IHT : Shaken traditions: The crushing of Myanmar's monks

Shaken traditions: The crushing of Myanmar's monks

By Choe Sang-Hun | October 23, 2007

MANDALAY, Myanmar: As the lunchtime gong chimed through a tree-shaded monastery, several hundred monks in burgundy robes lined up on a mid-October day, all holding alms bowls.

It is a common scene in Myanmar, where one out of every 100 people, many of them still children, are monks. But the lunch line at the Mahagandhayon Monastery here, the country's largest, used to be much longer.

"We usually have 1,400 monks here," said a senior monk. "Because of the situation, parents took 1,000 of them home."

For decades, two powerful institutions have shaped Burmese life: the 500,000-member Buddhist clergy, which commands a moral authority over the population, and Senior General Than Shwe's junta, whose 450,000-strong military keeps the population in check with intimidation.

Their uneasy coexistence has shattered. After scattered demonstrations erupted against sharp increases in fuel prices in August, thousands of monks took to the streets to protest the junta's economic mismanagement and political repression. The military responded with batons and bullets.

The guns have prevailed over mantras, at least for now.

As of Oct. 6, the government said it had detained 533 monks, of whom 398 were released after sorting out what it called "real monks" from "bogus ones." Monks and dissidents contend that many more were detained.

"They took away truckloads of monks and lay people," said the deputy head of a monastery in Yangon, the country's largest city. "They had the monks kneel down, with their hands on the back of their heads. Anyone who raised his head was beaten."

He said that at Ngwe Kyayan, the largest monastery in Yangon, soldiers took food and donation boxes, and even beat the abbot and vandalized images of Buddha, as some of its 300 monks fought back.

The monks, he said, began demonstrating to protest the economic deprivation of ordinary Burmese. "It's a terrible situation," he said. "Monks took to the streets to draw attention to this problem, pleading for loving kindness. But our government is worse than Hitler's Nazis. They have no respect for religion. I wonder how long it will take to heal this wound."

When it was over, The New Light of Myanmar, a government-run English-language newspaper, said, "monks had been defrocked during interrogation," so that they could be questioned as lay people, then "ordained and send back to their monasteries." In interviews, monks denounced the process, saying the military had no authority to defrock or ordain monks.

The junta also employed divide-and-rule tactics, by persuading the state-sanctioned Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which oversees the Buddhist clergy here, to accept its donations and to order monks to stop protesting or face punishment.

"Some of these senior monks are bribed by the regime," said an editor at a Yangon magazine. "They have accepted so many good things in life — cars, televisions, big houses, telephones and mobile phones — that they simply have to listen to the regime."

At the Mahagandhayon Monastery here, soldiers had pulled back after cordoning off this temple for weeks. But their trucks continued to lurk in back alleys near the compound, as rumors circulated that, if the monks rose up again, it would probably be in this city, the nation's second largest. About 20,000 of its million residents are monks, one of the highest concentrations in the country.

Young men from across the country come here to train as monks, and they have grown increasingly passionate about the poverty and injustice their nation has suffered under the military government.

The fear was still palpable at Mahagandhayon, where monks chanted mantras over their last meal of the day, a late-morning lunch of vegetable soup, eggplants, rice and a special treat from a donor — instant noodles. But the monks were clearly still reluctant to discuss the military's crushing of the demonstrations less than a month ago.

"They are afraid of guns!" said a senior monk said before vanishing into the dining hall.

Long before the protests erupted, monks were keenly aware of people's suffering. When they went out to receive alms, said the senior monk in Yangon, they saw "no happiness in people's faces, people whose minds are preoccupied with finding food and surviving one day at a time."

But the military's use of force against the monks has unsettled fundamental Burmese values.

"To Burmese, monks are like sons of the Buddha," said Maung Aye, a taxi driver, as he drove around Yangon's 2,000-year-old Sule Pagoda, which is said to enshrine a hair of the Buddha and was a focal point of the protests and their suppression last month.

One man, a 37-year-old shop owner in Yangon, said his 5-year-old son, who like most Burmese children has been raised with Buddhist beliefs in karma, had cried out: "I don't want to become a soldier. If I have to kill a monk, the worst thing will happen to me in my next life."

At a Yangon temple, sitting before a golden Buddha figure encircled by blinking electric lights, two middle-aged monks spoke with resignation and anger.

"We learned a lesson from 1988," one monk said, referring to the large-scale pro-democracy uprising that the military put down, leaving hundreds, perhaps thousands, dead. "If it changes nothing and only gets worse, why risk our lives? Why try, if nothing happens?"

The other monk said: "We would like to love our government. We tried but couldn't. We want to like to go out and demonstrate again, but we know they are out there with their guns."

The Buddhist Lent, which lasts three months into late October, is a time when monks focus on studying scriptures and refrain from leaving their monasteries, except for early-morning outings to collect alms. The fact that monks ventured out in protest during this period was widely seen here as a sign of just how angry they were. But by mid-October, many monasteries in Yangon were deserted, after raids by the military drove thousands of monks to flee.

In towns across Myanmar, dawn has traditionally seen the ritual of monks filing down streets seeking alms and laypeople gaining merit by donating rice and other food. Families take pride in what is often seen as adopting monks, providing them with food, clothing, books and other goods for a few months or years, depending on their finances.

As poverty has worsened in Myanmar, however, the alms processions have increasingly turned into a sad exchange of apologies for having to beg and for being unable to give. Now, with the monks scattered, the alms lines have dwindled in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay.

For centuries, whoever seized power in this country sought legitimacy by lavishing money on pagodas and monasteries. When the democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi called for a "second struggle for national independence" in 1988, she chose Yangon's gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda as the site to deliver her watershed speech.

Thus when monks marched in September to the home where she is kept under house arrest, the act was a moral reproof to the government.

But the monks themselves are not immune to criticism. Although senior clerics are elected by monks and revered by lay people, "they form a small closed society which doesn't know anything about the community at large," the magazine editor said. "Some of them do not know how poor people live in a small village."

One of the many titles the government bestows on the senior monks is Bhaddanta. Some lay people call these privileged monks "Bhaddanta Toyota" or "Bhaddanta Toshiba."

Other lay people defended the aging clerics who have taken gifts from the government. These monks, they said, are under moral obligation to accept donations, and fear that confrontation could cost more lives.

Still, witnesses reported piles of rice donated by the government left uncollected at the gates of some monasteries, a rebuff of the government's effort to placate the clergy.

At Mahagandhayon in Mandalay, the monks were going about their daily routine. Droning sounds of scriptures being recited filled the monastery. Stray dogs, which came to share leftover alms with child beggars, dozed on the ground.

The senior monk said he hoped that the rest of the students would return in a month or so. One young monk who had remained said, "Please go out and tell the world exactly what really has happened in this country."

He added, "I am scared just talking to you about this."