Burma’s Buddhism: A Tale of “Form without Substance”
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 12 Nov 2012
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Do not mistake Myanma’s thousands of Golden Temples and Pagodas and thousands of Saffron Robed men, that is, form, for the real practice of Buddhism, that is, the practice of Metta or universal loving kindness for all sentient beings. That, of course, is except Rohingya and Muslims.
It is simply not conceivable for any community of really practicising Buddhists to even advocate or rally behind a genocidal racism against a small ethnic and religious minority, let alone proactively participate in such savagery as the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
Both “Buddhist” masses and the ruling class in Burma worship Lord Buddha and recite Buddhist prayers. But emphatically, deep in their hearts, we are animists and occultists who neither truly believe in the central Buddhist notion of Karma nor put to practice a crucial notion of “Loving Kindness” or Metta.
Beneath every ancient Buddhist monument of the pre-modern Burma lies mass graves of forced labourers.
According to the noted Burmese historian of the old Burma the late Dr Than Tun, the unfinished pagoda in Mingun built by King Bodaw Maung Wai alone involved 2,000-plus Arakanese men brought down from Arakan at gun point by royal troops around 1790 AD for the sole purpose of making them bake the bricks for this monument of kingly megalomania during his long reign. Two hundreds years later in the late 1970s, I was ordained as a young novice at a monastery 500 yards away from this massive Arakanese force-labor built pagoda.
Now the “Unfinished Pagoda” is just a massive pile of bricks. The Burmese king megalomaniac Bodaw Maung Wai, the “Conqueror of the Arakan Kingdom”, wanted it to be the world’s tallest temple of worship.
The Temples of Loving Kindness in Burma are no different from the slave-built pyramids of Egypt.
Beyond Golden Temples and white-washed Pagodas that dot Burma’s physical geographic landscape and despite years of secular schooling of her inhabitants, many “Buddhists” of Burma there continue to hold on to their deeply ingrained, blind faith in all acts of sooth-saying, fortune-telling, and other anti-Buddhist ideas wherein the individual surrenders his or her brain to a clever moron.
Planetary patterns – alas, dark matters, the Red Planet, etc. — are deem to have determined what happens to us as social beings and our society throughout various phases of our lives.
As a society, we are neither influenced by the Enlightenment of Europe which eventually gave birth to a humanistic liberal ideals of liberty, equality, brotherhood/sisterhood and liberty, nor are we genuinely ideological children of Buddhist Spiritual Enlightenment.
Our action speaks volume.
Genocide, or chanting in support of the genocide in Western Burma, is no Buddhist act.
Next time we bark human rights or recite Metta Sutra (Loving Kindness Prayer), do not be fooled.
We mean neither.
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Dr. Maung Zarni is member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press.
Go to Original – maungzarni.com
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[…] Do not mistake Myanma's thousands of Golden Temples and Pagodas and thousands of Saffron Robed men, that is, form, for the real practice of Buddhism, that is, the practice of Metta or universal loving kindness for all sentient beings. […]