Christianity and Islam are concerned with the idea of justice, which can turn into political justice, social justice, economical justice, and so on. Buddhism is not so concerned with the idea of rights. There is more talk of responsibility than of demanding rights.

Our tolerance of the intolerable found a low threshold as early as the late 1950s with the grotesque excesses of McCarthyism, which destroyed so many honest lives, and then with the insane nuclear arms race and confrontations.

Buddhism has always been a religion for people who've worked their way through a cycle of materialism and still feel discontented and want more, or have questions that their state of prosperity is not answering.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.

The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth - that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans - is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots - the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic.

The longing for a very garish kind of success seems as widespread among writers as among investment bankers.

Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations.