsensical. Also, too many who lack responsibility for execution while still demanding things get done, and many things that need to be done without anyone actually doing them.

Let us correct this. The problem with human rights isn’t exactly a lack of willingness or power to enforce them. Don’t think of the chiefs in this analogy as powerful or important people, but rather as people who have been deceptively empowered by their innate divinity, now presumed possessors of inalienable rights. And the powerful people would be the Indians, the ones truly responsible for guaranteeing those rights. This is precisely the deceptive transubstantiation occurring with the issue of rights.

The Magna Carta is the origin, at least in the West, of the notion that subjects have certain prerogatives the king shouldn’t have the right to violate. A small medieval guarantee against insane rulers. It’s, of course, more about limiting the king’s rights than granting rights to the subjects. When Enlightenment swept through Europe, the notion of the divine origin of kings was revolutionarily dethroned and decapitated, and like theft of divine fire, finally delivered to commoners a couple of centuries later, with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

These commoner-kings or king-commoners seem to have been naked for a long time. But let’s not belittle an honest attempt to address genocide while it was jacked up by the rationalistic tools of the industrial revolution and the assembly line. Human rights arise as a desperate need, in recognition of the atrocities empowered by the same smart gadgets created by “Enlightened” Europe. The beautiful spirit of the time expressed in Zyklon B, napalm, and thermonuclear warheads capable of destroying everything and everyone in a matter of days.

The transvaluation is complete: the commoners kings on paper but factually increasingly more common. The kings commoners on paper but increasingly kings in reality, deliberately sustaining the mechanisms of income and power concentration that kept them where they’ve always been. No one nominally believes in the divine origin of privilege anymore—but everyone believes in the divine origin of the oppressed, with their magical rights. And the ones who most believe in the divine origin of the oppressed are often those who violate them most brutally, since there’s always plenty of resentment from every side, for any reason.

It’s like the episode with the whip in The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The freed slave is spotted by his former master as he punishes his own slave, using the same words and method of torture. The former master, Brás Cubas himself, finds the situation quite ironic. The Brazilian middle class has always viewed the oppression as its own privilege. It’s like a kind of anti-bodhicitta, wishing to bury others in an even worse samsara than their own. It was to respond to this endless pettiness that they pulled “human rights” out of a hat. The Buddhist challenge is to demonstrate that with these prerogatives, it will never work.

Too many gods to whom offerings must be made—we, as privileged to some extent, can continue to ignore the multitudes, as long as each of them sees themselves as a deity deserving everything that can be offered. And you continue to do whatever you want: no one will lose their inalienable rights, particularly if they are never to be respected or fulfilled. Smoke and mirrors.

When we talk about freedom, you believe you're defending your own freedom or that of the oppressed, but you're also, at least in equal measure, defending the freedom of corporations to destroy the world. When we talk about rights, you believe that the people who need protection will be protected, but you’re just shifting this responsibility to the impersonality, timelessness, and abstraction of the state. Meanwhile, the government is never concerned with its own violations but loves to criticize the violations of rival countries.

If George Orwell warned us, it’s because this was already happening in the 1930s. 1984 is a great pamphlet for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed six months before the novel was published. Even these modern perspectives become obsolete relics in the hyperrealism of post-truth: temperatures are the highest ever recorded, half the earth is on fire while the other half is drowning in filth, and the debate is whether a character designed to sell M&Ms is being drawn less sexy because of the “woke mind virus”!

For Buddhism, as in many other areas where the dharma is primarily an obstacle remover rather than a creator or intensifier of qualities—the latter being a skillful means, and the former being the effective way to reveal our true nature—the notion of a creator god creates all kinds of problems. One of these problems is the idea of innate rights, even as we understand the motivation to respond to the 20th century atrocities.

Enlightened intent may not be compatible with Enlightenment ideals

The closer to the definitive truth a contract is, that is, the more abstract and comprehensive, the less it can be positive. This is pure logic. The deity is made by the lineage and the practitioner, not the other way around. What does it mean to say that a contract is negative? It means that a truly non-theistic and egalitarian contract needs to focus on duties above rights. This doesn’t mean that all people need to take on responsibility, or not take it on. It means that for every good thing you want to see in the world, there need to be clearly designated, non-abstract actors. No invisible hand, tribal god of some chosen people, hypostatized AI, or science still to be researched can be trusted to answer our prayers and bestow blessings.

Without global solutions like wealth taxes that don’t depend on borders, no one will have any valid discussion about human rights of any kind: the entities to be held accountable are inherently transnational. No UN makes sense with oligarchs who can flee to tax havens.

In other words, in an Enlightenment that truly wanted to go beyond religion, toward a non-theistic vision, and establish a secular prosperity, the notion of innate rights (as seen in the U.S. Constitution and everywhere else—also in the concept of human rights) would need to be completely abandoned. If someone wants to maintain some sort of innateness, we could talk about innate duties. World-wide accountable innate duties. Whose duties? Those of the real chiefs, not the indigenous people. This is the logical consequence of universal responsability.

For example, every human being on this planet needs to recognize in themselves the innate duty to preserve the health of the world. When we see people mythologizing billionaires who got rich at the expense of the well-being of beings now and in the future, we should feel free to express disgust.

This does not mean violating the Buddhist principles of equanimity and compassion or the view of the innate purity in all beings, but it means not condoning erroneous views that harm beings. The holder of the erroneous view is, in fact, the best and greatest object of compassion. In hyperrealism, we either feel disgust or deify, never considering compassion, and thus the cycle of news and rebirth goes on.

Prisons, both actual and conceptual

Human rights are an anthropocentric and Eurocentric notion, grounded in the ideas of individuality, self-determination, or will, established by modern secularism and its historical roots in Abrahamic religions. In short, this is Buddhism’s critique of the concept.

Even so, among all the peoples and civilizations in the world, Buddhists have historically had a good—or at least above-average—track record when it comes to the treatment of prisoners. Nagarjuna advised a king in the 2nd century not to mistreat criminals or prisoners of war.

Here we have a clear example of the difference between a rights-centered perspective (creationist, theistic, innate) and a perspective centered on what we might call “the cultivation of virtues.” The Buddhist focus is not that prisoners have innate rights, but rather that the king—or in a democracy, each person responsible for the whole situation, i.e., each one of us in principle—needs to be compassionate and train in virtue. This includes compassion especially for those who commit wrongdoings because, in the view of karma, to which Buddhists subscribe to, these are the ones who will naturally suffer more. This does not mean refraining from taking restrictive measures or never punishing—but it certainly means not centering the vision on the idea of punishment. What can we say, then, about “extraordinary and cruel punishment”? (To use the phrasing of the 1689 English Bill of Rights).

This is a clear message to those supposed Buddhists who tend toward the more extreme right, who praise torture or wish for inhumane punishments for criminals. I apologize to anyone who reads this and is surprised, and I am certainly ashamed. There are people in my religion who do not understand enough to recognize its ethical principles and training in virtue. If they could watch a rapist being raped, some Brazilians who call themselves Buddhists, would rejoice.³I recently posted a video on YouTube on the same subject, spoken in Portuguese, and one of the commenters said “You should suffer all the same pain the criminals you defend inflicted on others”. My defense on the video was that criminals shouldn’t be arbitrarily condemned or tortured, it was really not a very rose-colored glassed bleeding-heart liberal kumbaya view. It was quite moderate. The problem is the Brazilian middle-class is really quite bloodthirsty. I went to check if this was someone who considered themselves Buddhist, and he was a devoted follower of an authentic Rinpoche, from a lineage different than the ones I am most connected. At least he was not a vajra brother. Thus, they only become complicit in all this karma, and this is extremely unfortunate.

This was my motivation for writing this text because I can really understand what the lamas are saying when they point out a problem with human rights, but I see a disconnect between that discourse and the discourse of a part of the Brazilian middle-class Buddhists, which finds it wonderful and beautiful to see a vulnerable person run over by a bus—just because they happened to steal a cell phone. Maybe I demand too much from people who use the label “Buddhist” to refer to themselves. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

However, when Brazilian police write “human rights” on their batons and weapons, it’s necessary to understand that we’re not just dealing with U.S. or British hypocrisy when discussing the topic. There are people ready to torture and kill, justified because “human rights” are a dream of naïve progressives, not the reality of the streets. The Dirty Harry and Death Wish mentality is pervasive throughout the Brazilian middle class—“Are you defending criminals?” is the indignant cry that anyone who suggests fair judgment and minimal prison dignity has certainly heard around here. And the police are often just like that freed slave from Machado de Assis, exercising the resentful privilege of torture and death freely and with impunity.

Anyone who criticizes human rights should remember that, in a certain sense, they are also endorsing, even if unintentionally, the misguided views of state agents, who torture and kill—primarily brown skinned people—around the world, but certainly in Brazil.

The Heart of the Messy Matter

When the U.S. of George Floyd, ignoring Saudi Arabia's violations and actively complicit in Israel’s genocidal activity, complains about human rights in China or rigged elections in Venezuela, this is endless hypocrisy, no doubt. It's important to understand that human rights are, above all, a geopolitical weapon.

However, at least here in Brazil, if someone complains about human rights at any level, it’s because they want to see others, especially the most oppressed, dark-skinned, uneducated, or with no opportunities, being tortured and trampled upon.

That some of these people call themselves Buddhists should indeed be surprising. These same people sometimes don’t care about massacres of indigenous people, the assassination of Marielle Franco, the huge percentage of people who would have survived COVID if there hadn’t been medical misinformation perpetrated by those with the vote and the duty to protect the population, and don’t care the world is in flames due to unbridled competition, “greed is good”, and other values of hegemonic capitalism. Often all this combines in the same person, and the cherry on top, the label: “Buddhist.” If it ever happened a shortage of dismay towards this world, this would be more than enough.

That some people who like the idea of human rights are a bit foolish and idealistic is the least of it. Discussing the imperfection of Enlightenment ideals here in Brazil is like trying to teach elephants to paint porcelain. This includes the discussion in terms of the abstraction of human rights and the problems I’ve dealt with in this text.

I apologize for us being so backward, but unfortunately, the rest of the world isn’t much better. As Chandrakirti said, about not intending to step on others’ toes, I’m sure the aim of Buddhists criticizing human rights is not to promote vigilantism, concentration camps, lynchings, or the return of political torture to Brazil. Perhaps even in the most refined argument, there’s room to say that human rights are not and have not been enough to protect us from the arbitrariness of resentful people.

I have no reservations about anything I’ve heard or read from Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche. You can call me a sycophant and say that I wag my tail for the Dharma of the Buddha—I don’t mind seeming that way to others. I proudly aspire to belong to a long lineage of brain-washed sycophants.

The secular vision finds the idea of placing faith in a person, a guru—which is common in Buddhism—quite repellent. But people still love placing trust in a set of principles—and perhaps they don’t realize that this comes from the idea that the logos of the creator or something like that—a logical or even illogical and mysterious principle, but perfect, behind what would be creation by an immaculate being—as being the ultimate sense of things.

When scientists rely on mathematics, they want to find the mind of God in the examination of creation. They want—or, at least until Popper and modernity, they wanted—a final formula, a definitive as a postulate: a light that becames word. Now, it seems, instead of finding God, they are content with the infinitesimal approximation through the refinement of understanding the supposedly divine formula written into things.

In Buddhism, it’s not quite like that. Things, if they came from somewhere, and if they present themselves as confused, came from confusion. Everything that is composed is unreliable, and nothing in terms of language is non-composed. So, neither things nor formulas are reliable.

And in what sense is a guru not compounded? He is not compounded with the very nature of his mind, which is what ultimately allows and expresses the seemingly external guru.

Rinpoche never leaves me confused. I get anxious because I feel some acquaintances of mine may misunderstand him.⁴In the end, although there are revengeful bloodthristy Buddhists in Brazil, I should confess I was sometimes motivated by being embarassed around my left-wing friends. When my teacher (he doesn’t know me, and I have not been formally accepted as student) levels some — acknowlegedly quite reasonable and sound — criticism towards the idea of human rights, just the hint of using the expression in a not completely respectful manner brings torture, blood and death to my mind. Yet, this panic seems justified considering Brazilian society. This is my neurosis and the source of these compounded, inherently unsatisfactory words.

References

◦ Rinpoche has a few times spoken about human rights, but particularly in this Facebook post:

“Can someone explain how you define human rights?

If a government fails to lead responsibly during a plague or gives inaccurate information about a disease, thereby costing tens of thousands of lives—does that constitute a violation of human rights?

If leaders have ample time, knowledge and means to prepare for and prevent disaster and yet fail to do so, thereby causing untold human suffering—does that constitute a violation of human rights?

If affluent nations and businesses hoard life-saving vaccines, knowledge, and medical gear, knowing that will cause huge loss of life in countries that don’t have the facilities, information and resources to protect their people—does that also constitute a violation of human rights?

If the world’s top arms manufacturers headed by the USA, Russia, France and Germany export their weapons to war zones, knowing that they won’t be used against viruses but to kill other human beings—is that a human rights violation?

If the richest 10% of people emit half the world’s carbon and plunder most of its water, wood and other resources, knowing that this impoverishes and threatens the lives of millions of others and of future generations—is that considered a violation of human rights?

Are human rights god-given rights, or are they made up and defined by people to suit their own agendas and to bash their enemies?

I know some readers will consider these questions to be sarcastic, but I assure you they are entirely genuine.”

◦ Rinpoche has recommended a text by a Bhutanese lama and scholar named Drubgyud Tendzin, Time for a closer look at universal human values.

Rinpoche wrote about it: “At a time when Buddhism is being so watered down, diluted, cherry-picked, plagiarized, and made into spiritual entertainment, and when those who do so claim ideas as their own revelations without the decency to give credit to the Buddha who originated many of them, Drubgyud Tenzin’s statement is very welcome.”

◦ Rinpoche has also recommended the book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky

Rinpoche wrote a blurb: “Anyone who speaks out loud about human rights, freedom of journalism etc etc must read this. Wonder why this book is not in the school text book.”

◦ In a Facebook post, Rinpoche also wrote the following paragraphs:

“This is not theoretical but very practical. Westerners assume that their most cherished, celebrated and zealously guarded values, like ‘human rights’ for example, are universal in nature and can therefore be rightly imposed on Asian and other non-western cultures. But a closer look shows such ‘rights’ to be highly individualistic and deeply embedded in Christian ethics, as respected scholars acknowledge: ‘The deep roots of human rights ideals are rooted nowhere else than in the biblical tradition.’ (See for instance: Christianity and Human Rights and Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective.)

And so today, from the most die-hard secular western atheists even to Asian Buddhists, such basic terms as ‘good’, ‘bad’ and ‘happy’ are defined in western terms that are deeply embedded in Christian ethics. And when these are applied to notions like ‘good karma’ and ‘bad karma’, the Buddhist view of karmic cause and effect, which is not fundamentally about morality and ethics, gets subtly but dangerously perverted.”

◦ Rinpoche also has some words on democracy that can raise some of the same issues, if we consider the Brazilian middle-class and its history.

◦ The Just King, a book on Buddhism and politicsby Mipam Rinpoche (at amazon.com)

◦ Buddhism and Human Rights (at amazon.com.br)

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