They presented themselves as people with entitlements even though they adhered to a religion that taught them to deny attachment to worldly things. This has been one of the paradoxes of the human rights movement. The Nepalese Buddhists were using the concept of human rights to catch the attention of the state, probably also conscious of the international currency of the language, and they apparently had no difficulty in distancing the instrumental language of their political arguments from the concepts they used to talk about themselves as followers of the Buddhist path.
