24 Aug, source Rebound 88
In September 2007, thousands of monks marched through the street of Burma's major towns chanting the Mettā Sutta,
one of Buddha's most important discourses on loving kindness. When
they walked and chanted they overturned their rice bowls as a sign of
not receiving alms from the military. This boycott of donations (thabeik hmauk)
is a powerful symbolic act rarely used as a collective political
statement by Buddhist monks. It was a clear political message to the
brutal regime and a powerful attack on the ontological security of the
military personnel, particularly the ruling generals.
During interviews in Mae Sot, Thailand in 2010
and 2011, some of the exiled monks from the 2007 ‘Saffron Revolution’
explained how Buddhism, education and democracy are intertwined. They
combine the Buddhist core concepts mettā (loving kindness) and karu ā
(compassion), the idea that monks should help lay people who suffer
from repression, with the power of education and morality as
prerequisites for developing democracy. They defined their strategy as
‘study power’: hpoùn acariya; ācariya means ‘teacher’ in Pali and is often used in the title of a monk with a degree. In this context it was translated ‘study’. Hpoùn (or hpòn) means merit or the power of religious merit in Buddhism (derived from Pali puñña). A monk in Burmese is called hpoùngyi—‘great
merit’ or ‘great glory’. But the word also signifies the power of a
person (male) who possesses substantial personal merit, or moral capital
based on karma. In other words, this kind of spiritual power, or
karmic power, is seen as a subjective substance and property. This is
somewhat contrary to the most common definitions of power which
emphasize the relational dimensions of power above/or combined with the
person's abilities. However, in Burma the personal, karmic capability
of power, called hpoùn, is crucial for understanding the
struggle between the military and the opposition and for the concept of
democracy in the Burmese context. The monks and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
have used Buddhist concepts in order to translate and transmit ideas of
democracy, human rights and human security into a Burmese cultural
context. The opposition thus uses Buddhism as a medium for critique of
the regime, while the generals use Buddhism as a means to legitimize
their power and rule. However, the simple opposition contains a more
subtle struggle of morality and subject formation in a modern form of spiritual politics (Foucault 1978).1
Spiritual politics is not the policy of a state but the resistance to
and moral enquiry into a regime and its rule. The Generals, on the
other hand, apply Buddhism as a national, political religion to
promote ideas of a unitary state with a common Myanmar national
identity covering all 24 plus ethnic groups. Buddhism is synonymous
with Burmese tradition and seen as under threat from ‘external and
internal destructive forces and neocolonialists’. This perceived threat
is used by the regime to legitimize the use of force against the
opposition including monks.
The main focus in this paper is the struggle
between the democracy movement(s) and the military regime, which
increasingly demonstrated totalitarian tendencies. I will argue that
this struggle can be considered a struggle for the control of subjectification,
i.e. the formation of subjects, their position, their rights and how
they are morally judged, how they act and finally how they are
subjected to power. It is a struggle involving a religious cosmological imaginary
(explained below) shared by Buddhist Burmese, as well as political
ideas and ideologies in local, as well as in universal forms. Burmese
monks have engaged Buddhism in search of a new moral and political
order.2 Thus the focus of this paper is on the symbolic forms of power included in this imaginary of an alternative social order.
In this brief discussion of the role of Buddhism
in Burma, I have to make generalizations and counter-pose opposition
and regime. The use of Buddhism and its concepts in the discourse on
politics vary among monks and lay people. Thus, the interpretations I
give here may not be shared by all 300,000–400,000 monks or their lay
followers. Buddhism is not one coherent ‘religion’. There are nine
official ‘sects’ in the monastic community (sangha) of Burma and
there are individual opinions and interpretations. However, there is a
common discourse and practice within the opposition and another within
the regime and its supporters, which I attempt to describe and analyse
in the following. Likewise, it is not possible here to make a detailed
analysis of the regime and its modes of operation, but only a brief
overview of its practices.
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