As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.

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.

What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion is the fact that the patron saint of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that barbarian peoples like the Indians were unfit for self-rule.

The Buddha would not have liked people to call themselves Buddhist. To him that would have been a fundamental error because there are no fixed identities. He would have thought that someone calling himself a Buddhist has too much invested in calling himself a Buddhist.

Buddhism doesn't really have much time for political mass-movements. We are so trained to think of politics in terms of acting collectively, acting as part of mass-movements, that it's become hard for us to imagine a form of politics that is based on a high degree of introspection and self-examination.

Most writers have very little that's important or valuable to offer; most of them are just repeating each other.

As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.