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Dhamma Preaching and Political Transition in Burma/Myanmar (2011-2021). A Transient Popular Practice in a Time of Radical Buddhist Nationalism

Prédication du Dhamma et transition politique en Birmanie/Myanmar (2011-2021). Une pratique populaire éphémère à une époque de nationalisme bouddhique radical
Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière
p. 187-203

Résumés

Cet article examine la passion pour la prédication bouddhique qui anima la vie nocturne de Yangon pendant les années transitionnelles (2011-2021) à la lumière du nationalisme bouddhique radical prévalant alors, propagé par un nouvel organisme fondé par des moines radicaux “pour la défense de la religion nationale” (Mabatha). S’appuyant sur des observations datant du milieu des années 2010, l’analyse porte sur l’impact du changement de régime politique sur la vie religieuse et sur l’instrumentalisation politique de la prédication bouddhique.

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  • 1 I was posted at Yangon as a representative member of IRASEC, Bangkok, during this period.
  • 2 The first results of this research were presented at Chiang Mai University during the International (...)

1For those who have observed Burmese religious life long enough, one striking evolution of the so called “political transition” decade (2011-2021) has been the growing importance of Buddhist preaching or predication in the practice of many monks and in the public space. While until the late eighties, dhamma talks were hardly to be seen on the tightly controlled public scene of Ne Win’s one-party regime (1962-1988), from the beginning of the nineties onward, it started to become more and more visible. I noticed this progressive development every time I visited for field research but it is only during a long stay for study, at Yangon, between October 2014 and August 20161 that it struck me as a “new” feature of Burmese Buddhism. It became so prominent within religious life that it also had an impact on public opinion in the new transitional circumstances, particularly in the growing importance of extreme religious nationalism. The recurrent encountering, at night, of these colorful happenings, which attracted large gatherings of devotees, encouraged me to enquire on the topic, to interview the event organizers, collect data and observe the events during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 preaching seasons. These years were particularly important in Burma: in 2015 general elections were won by Aung San Suu Kyi’s democratic party (NLD National League for Democracy). This year thus saw the first and only political alternation, to date, under the 2008 Constitution.2

2However, since these days when scholars of Burmese Buddhism were busy reflecting on the intricate connections between Buddhist monks and the new transitional political life, the situation has once more changed dramatically due to a military coup. On the 1st of February 2021, the chief of the military, Min Aung Hlaing, decided to claim power and to dismiss the newly elected legislative Assembly, which had been overwhelmingly won by the democratic party (NLD). This bewildering move elicited a powerful civil disobedience movement (CDM) and large protests started in the country, which were in turn brutally repressed by the new military authorities (SAC State Administration Council). Since this time, Burma has been torn apart by an enduring civil conflict opposing ethnic armies and armed resistance under the leadership of the government in exile (NUG National Union Government) to the military government and its army. Without going into the details of the dire situation out there, one of its outcomes has been the cessation of mass preaching in Yangon streets and elsewhere. Security conditions, financial difficulties of the Buddhist devotees and communities, and furthermore the avoiding of public space and expression by the monks have made mass public preaching seem unthinkable today.

3This paper, built on observations dating back to the mid of the 2010s, is thus about a dated phenomenon of Burmese Buddhism and as such, tells a lot, I argue, about the impact of political development on religious life, at a general level, and more specifically on the way Buddhist preaching may be instrumentalized for nationalist mobilization, as it had already been in the twenties by young “political monks” engaged against the British administration, and in political transitional circumstances particularly.

Preaching in the Theravadin Buddhist Context

4Traditionally, Buddhist monks were requested to preach on private or communal ritual occasions such as funerals, novitiate or communal offerings made at the monastery at the end of the rain retreat season (kahtein bwe). However, the large public performance of dhamma talks by monks, invited by lay communities independently of any other ritual occasion, contrasts sharply with these common practices of preaching. Called in Burmese taya bwe, the “feast of Law,” or in a mix of Pali, dhamma puzaw bwe, the “feast of honoring the (religious) Law,” they were held at night and usually lasted around an hour, or more. In his study of teaching practices in North Thailand and Laos, Justin McDaniel insisted on the didactic rather than ritual dimension of monastic preaching there (2008: 124-125). On the contrary, the kind of mass public sermons I observed in Yangon during the transition period were highly ritualized occasions in themselves, as attested by the liturgy, characteristic of any monastic ritual interaction with laity, in those occasions. However, it seems that their occurrence was highly variable according to general circumstances.

  • 3 See the edition in English of Thingaza Hsayadaw preaches by Maung Htin Aung (1966). About Ledi Hsay (...)
  • 4 Ottama and Wisara were among the first and most famous “political monks” of the 20’s whose methods (...)

5As stated by Mahinda Deegalle in his study on Sri Lanka (2006), public preaching, known in that context as the bana tradition, has developed particularly fast from the beginning of the eighteenth century onward. This trend has corresponded to the agenda of Buddhist communities’ consolidation through popularization of Buddhist teachings. In Burma, resorting to mass preaching to educate the public at large has its own genealogy starting in the early nineteenth century with the famous addresses of Thingaza Hsayadaw and those not less famous of Ledi Hsayadaw towards the turn of the twentieth century.3 Mass preaching had its heydays in the 1920s, when it was used as a tool to initiate reform among the public and to contest the colonial rule by young nationalist activist monks such as Ottama and Wisara.4 It had continued until the 1960s when it drastically decreased, after Ne Win’s military coup, because expressions of religious life then tended to be relegated to the private sphere. The large public dhamma talks were to reemerge only in the 1990s, at the joint initiative of local communities and the authorities, to become the highly popular events prevailing during the transition.

  • 5 One should not ignore, however, the possibility that Burmese preaching monks who travel abroad, esp (...)
  • 6 About religious policies of the military regimes, see particularly Schober (2011).
  • 7 See Walton & Hayward (2014), Brac de la Perrière (2015b) and Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016).

6Of course, one cannot but notice the congruence of public religious preaching unfolding in Burma with its growing popularity elsewhere in the world during the same period, be it Islamic or Christian. However, the growth of Buddhist preaching does not have transnational origins in Burma, as it is the case elsewhere, although invitations by the diaspora abroad of some famous monks probably played a role at some point. Here, the expansion of public preaching since the nineties was both multifaceted and more connected to the situation in the country.5 First, it was the result of the religious policy of the military regimes, which promoted the spread of Buddhist teachings to strengthen the national Buddhist community.6 And second, the rise of moralistic preaching in reaction to more institutional sermons came as a backlash, implicitly critical of governmental religious policies. Later on, public preaching grew tremendously until the transitional period when, whether in Yangon or Mandalay, during winter time, one will always find a dhamma talk to attend on any given night, on one street or another, organized at the initiative of a local community or of some different body. It is, among other things, because of the development of public sermons since the nineties that the “969” discourse, a fierce discourse of boycott of Muslim businesses in Burma, spread like wildfire in late 2012 and early 2013, and then sparkled communal violence against Muslims.7

7From these simple observations, it is possible to deduce that the striking growth of public religious preaching during the two first decades of the twenty-first century has not been independent of political evolutions and may have ambiguous political implications. This paper is an attempt to look more thoroughly at what happened with Buddhist predication in the political transition conjuncture. This raises the issue of the way monks’ position and role have been affected by the changing political situation and of their capacity to take initiative within the post-2011 authority configuration in Burma.

Monks under the Juntas’ National Merit Economy

  • 8 Schober (2011: 86). Also see Houtman (1999) for one of the most comprehensive analysis about the cu (...)
  • 9 About Thamanya who died in 2003, see Rozenberg ([2005] 2010) for the Yale University translation).
  • 10 Thitagu Hsayadaw (Sitagu Abbot), one of the leaders of the Burmese Sangha Shwegyin branch, had star (...)

8First, we have to look back at how the spread of public predication has been made possible before the change of regime in 2011, under the national merit economy developed by military regimes, and what opportunities it had opened for the preaching monks. After Ne Win’s one party regime’s collapse, in 1988, a new junta calling itself the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) took power and sought to establish legitimacy through, among other measures, its systematic policy of funding and supporting religious institutions and religious order. As Juliane Schober writes, “[t]he military regime’s patronage of Buddhism provided an alternative source of legitimation and transformed a national community into a ritual network.”8 Thus, building on the reform of the Sangha, which had been implemented under Ne Win’s power in 1980 and had placed all the monks under the authority of the Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, a body of senior monks administered by the Department of Religious Affairs, this new religious policy contributed to give the government seemingly complete control over Buddhist institutions. Only a few charismatic figures emerged out of the religious scene, at that time, who were able to have their own initiative, and to be independent of the official Buddhist institutions. For example, the departed Thamanya Hsayadaw,9 who managed to build for himself a saintly figure through avoidance of manipulations by the junta, or the famous Thitagu Hsayadaw, whose once huge popularity has since known vicissitudes.10

  • 11 See Brac de la Perrière (2015b), on the development of Buddhist extreme nationalism under the aegis (...)

9The junta’s policy of lavishly sponsoring Buddhist institutions, however, started being less enforced in 2004 following a government reshuffle and the firing of Khin Nyunt, then the prime minister, who, for years, had been patronizing the main state rituals. Following his arrest, a number of ritual networks were shut down. The change in the junta's internal power relations therefore affected the overall balance of relations between the state and the Sangha. The break out of the monks' protest known as the “Saffron revolution,” in the midst of September 2007 economic crisis, started with the boycott of alms from the military administration after some monks were severely beaten when peacefully demonstrating in Pakokku (Central Burma). Being placed in this context, it emerges as a return of some monastics to the political arena as a force equipped with a certain degree of autonomy.11

10On the one hand, the merit economy designed by the junta's religious policy had involved major segments of the Sangha which the public ended up judging as corrupted by political power. Labeled as asoya pongyi, or “the government’s monks,” these monks were accused by part of the opinion of being void of “true” intent and straying from the monkhood renunciation ideal. On the other hand, monks’ protest amounted to a breach of renunciation vows and rose the accusation of nainggan yay pongyi or “political monks” by the government and its affiliates: it allowed authorities to defrock the monks and to take actions against them according to the historical precedents of Ottama and Wisara in the twenties, then engaged against the colonial administration. But for many civilians, defrocking monks in order to arrest and interrogate them was tantamount to outraging the monkhood.

Reclamation of Agency by Activist Monks: Saffron Revolution and Nargis Humanitarian Crisis

11The events of September 2007 revealed that governmental authorities no longer had as full a control over the religious establishment as was generally assumed and that the Sangha was not a monolithic body. This marked the return of some monks as an independent force equipped with a certain degree of autonomy. It did not take long for those monks' capacity for initiative to be again demonstrated. The crisis and need for emergency aid prompted by Cyclone Nargis on May 2, 2008 would give them a new opportunity to take action in the world. The urgency of having to bring help to the disaster’s victims provided room for action that the general public as well as the monks—at least some of them—seized, to organize themselves against government control. Therefore, during this relief crisis, it is the social activism on the part of the monks as well as the laypeople that was condemned as "political" and the target of repression by the junta.

12In other words, under the military regimes, the “political” and “governmental” labels were used by protagonists on both sides to question the authenticity of monkhood renunciation, and were an integral part of the Burmese debates. Particularly, the “defense of Buddhism” had become assimilated with the moral position of opposing the oppressive government, a position whose value would be reversed during the democratic transition, under the pressure of ultranationalist Buddhist circles, as we will see. In this eminently political game, no position could be considered solely religious or political due to the symbiotic relationship between state and religion. It is this situation that the new transitional political order unsettled by introducing electoral legitimacy and democratic values rather than Buddhist ones, which seemingly contributed to setting apart political and religious orders. But this mutation had been taking place while the monastic order, for its part, was experiencing a marked evolution.

  • 12 Udu Mingala, is a case of a monk whose preaching gained in popularity after he used it as a tool to (...)

13The events that occurred in 2007-2008, the so-called “Saffron revolution” and the humanitarian crisis caused by cyclone Nargis, have been particularly significant in this regard in as much as they have signaled the advent of a new generation of monks in line with their time and within a religious environment the boundaries of which they were contributing to re-delineate and reshape. One feature of the monks’ involvement in social work as it was redefined in the context of the Cyclone Nargis aid crisis is the innovative combination of preaching, among a certain number of practices, in order to ensure access to religious donations independently from official networks: in other words, some monks have been able to delineate autonomous ritual networks articulated to their dhamma talks. Public preaching assorted to independent caritative foundations of influent abbots has been a particularly efficient mean to regain initiative, of which Thitagu Hsayadaw (the Abbot of Sitagu) is just but one illustrious instance, Udu Mingala being another very different one.12

14In the years before 2011, mass Buddhist preaching had thus become a common arena, shared by different religious actors present on the social scene. However, under the military governments, the Department of Religious Affairs had closely monitored mass preaches through the requirement of their authorization, together with the approval of various local authorities to organize such a public event. For most of the entrepreneurial abbots trying to carve out a space allowing them for action through public preaching, this had to be carefully negotiated inside the religious institutional framework provided by the central administration of the Sangha.

Transitional Buddhist Preaching: A Disputed Arena

15The release on general media censorship that took place in 2011 and that instituted a relative freedom of expression for the press and the public did not change a dim for the Sangha as demonstrated by incidents that occurred in Mandalay during the autumn of this very year. For the monks who demonstrated at this occasion, the point was that they too deserved freedom of expression. On the contrary, the Ministry of Religious Affairs soon resorted to Sangha control policies of previous governments through the decision to grant the right of public preaching exclusively to monks who had passed the national monastic exam (dhammacariya). This measure was meant to prevent those who had been formed outside mainstream official religious institutions from preaching in public.

  • 13 See Larsson (2015) about monks’ disenfranchisement in the 2008 Constitution.

16This attempt to curb monks’ public speaking did not, however, go to the extreme of evicting from the Sangha and imprisoning those monks deemed to threaten the institutional order through their sermons: they were only temporarily prohibited from preaching in public. In 2011, cases of ban on preaching of the most outstanding monks of the time were thus pronounced by the ecclesiastic hierarchy (the Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee or Ma Ha Na) particularly against Ashin Pinya Thiha, the vocal Shwe Nya Wa Hsayadaw, a member of the Saffron movement, and Udu Mingala, the latter following a series of sermons on the “10 duties of the Buddhist sovereign,” in others words on good governance. However, against those few independent monks daring to translate their social engagement in their dhamma talks, most monks at this time avoided preaching about politics else than wrapped up in lessons about everyday moral, as stated by Matthew Walton (2016: 63). All these developments together with the disenfranchisement of the clergy from elections13 showed, if it was needed, that the Sangha was kept at distance of the general opening of the public sphere taking place through the democratization process.

17However, if this was applied to monks considered by the authorities to be too buoyant, other trends were finding their way into the multifaceted monastic institution. Besides that, the decision to restrict authorizations of preaching to those monks holding the dhammacariya does not seem to have been systematically enforced at this time, except for those monks deemed to threaten the governmental authority. In any case, it was not enforced during the series of “969” sermons that inflamed the country against the Muslim community in the winter 2012/2013.

18As a means to act upon the world, preaching became all the more powerful thanks to new media technologies, which entered the religious landscape to allow performances of charismatic religious leaders to circulate widely. In Myanmar, however, mass distribution of dhamma talks had not yet flourished freely because of the strong censorship exercised by the Ministry of Religious Affairs until 2011. While those sermons by monks close to the authorities benefitted from official distribution and diffusion on the official TV, those of less obedient monks were discarded. Nevertheless, this had not prevented CDs of dhamma talks from circulating widely underground, even under military rule, as soon as this technology was made available. After 2011, CDs of monks’ sermons were to be found in numerous street stalls, besides kungfu videos and other audio-visual products and street sellers of dhamma talks had become a common feature of cities. In any case, watching these performances at home had become a favorite leisure-time activity of the Burmese Buddhists when the “969” campaign burst out, adding to the precedent selling spots new peddlers specifically recruited to diffuse CDs of “969” labeled sermons.

  • 14 The number 969 encapsulates the virtues of Buddhism, that is the 9 attributes of Buddha, the 6 qual (...)

19The “969” campaign, a fierce anti-Muslim campaign in the name of Buddhism defense, ended-up in pogrom like violence, which started in Arakan and spread to Central Burma during the spring of 2013. The hate discourses disclosed by some “969” activist monks were then so disturbing that authorities eventually passed a decree to condemn preaching making use of the “969” Buddhist symbol,14 but only in September 2013. Among those monks voicing “969” discourses were Wirathu, just freed in September 2012 from a jail conviction for hate speech, among the general transitional grace of political prisoners. Wirathu then became the face of ultra nationalist Buddhism in Burma, famous for his provocative statements, for which he made the front page of newspapers during the whole transitional period. He ended up condemned in May 2019 for insulting the State counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, and had to cover up until he reappeared on the verge of the November 2020 general elections.

  • 15 About Mabatha formation and destiny, literature is plenty. See Brac de la Perrière (2015b); Nyi Nyi (...)

20However, if the “969” campaign was interrupted by its censorship in 2013, the movement mutated into a new nationalist Buddhist association known as Mabatha which advocated a similar objective that is the “defense of Buddhism as the national religion” (amyo batha thathana saung shauk yay). It was formed at the Insein Ywama convention of monks in June 2013.15 This association has remained infamous for the laws deemed anti-Muslim it has promoted in the name of the "protection of the national religion" and made pass at the Parliament in August 2015, just before the general elections planned for November. Mabatha has grown at an impressive pace during the transition period until it was disbanded under Aung San Suu Kyi’s government, in 2017. A number of committees informally branched out of it, among which the gunna wasaka or the body of the preaching monks, for instance. What should be noted is the vigorous activism of Mabatha’s monks that played a role in electoral politics, particularly before the general elections of November 2015 when they organized huge meetings to celebrate the passing of their nationalist laws, taking advantage of it to discourage the democratic vote. At this occasion, collusion of the Mabatha monks with the military proxy party, the USDP (Union for Solidarity and Development Party), appeared openly. That is why the participation to the last meeting of the most revered Thitagu Hsayadaw (Sitagu Abbot) who accepted to deliver a preach at this occasion, took the public by surprise. The public largely commented on what could have driven him into such an enterprise, and why the meaning of his words was at this occasion so obscure. But what is of interest to us is that Mabatha’s multifaceted activism during this period translated particularly in further developments of the preaching sphere. Compared to the impediments met by socially engaged monks in their predication undertakings, the involvement of Mabatha in this practice suggests contrasted attitude of religious authorities towards preaching monks.

A Preaching Season in Downtown Yangon

  • 16 Hnitthi U dhamma puzaw bwe: New Year celebrations of dhamma.

21To give an idea of the monks’ predication activity during the transition period, lets wander in downtown Yangon during the winters of 2014 and 2015. Preaching season is supposed to start at the end of the Buddhist lent, typically around the communal feasting of the monks called kathein bwe (November), and lasts until the New Year (April). But at this time, taya bwe were organized on a yearly basis by local communities, “street families” as they often call themselves, and they were held without discontinuity well into May with the preaches following the New-Year celebrations.16 One has to imagine downtown streets emptied one after the other of the newly imported parked cars and closed to the circulation at the end of the day for three to five consecutive nights, to host Buddhist sermons. The preaching throne was set in its middle, adorned with flowers and brightly illuminated. The asphalt was covered with mats on which devotees dressed at their best would take place in good order before the arrival of the programed preaching monk. Huge screens were also set up as well as powerful sound-systems to allow the audience that might count by thousands in the best attended cases to watch and listen comfortably.

22Many of these streets have mosques alongside which means that the Buddhist preaching scene could be located shoulder to shoulder to the Muslim establishment: in the winter of 2014, it happened that a mosque was veiled with large posters of Buddha's life scenes. Flocks of Buddhist devotees were welcomed at the end of the streets by laypeople dressed with yawgi clothes, that is the white shirt and brown longyi worn at the pagoda or the monastery on the observance days. Since a few days, the stand for donation had been operating in front of the red portico adorned with large billboards picturing the expected monks during the preaching program. The event had also been advertised through regular loud announcement since some days and with flyers lavishly distributed. Laypeople were still collecting donations, drawing the attention of the passer-byers through making their silver bowl resonate with coins. Inhabitants coming back home with no intent to sit down among the listeners were bound to sneak alongside the preaching setting trying to make themselves invisible. The scene was thus set for the monk sitting above the devotees to deliver his dhamma talk in the midst of the city night life. Public visual-scape and sound-scape were both saturated with the dhamma teaching. Public space was actually turned into a dhamma-scape.

23To assess the novelty of the spread of these events at this time, one could look at the serial number inscribed on the red porticoes erected at the end of the street: most of the sermons organized in downtown Yangon in 2014 had not known more than 7 annual occurrences and a lot were only in their second or third iteration pointing to changes in pace of this development, a first one after the Saffron revolution and the Nargis cyclone, and a second one after the 2012 “969” campaign. In a number of cases, when the celebration was more anciently established, the taya bwe, or taya puzaw bwe (feast in homage of Law) had been added to a different kind of communal celebration such as collective offerings to the monks, or 28 Buddhas celebrations, in such a way that one could say that dhamma preaching was on its way to replace more diverse communal ritual occasions under a nationalist moral reform project. For instance, New Year sermons seemingly took the place of the protective verses’ recitations (payeik bwe) that used to be performed by monks after the New Year celebrations. Sermon delivering was becoming the overarching Buddhist communal ritual form, displacing those deemed more traditional as the payeik bwe.

Mabatha as a Facilitator of Public Preaching

24The explanation usually advanced for the noticeable development of Buddhist predication was that the organization of public sermons had been facilitated following the withdrawal of plain military governments. According to one member of a committee for the “elevation of dhamma teaching,” linked to the network of the ultra-nationalist movement, the Mabatha, the demand came from the local communities organized in small ad-hoc associations, gathering around two to three hundred members, financing themselves through small monthly participations, following the NGO model. Now that this kind of associations were allowed without authorization, I was said, local communities were no longer afraid to organize such gatherings as they were no longer under military administration.

  • 17 This seemingly new discourse in Burma was strikingly illustrated through an iconographic device tha (...)

25Public preaching still required authorization from no less than five administrations and this is where dedicated committees, such as that of my informant, intervened to facilitate the approach of these administrations and to advise people on which monks were suitable to invite, according to the lists of those duly sanctioned by the governmental dhammacariya exams. The advocated aim of these committees was the “purification of Buddha’s teachings,” or thathana than shin yay, to avoid the preaching of “false precepts.” The impulse in promoting a purified religious dispensation, in the eyes of these religious activists, was born from the predication, some years before by U Kawthala (then teaching at the Theravada International University), that Buddhism (bodha batha) was endangered and could disappear from Burma as it had already disappeared in many countries.17 This predication had at this time “opened their eyes” (myessi pwin-) and was the signal for embarking actively in the defense of thathana through monitoring and developing dhamma teachings. The most active monks on the preaching scene were those that had taken part in the “969” campaign and also those known for their sanctioned erudition.

26Facilitation of public events by dedicated committees may be said to be one of the main devices of the expansion of preaching during this period. This function of the committees involved in the organization of the preaching events required that they had a privileged access to the authoritative institutions allowing the events to take place. Among these committees, the most active were those that were then linked to Mabatha, the large movement issued from the “969” campaign that advocated the defense of Buddhism as its main objective.

27Nevertheless, local communities were not uniformly depending on these committees to plan their preaching events. Those who had more experience of the process may have developed a more direct access to the authoritative institutions and more autonomy in the choice of the preaching monks they wished to invite. Also, some other committees as the one linked to the Thitagu Hsayadaw (Sitagu Abbot) may have developed independent networks for the organization of predication relying on the fame of the preaching monk. The spread of Buddhist preaching on the contemporary religious scene was thus not monolithic. However, one could assume that the large involvement of branches of Mabatha in this spread did have a definite impact in the general outlook and content of predication.

The Plurality of the Preaching Events

28Let’s take a closer look at these events that although framed ritually in a rather uniform way could end up quite different in content. Dhamma talks taking place in a downtown street, in a local community of a far-away suburb or in a prestigious religious university might have drawn various types of audiences and elicited contrasted atmospheres. In all cases, preparations started long before by the invitation of the monk, the authorization process and the collection of donations to finance the ritual and insure the donation to the monk. The audience was already sitting in good order before the announcement of the monk’s arrival in time, 7:30 or 8 in the night, accordingly, his car adorned with religious flags, escorted by a cavalcade of bikes, in some cases. Led by a singer or by reciters, the audience started a welcoming hymn cheering the abbot while he got out of his vehicle and headed on to the preaching throne by walking under white umbrellas held by male attendants, amidst the devotees bowing down to him. Some monks were very ceremonial, others were joking with the local notabilities escorting them. One of the most extravagant monks’ appearances I observed was at the preaching event organized to dispense the instructions (owada) of the Mabatha monks for the dhamma dispensation of the New-Year (Thingyan) at a suburban religious university. Planned by different local groups affiliated to Mabatha, the processional entry of the monk was accompanied by conch players and the mock elephant of a local nationalist group (wunthanu rakhita).

29At this point, the monk sat on his throne and the event started with the verbal exchanges presiding to any ritual involving interaction between monks and laypeople: the main lay devotees asked the monk for the administration of the five precepts to which the monk answered positively. These are standard collective recitations. In some cases, donations were then presented, and the merit sharing ritual took place before the actual sermon started, in other cases, it followed the address. Together with the administration of the precepts, the merit sharing rite going with the presentation of donation, fully qualifies these events as Buddhist rituals (see also Turner [2014: 96-98]).

30The preaching monk often began his talk with precise contextual announcement of the date, the circumstances of the event and the theme of the speech. The theme could be very prosaic as with this event at the occasion of the installation of 28 buddhas in a small suburban local community: the theme was the importance of the gift of the law (dhamma dana) from the part of the Sangha, creating a debt (kyaysu) for the laypeople in order to incite them to donate to the Sangha. In another occasion, the head of a prestigious religious university was not secretive about the fact that the invitation of laypeople to deliver a preach was all the more welcomed that he had been to Bangkok to check his health and had spent a lot during his stay abroad.

31Donations were at the center of many sermons and point to the importance of preaching as a means to raise funds for the Sangha. This pragmatic approach to fundraising by many preaching monks strongly recalls Wijeyewardene’s remarks on preaching as a strategic tool to ensure that the needs of the Sangha are met (Deegalle 2006: 15). In any case, the amount of donations collected was often advertised during the sermon, particularly when the preaching event was coupled with the financing of a particular program such as the operating of the Sunday school (dhamma skul) at the Great Ordination Hall of Theingyi Market in Yangon. One could also wonder if preaching as a means to raise funds for the Sangha or its related foundations had not become more important since the change of regime had put an end to the government’s systematic raising of religious funds for legitimacy reasons. In some cases, preaching was structurally linked to the financing of an independent caritative foundation, a practice initiated by Thitagu Hsayadaw but that has known a new impulse in the context of the cyclone Nargis relief operations, as previously mentioned. In Udu Mingala case, the foundation launched by the monk was entirely financed by a systematized preaching program with a deliberate engagement toward social action and moral reform through meditation practice, as its purpose.

32Most of the talks however were commentaries of texts taken from the Pali corpus and aimed at explaining their content in Burmese. Thus, Thitagu Hsayadaw address on the 14th of April 2015 on the invitation of the Yekyaw community (downtown Yangon) chose very simply to preach on the talk delivered by Shin Ananda on the same date in 104 at Kapilavattu for the people of this Buddhist kingdom “had forgotten everything of Buddha’s teachings.” Thitagu seemed to take the sermon as a pretext to teach side lessons on the history of Buddhism in Burma, on the Indian geography of Buddhism and so on, as he proceeded explaining the Pali content of the text, translating Pali concepts in both Burmese and English and having them repeated by the audience in order to have the listeners to memorize it.

33Very different was the manner of the abbot preaching this same year at the Great Ordination Hall of Theingyi Market who started by singing rather than chanting a Pali text during 10 minutes, after having checked that the sound system fit his voice and before reassuring the public that he will explain the teaching. This did not prevent him to speak vehemently to defend Sunday schools (dhamma skul) against its critics: the attacks were defaming the governmental background of the Buddhist education program for children promoted at this time, “while it was pure religion” (batha yay). Thus, unsurprisingly, many preaching monks defended specific agendas on top of the transmission of the Buddha’s teachings at the occasion of their dhamma talks.

34In the case of the Mabatha preaches such as the one given after Thingyan in a suburban monastic university, the defense of the Mabatha program pervaded all the discourse. Particularly the preacher placed the return of nationalist associations (wunthanu) dating back to the 1920s whose explicit aim was the defense of the race (anwe “lineage”) in the context of a discussion of meritorious action (kutho). Because of the seriousness of the danger faced by the religion, he exonerated the program of the “worldly” suspicion (lawki) a critique that could otherwise erase any meritorious gain for the laypeople taking part in it. Another preaching event was rather specific, being held at the occasion of the annual meeting of a caritative foundation headed by the preaching monk. Besides being a kind of presentation of the association activities, in the shape of a sermon, all his talk was also an admonition for the monks to have “dreams” and to act accordingly and a critic of the uselessness of monks of the previous generation who “stayed sleeping”: a critique of renunciation so to say.

35Indeed, one of the characteristics of the predication arousing from the Mabatha circles and their affiliates was that it was not just about teaching the dhamma but it was also an incentive to action: it was a tool for mobilization. Preaching was one tool of the development of the Mabatha movement as a growing mobilizing force to various causes linked to the defense of Buddhism as national religion. As had been exemplified with the Saving the Shwedagon movement, Mabatha was becoming a major lobbying body in transitional Burma, more efficient in some cases than other actors of the civil society, and predication was one of the tools of this lobbying force.

  • 18 About Sri Lankan instances of such speech, see D. Kent 2010. About this particular Thitagu’s (Sitag (...)
  • 19 Note that the question of his ambiguous position regarding Ma Ba Tha had already provoked a controv (...)

36A last example of a preach that has elicited much comments deserves to be evoked here, to which I did not attend. It is one amongst the numerous sermons delivered by Thitagu Hsayadaw, specifically the one given on the 30th of October 2017, to military servicemen. Discussions about Buddhist monks preaching to active soldiers are well known in the Theravada context, particularly because military fighting is supposed to go against the Buddhist teachings of compassion.18 As is often the case in this situation, the talk was a comment of the depiction in the Sri Lankan chronicle (Mahavamsa) of King Dhuttagami’s destruction of his Tamil enemies at the foundation of the Buddhist kingdom and of the discussion in the chronicle about the negative impact on his karma, which according to the monks involved, would not happen because these people being not believers, their killings could not count as human killings. The benefice of the royal action to the Buddhist religion was overriding the crime of killing. The validity of the argument is of course a matter of debate as is the legitimacy for a Buddhist monk to preach to soldiers before a battle. Furthermore, delivering such an address in the midst of the Rohingya crisis raised obvious concerns about the monk’s intention by seemingly justifying the violence against Muslims. Finally, arguments around Thitagu Hsayadaw delivering a religious talk to military men were also about him getting closer to the Burmese military force when he had been one of the favorite preaching monks of the Burmese public at large, and among them, of the democratic forces. It seems to have been perceived as a betrayal.19

37In fact, the progressive dismissal of Thitagu Hsayadaw in the popular eye during the transitional period paralleled his seemingly increasingly getting closer with the army. Another step was taken after the 1st of February 2021 military coup, when Thitagu failed to condemn it and later even accompanied Min Aung Hlaing to Moscow in June 2021, he then started to be seen as linked to the junta. What is sure is that given the interruption of mass public preaching events since the coup this once favorite predicator among Buddhist people could not maintain anymore his privileges due to this activity. The passion for public preaching that moved Yangon’s night scene during the transitional years was now over and this is significant of the dependence of this practice on societal conditions, at large. During the transitional period, public preaching was in a sense liberalized so that monastics otherwise insulated from the political life could, for some of them, indulge in the practice and gain from it a relative independence, at least an alternative way to fund their activities and to get involved in the course of events.

***

38The whole transitional period was also marked by debates on the political use of religion, debates that went through a reversal of the moral stance of positions, as announced earlier. While under military regimes or colonial one alike, the “defense of Buddhism” was assimilated with the moral position of opposing the oppressive government, under the hybrid transitional regime, the newly elected democratic forces were forced to draw back from this position. It was for the ultranationalist monks, looking for a renewed role of the Sangha in the new situation, to claim the defense of Buddhism against Islam as their role, in collusion with the military proxy party playing this card in an unsuccessful attempt to win the elections.

39We have to realize that if Buddhist preaching in the name of the “defense of religion” pervaded the public discourses during this period and had an important impact on public opinion, at large, it did not result either in electoral gain for the military proxy party nor in mitigating the popular adhesion to democratic ideals as evidenced in the unfolding of the present crisis. If anti-Muslim violence has indeed disgraced the democratic governance, the electoral process does not seem to have been affected by ultranationalist Buddhism leading the military head to perpetuate his coup in order to regain power.

40We have seen that during transitional period, preaching was far from uniform. Besides mainstream preaching monks praised for their erudition, which avoided political topics, before 2013 the 969 monks were taking steps on this scene to promote their anti-Muslim agenda, while so called political monks were on their side diffusing their critical discourses against the government. We also observed how Mabatha ultranationalist religious activism for the defense of Buddhism as national religion took part in the expansion of preaching activities after 2013. An activism that unfolded all the more freely as it operated outside or besides the political and religious institutional frameworks, under electoral franchise and outside the Sangha Maha Nayaka umbrella. We may put it this way: because the Sangha had been kept at distance from the democratization process according to the 2008 constitution, Mabatha was formed to regain new influence and capacity to act in the social world through religious activism in which the investment and development of preaching had a part.

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Note de fin

1 I was posted at Yangon as a representative member of IRASEC, Bangkok, during this period.

2 The first results of this research were presented at Chiang Mai University during the International Burmese Studies conference that was held there on the 24th July 2015.

3 See the edition in English of Thingaza Hsayadaw preaches by Maung Htin Aung (1966). About Ledi Hsayadaw teachings, wich focused on the moral reform of the Buddhist public, see Braun (2013). See also Alicia Turner for a newspaper description of one of Ledi’s preaching event, and about the popularity of preaching campaigns at the turn of the twentieth century (Turner 2014: 98).

4 Ottama and Wisara were among the first and most famous “political monks” of the 20’s whose methods of “non-cooperation” brought back from India have been addressed by D. Smith (1965: 95-98). Wisara died in prison in 1929 and Ottama in 1939. Both are still celebrated as martyrs of Burmese nationalism.

5 One should not ignore, however, the possibility that Burmese preaching monks who travel abroad, especially to preach in the Burmese diaspora, may have been influenced by the general development of public preaching.

6 About religious policies of the military regimes, see particularly Schober (2011).

7 See Walton & Hayward (2014), Brac de la Perrière (2015b) and Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016).

8 Schober (2011: 86). Also see Houtman (1999) for one of the most comprehensive analysis about the cultural sources of SLORC’s policies.

9 About Thamanya who died in 2003, see Rozenberg ([2005] 2010) for the Yale University translation).

10 Thitagu Hsayadaw (Sitagu Abbot), one of the leaders of the Burmese Sangha Shwegyin branch, had started to gain considerable audience already in the eighties taking part in the 88 protests and then preaching on the “10 duties of the Buddhist sovereign”, the Buddhist norm of good governance. After his return from USA where he had taken shelter for a time, he chose a more vigilant path, using his dhamma talks to promote “unity” rather than politics (Walton 2016: 64). He soon managed to become one of the most influent monks in Burma, being even venerated at a time by Aung San Suu Kyi, until his mitigating position became less and less accepted by the public. Lately, he failed to take position against the 2021 coup and compromised himself with the military men, going so far as to accompany Min Aung Hlaing to Moscow. This turning back from association with the democratic forces to taking sides with the military government elicited harsh criticisms against him in the democratic opposition ranks.

11 See Brac de la Perrière (2015b), on the development of Buddhist extreme nationalism under the aegis of Mabatha, and Brac de la Perrière (2016) on the engagement of a new generation of monks in new roles.

12 Udu Mingala, is a case of a monk whose preaching gained in popularity after he used it as a tool to raise funds during Nargis humanitarian crisis, in a systematic way, developing its own caritative foundation. See Brac de la Perrière (2015a).

13 See Larsson (2015) about monks’ disenfranchisement in the 2008 Constitution.

14 The number 969 encapsulates the virtues of Buddhism, that is the 9 attributes of Buddha, the 6 qualities of the Dhamma and the 9 of the Sangha and, as a symbol, was meant to compete with the number 786 used by Muslims which identified the latter business.

15 About Mabatha formation and destiny, literature is plenty. See Brac de la Perrière (2015b); Nyi Nyi Kyaw (2016); Walton & Hayward (2014); Frydenlund (2019).

16 Hnitthi U dhamma puzaw bwe: New Year celebrations of dhamma.

17 This seemingly new discourse in Burma was strikingly illustrated through an iconographic device that appeared around the same period, at the end of the nineties, in the compound of the Mahamuni pagoda (Mandalay), one of the most visited by pilgrims in Burma, made of a huge map of the largest expansion of Buddhism all over Asia, during Asoka times, and of its contemporary reduced space.

18 About Sri Lankan instances of such speech, see D. Kent 2010. About this particular Thitagu’s (Sitagu’s) sermon see Fuller (2017).

19 Note that the question of his ambiguous position regarding Ma Ba Tha had already provoked a controversy leading the monk to distance himself from the organization in 2015 (Myanmar Time, 16 June 2015). See also Kyaw Tin (2023).

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Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, « Dhamma Preaching and Political Transition in Burma/Myanmar (2011-2021). A Transient Popular Practice in a Time of Radical Buddhist Nationalism »Moussons, 45 | 2025, 187-203.

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Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, « Dhamma Preaching and Political Transition in Burma/Myanmar (2011-2021). A Transient Popular Practice in a Time of Radical Buddhist Nationalism »Moussons [En ligne], 45 | 2025, mis en ligne le 11 juin 2025, consulté le 17 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/moussons/12796 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/147js

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Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière

UMR CASE (CNRS-INALCO-EHESS)

Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière is an anthropologist working in Center for Southeast Asia at CNRS and doing field research on religion in Burma since the beginning of the eighties. Among her publications, she authored Les rituels de possession en Birmanie. Du culte d’Etat aux cérémonies privées. (1989 ADPF) together with Guillaume Rozenberg and Alicia Turner Champions of Buddhism: Weikza Cults in Contemporary Burma (2014 Hawaii Press) and together with Peter Jackson Spirit Possession in Buddhist Southeast Asia. Worlds Ever More Enchanted (2022 NIAS Press).

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