{"id":160418,"date":"2020-05-11T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=160418"},"modified":"2020-05-10T09:57:27","modified_gmt":"2020-05-10T08:57:27","slug":"letter-from-myanmar-what-comes-after-militant-buddhism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/05\/letter-from-myanmar-what-comes-after-militant-buddhism\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter from Myanmar: What Comes after Militant Buddhism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rise of Buddhist nationalism has led to some of the worst inter-faith violence the country has ever seen. But some monks are leading the charge against the most intolerant preachers.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Monks in Yangon, Burma\/Myanmar, during Saffron Revolution. New Statesman<\/p><\/div>\n

6 May 2020 – <\/em>January is the cool, dry season of traveling sermons in Myanmar, where members of the country\u2019s vast monkhood disperse to preach outside their home constituencies. In Yangon, a neighborhood Buddhist association had invited the monk Ashin Issariya to visit from the Myanmar\u2019s south-east, so he came, lodging humbly with a family in a storeroom above their pharmacy in Hlaing Tharyar, a gritty, industrial township across the river from the city centre.<\/p>\n

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The unassuming monk, wearing the traditional one-shouldered maroon robe, arrived at his sermon on a Sunday night to a hero\u2019s welcome. More than a thousand people streamed in to hear him speak as he took his place on a raised platform, framed by fluorescent, neon-green petals like a peacock\u2019s feathers.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo one in Myanmar reads,\u201d he told the crowd, with serene authority. \u201cOur country is the lowest-reading country. What\u2019s the point of being a majority-Buddhist country if people are ignorant, greedy, cheating\u00a0and angry?\u201d<\/p>\n

His listeners murmured in assent.<\/p>\n

\u201cI tried to see changes in this country, so I risked my life,\u201d he told them. \u201cI was not afraid to tell someone that they were wrong. I pointed out the wrongs of [Myanmar\u2019s Commander-in-Chief] General Min Aung Hlaing. I sacrificed my life for the Dhamma<\/em> [the teachings of the Buddha].\u201d\u00a0He paused. \u201cBut since most people here dare not point out the wrongs of others, the country still has much Adhamma, <\/em>and unlawfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Issariya, an activist monk formerly known as \u201cKing Zero\u201d, Buddhism is not merely about personal identity, rituals, or even community, all of which are foregrounded in Myanmar\u2019s Theravada Buddhist tradition. It is also a call to political action. Issariya was a leader of the 2007 Saffron Revolution,<\/a> named for the robes of the monks and nuns who spearheaded vast pro-democracy demonstrations against the military junta\u00a0that had ruled since 1962.<\/p>\n

After the Revolution, Issariya had to evade a two-week manhunt and escaped across the border to Thailand. Only four years ago did he finally return to a nominally democratic Myanmar, by which time his fight against Adhamma<\/em> had acquired a new target: militant Buddhist nationalism. This is the ideology that has fueled both the general anti-Muslim communal tensions of recent years and the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine State. At the end of January, the International Court of Justice rebuked Myanmar by ordering the country to \u201ctake all measures within its power<\/a>\u201d to prevent genocidal acts against the \u201cextremely vulnerable\u201d Rohingya.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I had been born in a developed country like America, I wouldn\u2019t have to care about these things,\u00a0I could just focus on meditation,\u201d joked Issariya, when I met him the day after his sermon above the pharmacy, where he was sleeping on a mattress. The 45-year-old has a shaved bald head and thick eyebrows. He tends to close his eyes while he metes out sentences. Buddhists in most other countries are lucky, he said, because no violence is conducted in the name of their religion. \u201cBut here, we will have to remain involved in politics as long as the country still needs our help.\u201d<\/p>\n

Issariya and a small number of likeminded monks \u2013 about 100, according to UK-based Rohingya rights activist Maung Zarni \u2013 are confronting militant Buddhism from within the sangha, <\/em>the country\u2019s vast class of monks and clerics. Myanmar\u2019s population of 54.3 million is about 88 per cent Buddhist. Today\u2019s wave of Buddhist nationalism has a somewhat recent vintage and started in earnest in 2012, escalating quickly from a boycott of Muslim businesses to laws limiting the rights of non-Buddhists that were passed by Myanmar\u2019s parliament in 2014 and 2015.<\/p>\n

Buddhist nationalism provided the ideological support for the Rohingya genocide, a vicious campaign marked by killings, rapes and the forced relocation of nearly one million Muslim refugees into Bangladesh, creating the largest refugee camp in the world.<\/p>\n

The rhetoric of Buddhist nationalism, which is disseminated by groups such as the MaBaTha (the Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion) and charismatic figures like Ashin Wirathu, the monk who Time<\/em> magazine dubbed the \u201cface of Buddhist terror<\/a>\u201d, argues that Myanmar is a Buddhist nation-state whose majority is threatened by its Muslim minorities.<\/p>\n

Issariya leads the \u201cAnti-Adhamma Committee,\u201d which counts many former Saffron revolutionaries among its numbers. They preach against intolerance and conduct modest interfaith outreach initiatives. \u201cThe Saffron Revolution alumni are the most important elements of change within the Buddhist establishment,\u201d said Thet Swe Win, a secular Burmese activist who works with Issariya.<\/p>\n

These progressive monks remain a tiny minority in a country where up to half of all Buddhist men have at some point been a monk, and their task is to counter nearly a decade\u2019s worth of propaganda by militant monks such as Ashin Nyanissara, who once remarked at the height of the Rohingya exodus that: \u201cMuslims have almost bought the United Nations.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Issariya\u2019s efforts got a felicitous boost last year when Wirathu was charged with sedition and forced underground, leaving the movement without its most charismatic spokesperson.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t believe that the propagation of [nationalist groups like] Ma Ba Tha is truly as successful as we are made to think,\u201d said Issariya. \u201cMany people followed along because it was wrapped up in the package of protecting the Buddhist religion and Buddhist pride, but I don\u2019t think they support hatred or ethnic cleansing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBuddhists are in the strongest position to confront the modern Burmese state, [State Counsellor] Aung San Suu Kyi, and Islamophobia,\u201d said Maung Zarni, a UK-based Rohingya rights activist. \u201cTheir religious identity is a form of protection. Whereas actual Muslims tend to keep their head low, because they are terrified.\u201d<\/p>\n

Issariya was born in Yangon\u2019s Kungyangone Township in 1974 and attended formal school only until he was around 13 years old, when his education was disrupted by the 1988 pro-democracy uprising. His parents encouraged him to follow the monastic path and he found much to love in its rigour and community, and its actionable conception of Buddhist \u201cloving-kindness\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was never about retreating into yourself or even into the monkhood,\u201d he said. \u201cThere was a big library and our teachers encouraged us to read and discuss current affairs freely.\u201d On Sundays, when classes were off, they crowded around radios to listen to the speeches of Aung San Suu Kyi, then under house arrest as the world\u2019s most famous prisoner of conscience, as well as English news reports from the BBC and Voice of America:\u00a0rare missives from the outside world in a country that had little in the way of a public sphere.<\/p>\n

Due to this youthful exposure and his own background as a pro-democracy activist, Issariya continues to support Suu Kyi, even though the international community accuses her of being indifferent to the persecution of Rohingya. Like most Burmese, Issariya still sees her as the mother of their nation. Whereas external observers increasingly see militant monks, a ruthless army and a heartless Suu Kyi as part of one big complex, members of the Sangha try to compartmentalise.<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen if their selective rhetoric is more effective, but it\u2019s one of the only ways of being able to critique Myanmarese institutions, which tend to double down under outside pressure. The month that we met in Yangon, billboards everywhere announced \u201cWe stand with you\u201d to Suu Kyi, as the ICJ deliberated over the Rohingya\u2019s plight. But if Issariya remains soft on Suu Kyi, he does exercise his rare capital to criticise hateful monks.<\/p>\n

\u201cLay people would face charges if they said the things that I do,\u201d said Issariya. Monks and nuns are a revered and protected class in Myanmar; ordinary people cannot speak to them without a cavalcade of honorifics. Issariya\u2019s Anti-Adhamma Committee and Ma Ba Tha are fighting, monk-to-monk, on deeply religious terms over nothing less than who was the Gautama Buddha: a \u201cnationalis<\/a>t who defended his \u2018race\u2019 and religion\u201d or an exemplar of \u201cright speech\u201d and nonviolence.<\/p>\n

Today, Issariya lives in the monastery that he started in Hpa-An Township in Kayin State, near the Thai border, but he travels constantly to preach around the country, pointing to a growing demand for his ideas.<\/p>\n

He collaborates with other monks and lay activists. Among the former is the well-known, Mandalay-based progressive monk Sayadaw Badata Seindita. Last year, he spearheaded the \u201cWhite Rose\u201d solidarity campaign with Muslims after a spate of communal violence in Yangon, in which he and several other activists handed out flowers to congregants at the Bahadur Shah Dargah, the mosque set up around the burial place of the last Mughal king.<\/p>\n

Opposition to the new Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar has only developed since spring 2014, according to Matthew Walton<\/a>, one of the leading scholars of Burmese Buddhism. Critics of Wirathu like Issariya have been branded as traitors, forced to defend themselves publicly, and have received death threats. But according to Maung Zarni, \u201cMonks have a degree of protection, so I don\u2019t think they will actually go to jail anytime soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey may not confront racism like a secular activist would do, but no one can accuse a Buddhist monk of spreading Western ideology,\u201d said Zarni. Within the vast Theravada Buddhist corpus, there are \u201cnumerous values and historical examples that can promote religious pluralism, discourage hate speech, and encourage a more critical approach to rumors and misinformation,\u201d wrote Walton and analyst Susan Hayward<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI myself am not religious, but nothing in our society will get done without the support of monks,\u201d said Thet Swe Win, the interfaith activist, who is also part of the White Rose Campaign. It helps that Issariya is comfortable with public engagement and is, like most Burmese, an enthusiastic adopter of Facebook.<\/p>\n

Of course, progressive rhetoric or even further arrests of Buddhist nationalists like Wirathu are not in themselves sufficient to counter deep-seated intolerance; nothing will likely change unless the Suu Kyi\u2019s government creates policies to integrate the country\u2019s 135 ethnicities and figure out an actionable solution for the Rohingya. But the last major round of anti-Muslim legislation emerged directly from the activism of monks. Perhaps its counterpart will follow the same trajectory.<\/p>\n

As Issariya insisted in his sermon, Buddhism is political: \u201cThe Buddha\u2019s teachings are not just sayings, but a raft to cross the river and reach the other side\u201d \u2014\u00a0a concrete starting point for solutions to manmade problems.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

Reporting for this article was supported by the\u00a0USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, the John\u00a0Templeton\u00a0Foundation and\u00a0Templeton\u00a0Religion Trust.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Krithika Varagur is an American journalist who has worked extensively in south-east Asia<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – newstatesman.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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