monk shaving head of young ordinand in Mandalay - Mario Popham
We leave shoes and socks in the car, skipping over the hot stones until we reach the shade of the long covered arcade, lined with stalls selling religious knick-knacks, that leads to the great bronze Buddha image at the centre of Mahamuni, Mandalay’s most revered temple.
Pilgrims come pressing along the arcade, country people by the look of them, then fan out into the prayer hall and come to a pious halt before the image. Up there at the front other pilgrims are clambering about on the altar, pasting squares of gold leaf onto the image, some standing on ladders to reach his torso. People have been doing this for so long, our guide tells us, that the gold is now six inches thick; as a result the lower half of the statue, where most pilgrims past their squares, is losing definition and becoming flabby, as if Buddha had gorged on all the veneration he has received here, as if the image were slowly melting under the sun of devotion.
Framed photos of senior generals in Burma’s ruling junta are displayed on the walls. Maung Aye, the second most important general in the regime, is seen pasting squares of gold leaf onto Buddha, bowing before the image, standing benignly by while monks tuck into the food he and his fellow officers have donated. In another photograph Daw Kyaing Kyaing, the wife of Senior General Than Shwe, Burma's ageing strongman, approaches the image with a bunch of flowers.
I feel resistant to Mahamuni’s charms. Buddhism is not a religion of idolatry, despite appearances, but this looks like idol-worship pure and simple. In a country as poor as this it also looked like an absurd waste of gold. But sticking on a gold leaf, it seems, is part of the tour. Our guide ushers us up to the altar and the next minute I find myself standing on it and unpeeling the backing from a filigree gold square and smoothing the gold on to Buddha's left knee in a mood of confusion and futility.
We move out into the courtyard where half a dozen women face each other across a work bench, bent over metal discs and grinding stumps of thanaka and sandalwood into a paste with water. Thanaka is the creamy traditional skin cream Burmese women smear on their cheeks. But the batch these women are preparing is destined to be mixed with water to wash Buddha's face tomorrow morning.
It’s while we are watching these women at work that we spot the new arrivals. Four small children come filing into the hall with their parents, perfectly androgynous in appearance, dressed in floor-length satiny robes embroidered with arabesques of gold and baby blue. They wear coronets on their heads from which sprout wire and paper sprigs, beads dangle over their brows, gold rings glint on their fingers and ear rings on their ears, their faces are made up with powder and mascara and lipstick. They troop into the hall and kneel in prayer before the image.
And while we watch and puzzle over them, more come in behind: groups of boys and groups of girls, some in groups of five or six, one group of around twenty, all in shiny nylon finery and lipstick, aged from five or six to twelve, with mothers draped in jewels and gold ornaments and grinning dads in attendance. Outside they squint into the hot sun for commemorative photographs, proud mums by their sons’ side holding cardboard boxes, fathers grasping fat black lacquer bowls.
Why are these creatures dolled up like child prostitutes? What are they doing parading through the temple to bow down before the swollen gold Buddha? What’s it all about?
The penny drops: the children are dressed up to represent young Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha before he became the Buddha. Gautama was a prince of the Shakya clan in northern India, born and raised in closeted luxury as heir to his father's throne. And because his father had been advised by a sage that one day he would take up the life of a holy man, he was imprisoned in his palace - until the day he ran away.
We follow the families outside where they clamber into the Japanese pick-up trucks that brought them here, the young princes enthroned on plastic chairs in the back maintaining their expressions of princely disdain while mums fret and fan them and shade them with parasols and everyone gets slightly too hot. A band of drummers and xylophonists take their places in a decorated lorry and commence bashing away, a clownish boy dancer all in green cavorts in a pick-up of his own and finally all move off grandly and slowly through the city, the well-off friends or relatives who have coughed up the money to pay for this extravaganza bringing up the rear in a smart new four-wheel drive.
And the next day they all return to Mahamuni, to conclude the story: to re-enact Gautama's decision to renounce the world of samsara and to follow the Way; to bow their heads to the safety razors of the Mahamuni monks, until the hot stones are carpeted in black hair, and to don the maroon robes of the monk and take their vows.
young monks at Shwedagon pagoda - Mario Popham
**
We came to Burma six months after the rebellion of the monks last September to try to understand where the rebellion came from and what it meant.
When the monks of Burma took possession of their towns and cities last September, the whole world was gripped. It was an amazing spectacle, like nothing we had ever seen before, in Burma or anywhere else. The television news journalists relaying the pictures struggled to make sense of them. It was a protest movement, they told us, a rebellion, an uprising, much like Burma’s great student-led uprising of 1988, which ended in a government-ordered massacre and three thousand dead.
But the differences were more striking than the similarities. Only monks marched, first a few, then hundreds, finally tens of thousands of them, filling the boulevards of Rangoon with their maroon robes: a mighty river in spate. Only in the last days did the ordinary citizens join in, falling in at the side of the columns of monks as if the banks of the river were crumbling into the flood.
Under the monsoon downpours they walked at the steady pace of Buddhist monks everywhere: neither pounding nor ambling, not marching in lockstep like soldiers but clearly a body of people, a corps on the move, saturated with rain, bare feet slapping on the slick tarmac.
No banners, no slogans, no speeches, no protection, no masks, no helmets, no weapons. No shoes, even. They only carried flags, the multi-coloured flag of the Buddhists. And conversely, until the bloody days of the crackdown, they faced no resistance: no police, not one, no army, no hint of control; just these irresisitible rivers swelling with the endless arrival of new streams. And as they marched they chanted over and over the Metta Sutta, the Sutra of Lovingkindness:
"Sukhino va khemino horitu, sabbasatta bhavantu sukhitatta," they chanted, "ye keci panabhutatthi, tasa va thavara va-navasesa;digha va ye va mahanta, majjhima rassaka anukathula..."
"May all sentient beings be cheerful and endowed with a happy life," they chanted. "Whatever breathing beings there may be, frail or firm, tall or stout, short or medium-sized, thin or fat, those which are seen and those unseen, those dwelling far off and near, those already born and those still seeking to become, may all beings be endowed with a happy life...As a mother protects her baby, her only child, even so towards all beings let us cultivate the boundless spirit of love..."
We watched them marching, but we didn't really know what was going on. What was it all about? Where did this unique rebellion spring from? And where might it lead?
**
If you go to Burma your steps will be dogged by young boys flourishing packs of picture postcards. One of the sights featured in every pack is Kyaiktiyo, the Golden Rock pagoda, a boulder three times the height of a man teetering on the edge of a cliff east of Rangoon, entirely covered in gold leaf. The story goes that it was put there on purpose: an 11th century king with supernatural powers was offered a hair from Buddha’s head by a hermit, who instructed the king to find a stone the same shape as the hermit’s head, erect a stupa on top of it and enshrine the hair in the stupa. The king did as he was told, magically transporting the rock from the bottom of the sea and planting it in this unpromising position where at any moment it appears that it may slide down and crush anyone unlucky enough to be standing underneath. The secret to its stability, of course, is the Buddha hair squirreled away in the stupa.
Burma is like that rock. For twenty years Burma has been teetering on the edge of a cliff. On 8th August 1988 thousands of Burmese students rose up against the military regime of Ne Win, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for twenty-six years. The insurrection spread to the population at large, the army blinked and within weeks a revolution had taken place. A generation of tyranny was erased as a free press, trade unions, student organizations and political parties blossomed. But by October, with Ne Win sidelined, a new group of generals seized the initiative and in days of ruthless shooting they killed the Burmese revolution stone dead.
Burma’s was the first great uprising of the late ‘Eighties, harbinger of Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and everything that followed. Only in Burma’s case the rock merely continued to teeter; it didn’t go over the edge. And it has been teetering ever since.
Burma is a great emancipation waiting to happen, but the waiting has been going on so long that it has gained a terrible permanence of its own. There is something mesmerising about the contrast between the country’s desperate condition – so fragile, so poor, so badly and abusively ruled, such an outrage to the international community – and the fact that, year after year, decade after decade, it fails to come crashing down.
Trapped in her lakeside home like that Buddha hair shut away in Kyaiktiyo’s stupa is the person whose story is coterminous with those twenty teetering years, whose emergence as a political leader appeared to be the key to the country’s transformation but who has now spent more than 12 years under house arrest. Her imprisonment seems as crucial to the generals’ survival as the Buddha hair’s is to the stability of that rock. Once or twice a year she is exhibited to the cameras when the outside world gets too clamorous to be ignored, brought out like a religious icon paraded through the streets during its annual festival.
Suu Kyi emerged as the electrifying face of new Burma during those hectic months in the summer of 1988: beautiful, articulate, westernised, the daughter of Aung San, the founder of the Burmese army and father of the nation, returning from exile to take up the challenge of redeeming her native land.
With her hurriedly assembled party, the National League for Democracy, she won fully 84 per cent of the vote in the 1990 general election, despite being locked up in her home throughout the campaign. The great majority of her compatriots, including the many ethnic minorities, chose her to lead the country into the modern world; but the regime barred her from taking even the first step, transforming her instead into the Sleeping Beauty of Burma; forcing her to go from being an active player on the world stage – temporarily hampered by restrictions that, when common sense prevailed, would surely be dropped – to a sort of living goddess, like those sad pre-menstrual girls imprisoned in their temple in Kathmandu whose imprisonment guaranteed (until the Maoists sent the king packing) the safety of the kingdom. Even in western parlance Suu Kyi has declined from "leader" to "symbol".
The last time the Burmese regime looked to be on the verge of making important concessions was six years ago. After tortuous negotiations the UN’s special envoy, a Malaysian diplomat called Razali Ismail, obtained Suu’s release. And we who had watched and admired her incredible grit through the years in which the regime had imprisoned and toyed with her willed her on to an amazing vindication.
"The small, grubby concrete building," I wrote in the Independent on 13 May 2002, "stands on a broad road in the middle of leafy Rangoon...The headquarters of Burma’s National League for Democracy is always a mass of people these days: students wearing lungi flapping fans; grizzled, whiskery veterans; women with tiny babies; all clustered round on their haunches on the pavement outside. The sprawling, dingy space within is a constant hubbub of activity: a tiny urban village, a domesticated political commune.
"A woman in the corner is going full pelt with a treadle sewing machine, running up party flags; at the far end a free English lesson is in progress, open to all, party members or not. A few foreign journalists sit and stew; party members scoop drinking water out of a cauldron that sits on a tripod behind a column. The librarian marshalls her small, battered collection of books.
"There is a sudden commotion at the door, an urgent, hushed announcement, and the men and women around the entrance stop whatever they are doing and stand erect, forming two neat lines. The party’s general secretary, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, steps briskly into the office, arm swinging like a soldier, the ghost of a smile on her face, and vanishes up the stairs."
As in 1988, 1990, 1995, the mirage of revolution seemed on the point of coming true. But General Khin Nyunt, the former head of the intelligence service who had agreed to set her free, was purged by Senior General Than Shwe when he saw him manoeuvering for power. Once again Suu drew adoring crowds everywhere she went and again the regime feared for its life. In June 2003, after a bare year on the outside, she was attacked and nearly killed by a mob sponsored by the regime, in an assault that cost the lives of nearly a hundred of her supporters, most of them beaten to death. She was put in prison then returned to house arrest, where she has been ever since.
Burma is thus a country where the people who have been in power since 1962 – all but fourteen years of its independent existence – know they are hated by the people they rule, and the people know they know it, but because the rulers have a monopoly of firepower there is nothing to be done. And life goes on.
man and boy by the Irrawaddy at Mandalay - Mario Popham
**
The uprising of the monks never seemed to hold the potential to transform Burma’s prospects as the events of 2002 did. But it was an inspiring spectacle because it told us that the Burmese had not given up, they had not been starved and beaten and tortured and intimidated into silent acquiescence in their misery; and also that they had moved on from twenty years back, because these rivers of monks were something entirely new.
Forty-five years ago, a mass Buddhist anti-war movement sprang up in Vietnam, involving both monks and lay people, equally opposed to the Communists and the American-backed regime in the south. The movement engraved itself on the world’s memory when a monk called Thich Quang Duc sat down in the lotus posture at a busy crossing in Saigon, doused himself with petrol and burned to death. Six other monks followed his example. The movement provoked the intolerant anger of both sides in the war, and its leader, the Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh, went into exile from which he returned for the first time, for a brief visit, only three years ago.
It was the beginning of a phenomenon now known as "engaged Buddhism": a Buddhist counterpoint to the non-violent movement led by Gandhi, and the civil rights and all the other movements which Gandhi inspired. It was Buddhism rediscovering its long-lost political dimension.
Was something similar unfolding now in Burma? As the monks' movement gathered momentum I flew out to the region to report it. At Mae Sot on the Thai border last September a refugee monk explained to me why his brothers had come out on to the streets.
"To play a violent role would be far from our beliefs," he said. "But we can have a mediating role. When Lord Buddha was alive he mediated in a peaceful way between a king and those who were rebelling against him. We monks are Buddha's sons and so we try to follow in our father's footsteps."
Dr Naing Aung was one of the student leaders in the uprising of 1988 who had fled into exile after the massacre which brought that rebellion to an end, and who has been one of the leaders of the democratic movement ever since. He explained to me what had changed between 1988 and 2007.
"The big difference is that when we came out of Burma we were preparing for the armed struggle to overthrow the regime," he said. "We came out and began training alongside the ethnic armies that were fighting the regime. But now the protesters inside Burma are for the unarmed struggle. They want to win it by winning people's hearts. It takes more courage because they are facing fully armed soldiers and they have no weapons. But they say, anyway we can't compete against the army in armed power - but we can compete in terms of the support of the masses, in terms of truth and justice. They have been taking up Gandhian methods, what we call political defiance: demonstrations, boycotts, refusing to have religious communication with the regime..."
"In Burma we look upon members of the sangha [the body of monks] as teachers," Aung San Suu Kyi once wrote. "Good teachers do not merely give scholarly sermons, they show us how we should conduct our daily lives...In my political work I have been strengthed by the teachings of members of the sangha...Keep in mind the hermit Sumedha, who sacrificed the possibility of early liberation for himself that he might save others from suffering. So must you be prepared to strive for as long as might be necessary to achieve good and justice..."
Repeatedly Suu Kyi has insisted on the spiritual dimension of her political fight, and the way the values taught by Buddhism reinforce the demand for justice and democracy. The climax of the monks' uprising last year - captured only by a mobile phone camera - came when one long column of monks was allowed to come almost to the gate of Suu Kyi's home, braving the barricades that surround it, and she came out of the gate with tears in her eyes and saluted them.
**
Burma’s terrible history has brought it to a strange juncture today. The destruction of the tender plant of Burmese democracy by General Ne Win in 1962 was followed by the rapid eradication of all the other budding institutions of civil society: political parties, parliament, the independent judiciary, trade unions. The only force which did not go under – because Ne Win was not a Communist but a highly superstitious Buddhist – was the Buddhist church, the sangha. And because Ne Win’s successors have been equally superstitious, and equally cautious about incurring dramatic karmic penalties (ie hellfire), the sangha with its 400,000 monks is today the only force that has the power both to legitimise and to challenge military rule.
"The regime has been suppressing the people for a very long time, about twenty years," a Burmese refugee monk told me in Bangkok. "But the generals are also trying to show that they are good Buddhists, building new pagodas and monasteries as a way of gaining merit and showing to the people that they are devout."
So the sangha has a deeply ambivalent character. It is wooed and plied with money by the regime, but at the village level it is not separate from the people; on the contrary the ties between the people and the sangha are ancient and deep and rooted in karmic principles. Without the people, the monks would die of hunger; without the monks and their spiritual effort, the people would go to hell.
The rebellion of the monks "was a bad thing and a good thing," a chubby monk in his thirties told me at Shwedagon in Rangoon. "It was a bad thing because many monks were beaten, imprisoned, forced out of their monasteries. But it was a good thing because before it happened people thought that the monks supported the regime. Then the monks came out onto the streets, and they saw that this was not the case. …"
The reason the monks took the lead in the protests, the monk in Bangkok told me, was "Because of the poverty of the people. They hate to see the people becoming so poor. If the people are poor, the monks are also poor."
Although there are vocational, life-long monks, many men and women dip in and out of the sangha on a regular basis.In Mandalay we drove to the old capital of Amarapura, eleven kilometres south of the city, today the seat of a teaching monastery called Maha Ganayon Kyaung, founded in the 1940s. March sunshine streamed through the tall trees in the grounds, swarming with motes of golden dust. The silence was broken by the thump of cleavers: in a shady corner farmers were butchering the carcasses of chickens for the next day’s lunch under the eyes of a novice. By a well a young monk was chatting to a group of women pilgrims. Otherwise the place seemed deserted. Lunch was over and the sleepy tranquility of afternoon stole over the place.
But the calm was deceptive. Our guide, whose name was Tun Tun Ko, explained that this was a very busy moment for the temple. "It's harvest time. Most Burmese are still farmers, and harvest is when they have money, after they have taken the rice to the market. That's when they donate food to the monasteries, to obtain merit.
"And because people have both money and free time," he went on, "this is also the time when young Burmese boys undergo the initiation ceremony: they have their heads shaved and don the monk's robes and enter the monastery for a few weeks or months. So all the temples in the country are busy taking the young monks in." In some Buddhist countries, such as Japan and Sri Lanka, becoming a Buddhist monk is a life choice, like becoming a monk in the Christian tradition. In Burma, too, there are career monks, vocational, lifelong monks. But here, for all boys and many girls, too, it is also a rite of passage. Everyone does it. There is therefore no mystery about the ritual, the discipline or the significance of the monk's life, because everyone has experienced it. There is no great distance between the sangha and the world outside.
"Did you undergo this ceremony, too?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "every boy does it." He went on, "Actually, I still do it."
"Still do what?"
"Go into the temple: have my head shaved, put on robes and live as a monk again. I do it every year, for a week or so. Lots of people do it."
"When you are there you live like a monk?"
"Yes: we rise at four, then there is sitting meditation, walking meditation, dharma instruction from the abbot, working in the monastery, meditation, bed. Just one meal, in the middle of the day. There is also the chance of talking privately to the abbot, but last year it was too crowded so I could not. These days more and more lay people are doing this, especially young people."
Tun Tun Ko's monastic week falls during the rainy season, when much of the Burmese population disappears inside the monastery walls for shorter or longer periods. The Buddha himself, it is said, began the practice of the rainy season retreat after farmers complained that his disciples were trampling the padi fields.
The vocational monks whom Tun Tun Ko and millions of ordinary Burmese emulate lead lives of great austerity: they have no possessions beside robe and bowl, they obtain their food by begging, they eat one meal a day, they spend their time reciting the sutras that express the religion's profoundest truths. Every day they also meditate, and during the rainy season, lasting at least three months, they meditate intensively, for many hours every day. By all these means they strive to detach themselves from the world of samsara, the world of getting and spending and living and dying, and draw closer to Nirvana.
It sounds a lonely and harsh and supremely self-centred path. But in Burma, which has been Buddhist for many centuries, the personal and the social, the spiritual and the material, are closely knitted together: there is no idea of a solitary holy man separate from his society, because there is no cause without an effect; so every time a monk meditates or chants, every time a boy has his head shaved or a housewife slaps a dollop of rice into a monk's bowl, the positive karma spreads like ripples in a pond.
I saw this for myself in the southern town of Kaw Taung last year, watching the line of monks padding through the rainy town in the early morning, and the shopkeepers' wives standing outside their shops waiting for them, each with a cooking pot and a ladle. This was not begging in the western sense of imploring, nor was the dolloping of rice charitable giving in the sense of pity or condescension; what took place was simply a karmic transaction, to the benefit of both parties and (thanks to the ripples) the nation, the world, the universe.
Not long ago the Burmese believed the karmic power of their religion was capable of fantastic feats. Even the British were helpless before it. At Shwedagon in Rangoon, the vast and dream-like aggregation of golden stupas and images and shrines that is Burma’s most famous temple, an old fellow from Shan state came up and introduced himself, hoping for baksheesh in return for a guided tour. He spoke excellent English. "I learned it as a child from you people," he said. It was startling to be reminded how recently Britain ruled this country. How are things in Shan state? I asked him. "Not so bad, not so good," he said with a melancholy smile. "Many people are starving, the army burns the fields and chases them into the jungle…"
We perambulated around the great platform of the temple, and as we passed its famous monuments he told me stories of the great power they possessed. The thirty-ton bell, for example. "The British had the idea of taking it to England and putting it in the British Museum. They put it in a ship in Rangoon river but the ship capsized. The bell sank to the bottom of the harbour and the British didn’t know what to do. The Burmese had the idea of putting a bamboo raft underneath and floating it up to the surface."
Then there was the gilded standing Buddha not far away, small but exquisite, removed by the British and taken as a gift for Queen Victoria. "As soon as it was presented to the queen she got a splitting headache, which would not go away," he told me. "Finally she instructed them to take the image back where it came from – then the headache lifted." The image is still housed, he told me, in the steel cabinet the British made to bring it home.
Modern, educated Burmese on the other hand belong to our world: they don’t believe in miracles, not even those performed by the Buddha’s karma. But when they are thrown in jail for thought crime, more and more are discovering that they possess a resource they never suspected – the training they underwent as novices.
The ceremony we witnessed in Mandalay is the best opportunity of the year for middle class families to make an ostentatious show of their wealth. "Every boy undergoes this ceremony," Tun Tun Ko told us, "and many girls, too. The poorest families simply take their son to the temple and ask the monk to take him in. Middle class families do everything to show how much money they have and how many friends in the neighbourhood to give support. The really rich don't use cars but elephants."
The ceremony, known as shinbyu, is all about showing off - but the story the children enact is a journey from luxury to simplicity, from self-indulgence to austerity, from blindness to wisdom. And when the party is over, the children are installed in the monastery (or convent), where they remain for at least a week and sometimes for months, depending on whether they like it. How old do they have to be? I asked Tun Tun Ko. "Old enough," he said, "to chase the crows from the fields." And once in the monastery they begin to learn to do what monks do.
young monks in Rangoon - Mario Popham
**
Ba Thaung is a poet and editor who lives in Mandalay. He has a shy, reserved manner but his hooded, sleepy-looking eyes conceal a stubborn streak. He came to meet me at our hotel and we went for a night time walk through Mandalay’s main market street, where stalls lit by fluorescent tubes offered books, video cassettes, cakes, sex aids. I asked him if he wasn’t putting himself at risk, walking through the middle of town with a foreigner. He smiled wanly and replied, "Daw Suu Kyi tells us we must be free from fear."
As we walked he told me his story. "I was a university teacher here in Mandalay at the time of the uprising of 1988," he said. "I was a member of the All-Buma Students' Democratic Front, which had taken the lead in demonstrations against the government. I was expelled from the university for political activities and barred from teaching. So I went back to my parents’ village in the centre of the country, where they have a rice flour mill.
"Then in 1995 I married a girl from Mandalay – we have a daughter – and moved back to the city, and got a job writing copy for an advertising agency. The next year there was a big student protest against the government in Mandalay. I was not directly involved in it but I was like an older brother to the new generation because I had been involved in 1988. That’s why the authorities went after me. Some of the protesters were arrested, and eight months later they arrested me, too. They searched my flat and found a poem in my private journal which they said was anti-government. I was put on trial for sedition and sentenced to seven years in jail."
In prison he met Htein Lin, an artist who had been sentenced to a similar jail term for a similar non-offence. Htein Lin, who left Burma after his release and now lives in London, was into drugs and alcohol when he was sent to prison, but once inside he began meditating. "I learned how to do it as a novice," Htein Lin told me later, "but also from an old neighbour who encouraged me and the other children in the neighbourhood to sit, and focus on our breathing. So I already knew how to do it, though I had not been practicing before my arrest. I asked other political prisoners in the jail to lend me their religious books, the only reading matter we were officially allowed."
Htein Lin continued to paint secretly throughout his years in jail, using cotton prisoners’ uniforms for canvases and anything he could improvise for paint; smuggled out, many of these extraordinary works survive. And meditation became his anchor.
"I first started meditating seriously when I was moved to death row as punishment for protesting with other political prisoners about the conditions," he said. "I had to stay with murderers and drug cases on death row for seven months, and was banned from receiving family visits, and I was allowed out of the cell for less than one hour per day. While I was there I meditated for up to ten hours every day. I started to teach the death row prisoners to meditate as well as to read, and after a few months they were much less aggressive.
"After my transfer back to the political prisoner block I continued to meditate for about four hours each day, and longer at times. I drew a Buddha on the cell wall to serve as an altar. I spent most of 2004 meditating as the conditions in jail were tightened following a jail break and I could not easily paint. It allowed me to think clearly and sharpen my senses."
"Htein Lin and I swore to keep the ten precepts of the monks," Ba Thaung remembered, "and like monks we only ate one meal a day. He meditated in his cell and I in mine. It was the way to control depression, sadness, anger."
Prison is a good place to meditate, Ba Thaung pointed out. There is plenty of time, and nothing else to do. None of the distractions of the outside world, none of the excited anticipation of being young and energetic in a country like Thailand or Malaysia, where the economy is letting rip. You are just a Burmese intellectual trapped in one of the poorest countries in the world, locked up for years for being so rash as to confide private thoughts to your private journal – as if, like Winston Smith, you dared to imagine that some portion of you was beyond the state’s control.
In such a situation, depression is a serious hazard. Meditation restores you to yourself. It gives you a perspective on fear, rage, pain and loss. It restores you to the moment.
In time it brings equanimity. And with equanimity come the other brahma vihara, or "divine states of mind": sympathetic joy, compassion - and metta, the loving-kindness of the Metta Sutta, defined as "a strong wish for the well-being and happiness of all living beings." "A mind with metta is inclusive and non-discriminatory and has the power to transform any situation," according to Min Zin, a Burmese writer who lives in the United States. "Metta does not accept evil but confronts it directly with a force that is its exact opposite" - which is what the monks were doing as they walked through Burma's streets chanting last year.
For an imprisoned victim of the regime to take up meditation, therefore, is not merely to seek balm for his pain. It is also to begin the process of defiance and confrontation in the most fundamental way.
**
Six weeks after we flew out of Rangoon, the Burmese regime was making final arrangements for a referendum designed to perpetuate military rule in the guise of a return to democracy when a ferocious cyclone roared in from the Bay of Bengal and killed more than 100,000 farmers in the Irrawaddy Delta. Pious Burmese could hardly fail to see the karmic hubris of the generals reaping its due reward, even if the dead themselves were guiltless.
The regime insisted on carrying on with the referendum despite the tragedy. It got the result it wanted. And in the mean time it did everything in its power to stop international aid reaching the cyclone victims in need of help. Few people who know Burma were surprised to learn that in the vanguard of the (desperately inadequate) relief effort were the monks.
end
copyright Peter Popham/pictures copyright Mario Popham
some names have been changed
