Exploring the Complex Interactions between Biology and Culture in Human DevelopmentThe Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind. By Melvin Konner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

Abstract

and Sri Lanka, Buddhist Approaches to Human Rights attempts the very difficult task of providing a defense of basic human rights from a Buddhist point of view. The editors, Carmen Meinert and Hans-Bernd Zollner, thankfully address some major issues in their introduction to the volume. For example, they carefully consider the normative basis for defining human rights and consider what human rights might look like from a Buddhist point of view. They avoid a related trap of essentializing Buddhism, through openly questioning who and what ought to serve as representative of Buddhism: philosophical and doctrinal texts or monastic leaders? (This reader would have liked to have seen more attention paid to the voices of laypeople.) They also identify the very complicated relationship between Buddhist doctrine and secular law in relation to human rights and the obvious fact that the traditionally Buddhist countries of Asia do not share the same modern history or secular legal tradition. Some of these challenges are epistemological and present in any attempt to produce Buddhist Approaches to anything. As a whole, the volume does an excellent job of exposing the problems inherent in any endeavor of this nature, but it does not go quite as far in proposing solutions. Future research should continue the best of what is found here—careful ethnographic fieldwork that reconstructs our preconceived notions of Buddhism, through nuanced portraits of how particular Buddhist persons, texts, or practices interact with human rights in a historically contextualized manner.