Bearers of Wisdom, Sources of Power: Sorcerer-saints and Burmese Buddhism

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BEARERS OF WISDOM, SOURCES OF POWER: SORCERER-SAINTS AND BURMESE BUDDHISM

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

by Thomas Nathan Patton January 2014

UMI Number: 3579139

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BEARERS OF WISDOM, SOURCES OF POWER: SORCERER-SAINTS AND BURMESE BUDDHISM Thomas Nathan Patton, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation explores the world of twentieth and twenty-first centuries Burmese Buddhists’ devotion to Buddhist sorcerer-saints, known in Myanmar as weizzā. Based on testimonies of the devout, long-term participant observations, popular Buddhist periodicals, and scores of magazines, personal journals, songs, and even websites of weizzā devotees, this dissertation offers the first ethnography of Burmese Buddhist sorcerer-saints and Burmese lived religious society from the perspective of its devotees. By examining the economic, medical, and political changes that have been taking place in Myanmar over the past one hundred years and how they are reflected in the relationships Buddhists form with specific Buddhist saints that are known for their healing powers, my research seeks to uncover the beliefs and practices that have developed around these saints, whose cults, visible throughout the country, attract large numbers of devotees from all walks of life and are the nexus of many kinds of Buddhist sorcery and healing practices. More broadly, I undertake the task of describing the religious narratives and experiences claimed by the Buddhist saints and their devout followers to help increase our knowledge of their lives through descriptions of the webs of social, institutional and cultural relationships with which religious practices and experiences are entangled.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Thomas Nathan Patton was born and raised in Troy, NY. He received a B.A. in Religious Studies at Manhattan College in 2000. In 2003, he completed a MTS degree in Buddhist Studies at the Harvard Divinity School. He was awarded a Ph.D. in Asian Literature, Religion and Culture, specializing in the culture and history of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, by Cornell University in 2014.

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For My Mother, Father, and Sister

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been my very good fortune to have had Anne Blackburn as my teacher, mentor, and friend over these many years. I thank her for believing that my research was worth pursuing, which encouraged me to continue with this study. My training as a scholar and this dissertation has greatly benefited from Anne's guidance, keen insights, and good judgement. I could not have asked for a better advisor, and I can only hope that I will be as patient, caring and wise with my future students as Professor Blackburn has been with me. A great debt of gratitude also goes to the other two members of my dissertation committee: Daniel Gold and Andrew Willford. From my very first semester as a graduate student, Dan has been supportive and encouraging, providing sound advice at every step of the way. Andrew's brilliance and kindness have been an inspiration and our long chats during this past year have been instrumental in developing my next research project. The intellectual and personal support that Christian Lammerts has given me over the past ten years cannot be overstated. He has provided motivation for this project from its initial stages, encouraged me to write a dissertation on the weizzā, and has been more than generous in sharing with me any source he has come across. His ongoing support further stimulated my project and enhanced some of my own ideas. Erik Braun, Lilian Handlin, and Alicia Turner, are three people whose friendship and academic mentorship has meant much to me these past eight years. I have turned to them on countless occasions for moral support and drawn on their vast knowledge of Buddhism and Burma Studies, with which they have shared selflessly.

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I would like to acknowledge the support and mentorship of the faculty of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program and the Department of Asian Studies, particularly, San San Hnin Tun, Eric Tagliacozzo, Magnus Fiskesjo, Thak Chaloemtiarana, Keith Taylor, Jane Marie Law, and Tamara Loos. I also want to thank Kim Scott in the Asian Studies department and Wendy Treat at the Southeast Asia Program, for their kindness and administrative help. Brett de Bary offered much needed support and guidance during my final year of study. Magnus Fiskesjö provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of this dissertation. Lorraine Paterson inspired me to enter Cornell after sitting in on one of her courses, and she has remained a friend ever since. This dissertation would have never even gotten off the ground if it had not been for the enduring, generous help I received from friends and colleagues in Myanmar. My best friend, Toe Win, accompanied me on many research trips and, with the help of his mother, nursed me back to health on the many occasions I fell ill. Soe Kyaw Thu selflessly and diligently collected and shared dozens of crucial documents for this study, as well as introduced me to numerous individuals who follow the weizzā path. Some of my fondest memories in Mandalay are of us relaxing at his home with his family or sipping tea at one of the local tea shops. U San Lin, Daw Khin May Thet, May Oo San, Pan Nu San, and Hey Htet San welcomed me into their home during my first research trip to Yangon and offered a stable, loving home. Dr. Than Tun Sein took time out of his busy schedule on several occassions to drive me to remote weizzā places of interest and shared with me his knowledge about particular weizzā saints. Dr. Tin Maung Kyi shared valuable sources with me and explained, with care, the intricate world of the weizzā. Daw Mi Mi and Daw Khin Soe Aye were like older sisters to me, making sure I was adequately fed and healthy. The nuns of Maukathiwon Thilashin Kyaung allowed me to stay on multiple occasions, and I still consider them as my family in Sagaing. vii

Beyond Cornell and Myanmar, I am indebted to many friends and colleagues. Yin Ker has been a wonderful conversation partner and has shared with me every source related to the weizzā that she came across. Similary, conversations with Niklas Foxeus, and his own research on the weizzā, have been an inspiration. Min Zin Oo patiently sat with me on many occasions, helping me to decipher some of the more cryptic of weizzā texts. Bo Bo Lansin provided me with rare weizzā-related images. In my early stages of research, Kyaw Myaing taught me the basics of the weizzā path. Mi Khin Khin Soe generously supported a follow-up research trip in 2011. Patrick Pranke, Keiko Tosa and Guillaume Rozenberg gave sound advice regarding undertaking fieldwork in Myanmar. Juliane Schober and Steven Collins offered valuable guidance on getting the dissertation done. Justin McDaniel, unbeknownst to him, provided much needed support from afar. Chie Ikeya’s advice was invaluable during the final stages of writing when I was beginning to apply for jobs. John Ferguson invited me to his home during his last days and shared with me fascinating stories and documents regarding his research on weizzā. Shing and Landy from Hong Kong made sure I was adequately caffeinated during my long stints of fieldwork. Research for this dissertation was primarily carried out during a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. Intensive Burmese language instruction was conducted thanks to the BlakemoreFreeman Fellowship. I have also received generous financial assistance from the Cornell University Graduate School, Cornell Southeast Asia Program, Mario Einaudi Center, and U.S. Department of State. An enormous amount of thanks goes to my in-laws. They provided warm and loving homes for me in both the Netherlands and Hong Kong. I am grateful to have such supportive and caring relatives. viii

I thank my daughter for motivating me to finish this dissertation in good time. I worked diligently during the hours she was in daycare so that I would have free time in the afternoons to jump on the couch, have tea parties, run around outside, and watch cartoons. I thank my wife, colleague, and best friend, Oiyan Liu, who shared with me the adventures and headaches of travel, research, and writing even while she was writing her own dissertation. Being lucky enough to meet her during the first month of my graduate program and experiencing the ups and downs of graduate school life together is worth more than completing ten dissertations. She continues to be my greatest source of strength and encouragement. This dissertation is dedicated to, and would not have come to fruition without, my family: parents, Tom and Kathy, and sister, Jacklyn. They continually encouraged me to do what I love, no matter how unpopular it was at the time. They have been a constant source of love, concern, support and strength all these years. I would like to express my heart-felt gratitude to them.

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A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS In citing my interviews, I used a number and letter notation system to protect the source’s privacy and to give the reader essential information about the source. For example, the code “Interview, KM-M-35” means: Interview = Face-to-face interview Correspondence = Communication via letters or emails KM = Fictional initials for the source, but consistent throughout so that the reader will know who is saying what M = Sex (Man; W = Woman) 35 = Age ? = I was unable to ascertain that specific information

I have identified other sources in the following ways. Written responses to questions about the weizzā path or devotion to weizzā saints, and letters and emails sent to me are identified as Per.comm. This prefix follows the same number and letter notation as shown above.

I have not altered the personal information of interviewees who appeared in popular religious magazines. If known, their names, sex, ages, and city of residence are presented as they appear in the interview and follow the same abbreviation format as above, with the addition of the magazine title in which the interview appears.

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Works frequently cited have been identified by the following abbreviations: NYK Nekkattha Yaung-kyi (“Star Rays”) WRS Weizzā Rasa Sone (“The Complete Essence of Wisdom”)

Myanmar This dissertation uses ‘Myanmar’ (instead of ‘Burma’) throughout because that is the official name of the country and is accepted as such by the United Nations. It has, moreover, been adopted increasingly in common usage inside the country, especially when using the Burmese language. Its use in this dissertation does not represent a political statement of any kind. For an excellent treatment of the ways those writing about Myanmar have dealt with this issue, see Rosalie Metro’s “The Divided Discipline of Burma/Myanmar Studies” (Cornell SEAP Newsletter Spring 2011).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

A Note on Abbreviations

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Chapter One: Introduction: Lived Religion

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Chapter Two: Encountering the Sorcerer-Saint

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Chapter Three: Vanguards of the Sāsana

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Chapter Four: Grandchildren of the Wizard King

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Chapter Five: The Ethnographer and the Charlatan

199

Bibliography

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Introduction This is a study of Buddhist sorcerer-saints and the relationships that form between them and their devotees as well as the results of these unions. This dissertation explores the world of twentieth and twenty-first centuries Burmese Buddhists’ devotion to Buddhist sorcerer-saints, known in Myanmar as weizzā.1 Based on testimonies of the devout, long-term participant observations, popular Buddhist periodicals, and scores of magazines, personal journals, songs, and even websites of weizzā devotees, this dissertation offers the first ethnography of Burmese Buddhist sorcerer-saints and Burmese lived religious society from the perspective of its devotees. Following in the footsteps of scholar of religion Robert Orsi I see myself as a scholar of lived religion who is interested in religion as my informants actually do and imagine it in the circumstances of their everyday lives.2 To that end, I attempt in this dissertation to examine the religious lives of such individuals and the experiences they consider central to their lives along 1

For those words with Indic origins, I will transliterate in the traditional Pāli or Sanskrit manner. Exceptions to this include the words weizzā (for “vijjā”) when referring specifically to a person or practice related to the weizzā phenomenon in Myanmar so as not to confuse it with the other meanings of “vijjā,” which include “knowledge” and “wisdom.” A weizzā is also often referred to as “weizzā-dho” (Burmese pronunciation of “vijjādhāra (bearer of wisdom). In these cases, I will also retain the Burmese “weizzā-dho” when referring to someone who has attained a certain stage on the weizzā path, for this appellation, as we will see, when used in these cases has a more complex meaning than just “bearer of wisdom.” All Burmese and Pāli translations are mine unless stated otherwise. In the body of this article, Burmese words and phrases will be transcribed phonetically. Proper names and the titles of works in Pāli and Buddhist technical vocabulary in Pāli will be transliterated according to the Pāli Text Society convention with diacritics. Pāli words that have been domesticated in English to a certain extent, such as ‘sangha,’ will not receive diacritics except when used as technical vocabulary.

2

David Hall, in his entry on “lived religion” for the Encyclopedia of American Religion defines it as “an approach to the study of religion that foregrounds practice: ‘lived’ in the sense of the performed or enacted” (2010: 2182). 1

with the varied rituals and practices that make up their personal religious expressions. I consider religion at the level of the individual and take seriously his/her fluid, variegated, and at times, contradictory, beliefs and practices. My study aims to understand contemporary patterns of religiosity in Myanmar. Grappling with the complexities, apparent inconsistencies, heterogeneity, and untidiness of the range of religious practices that people in any given culture partake in and find meaningful and useful is valuable for it reveals important things about religious traditions and the ways people incorporate them into their daily lives that we might not otherwise recognize. My interpretive strategy situates narratives, practices of healing and possession, and ritual works involving weizzā saints and their devotees within a broader landscape of Burmese Buddhist traditions and contemporary social dynamics in Myanmar, as well as within the more intimate setting of devotees’ lives. This analytical framework highlights the weizzā saints’ function as “a symbolic agent mediating individual bodies and experiences and conventional discourses” within Burmese society about religion, healing, politics, and significantly advances our understanding of Burmese Buddhist religious culture.3 To put it in slightly different terms, I approach the religious tradition of the weizzā saints as a “form of social discourse: a conceptual and experiential frame for the expression of various disjunctive experiences, interpersonal conflicts, perceived threats to life and happiness, or other stresses.”4 I do not take religion to be sui generis nor an abstract system. Religion, as I understand it, is a social phenomenon that dynamically comes into being as a result of the felicities and tensions that develop at the intersection of the limits of what is 3

Hayes, Kelly. 2011. Holy Harlots: Femininity, Sexuality, and Black Magic in Brazil. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 9.

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Hayes, 2011: 9 2

perceivable, achievable, and imaginable in one’s world and the social structures one finds is part of.5 I agree with Timothy Fitzgerald that religion is a scholarly construct with a conceptual history and that using the concept of religion to analyze those traditions scholars recognize as “religious” is often ineffective because it implies a distinction from the social or secular.6 However, I believe that we continue to use the concept of religion as a skillful analytical framework and would, therefore, not go as far as Fitzgerald to de-privilege using religion altogether. Indeed, the modern category of “religion” is a result of Enlightenment presuppositions and preoccupations with defining the essence of phenomenon like “religion”. The word “religion” is problematic because it refers to a folk category acquired by scholars to refer to something that has no equivalent term or concept whatsoever to many of the groups religious scholars study and has come about as a concept used to explain and classify this specific aspect of cultural activity. However, with regards to Myanmar and Buddhism in Asia, while it may have been the case at the time when European scholars first encountered peoples belonging to non-Christian religious traditions, the concept of “religion” has become deeply embedded in many, if not most, of the cultures throughout the world in this post-Enlightenment, post-colonial era. Despite the fact that attempts, on the part of non-Western peoples, to stipulate the nature of religion has often resulted in definitions tainted with Western presuppositions, it is 5

Phenomenological anthropologists, such as Michael Jackson, refer to this as the “life-world”: “that domain of everyday, immediate social existence and practical activity, with all its habituality, its crises, its vernacular and idiomatic character, its biographical particularities, its decisive events and indecisive strategies, which theoretical knowledge addresses but does not determine, from which conceptual understanding arises but on which it does not primarily depend.” Michael Jackson, ed., Things as They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1996), 7-8.

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Fitzgerald, Timothy. 2005. “Problems with ‘Religion’ as a Category for Understanding Hinduism.” In J.E. Llewellyn (ed.) Defining Hinduism: A Reader, 171-201. 3

no longer fair to say that those peoples and groups whom religious scholars study do not now have an equivalent term for what scholars mean as “religion.”7 Since the early 1990s there has been a growing body of research done by scholars of religion whose work focuses on the everyday practices, thoughts, and beliefs of lay Christians in various parts of the Western world.8 Such scholars of religion have approached their subjects through history, sociology, ethnography, and close reading of texts to help expand our ways of thinking about the daily life of lived religious practices. Buddhist scholarship, however, has not kept up, and only recently have we begun to see a handful of studies done by scholars of Theravāda Buddhism whose work comes close to what one might think of as lived-religion.9 From this position, then, I present in this dissertation a view of religion as it is actually lived in people's everyday lives. For example, in Chapter Two where we look at healing phenomena and imagination in an ongoing, dynamic relation with the realities and structures of everyday life in particular times and places, I attempt to show that people in these situations do not simply act; “they attempt to understand and narrative themselves as actors” and that it is my task as a scholar of lived religion to recognizing that the stories they narrate and interpret are part of the, as Orsi writes, “ideas, gestures, and imaginings, all as media of engagement with the 7

For example, in pre-colonial Myanmar there was no word in the Burmese language for what we would think of as “religion.” The closest they had was the Pāli word sāsana. As time went on, however, a word for religion (B. bhātha from the Pāli “bhāsa”) came into existence, and also came to be used when referring to any subject of academic study, especially religion. 8

David Hall (1997) notes that the concept of “lived religion” and its application to studying religious history has long been in use among French scholars of sociology of religion. See sociologist, Daniele Herviu-Leger (1997) for an overview of the evolution of the concept of lived religion in French circles of sociology of religion.

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Recent books by scholars of Buddhist Studies, Samuels (2010), McDaniel (2011), and Turner (forthcoming) are all excellent examples of works that focus on religion as lived in everyday lives of the Buddhists they study. 4

world … [for] it is pointless to study particular beliefs and practices apart from the people who use these ideas in the definite circumstances of their lives.”10 I seek to understand how the practices, stories, and beliefs shared by my informants are described and understood by them while also taking into account the circumstances of their experiences and the cultural structures and conditions from which these elements emerge. In a sense, then, this will be a study of “popular religion” but not without first problematizing such a term. The term “popular religion” is: Badly in need of definition. Among detractors of the idea, popular religion means all those crazy religious things that people do and all the crazy ideas they have outside the structures of an organized and properly ordered church. Among its defenders, popular religion too often means the nostalgic evocation of peasant spirituality or the angry 11 defense of magic and folk practices. Such a term often gives the impression that it is mostly the uneducated, non-monastic legions of laity who engage in such practices. But this idea only perpetuates a monastic/lay, educated/uneducated, sophisticated/unsophisticated, pure/impure dualities that imply a binary of right/wrong. As I will show below, good scholarship has been undertaken over the past decade in the field of Buddhist Studies to help overturn such a bifurcated way of viewing Buddhism in Asia, and I therefore agree with scholar of Buddhism Richard Gombrich that the term is misleading because it implies a decline, “from an ideal standard which is maintained by a few

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Orsi The Madonna of 115th Street p.xx-xxi. Anthropologist, Michael Jackson, similarly argues that “to investigate beliefs or ‘belief systems’ apart from actual human activity is absurd” (Paths Towards a Clearing. 65) 11

Orsi. 1985: xiv. 5

spiritual aristocrats, a relationship analogous to that between ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ music.”12 If we use the term then, it seems better to use it in the everyday sense, i.e. with reference to those beliefs and practices that are “widely followed” or “prevalent.”13 Furthermore, terms, such as “popular religion,” “syncretism,” and “hybridization” continue to perpetuate an imaginary stratification of religious elements that is not selfconsciously reflected upon by the Burmese Buddhist engaging in many of the practices included in the following chapters. My interlocutors, when engaging in a variety of rituals, do not attempt to unravel the many threads of their religious practices because for them, there are none. 14 Take, for instance, U Kyaw, a Burmese Buddhist who chants the Heart Sutra (in Sanskrit) while seated in front of a statue of Sarasvati that is placed next to a statue of the Buddha that is enveloped in a fog of smoke from a cigarette that was offered to a laminated picture of a weizzā saint for the purpose of being successful in a new business venture. U Kyaw is not saying to himself throughout this ritual, “Ok, this is Mahayana Buddhist, this is Hindu, this is a smattering of animism from my ancestors, and this is just some stuff I came up with on my own.” I would argue that my interlocutors, unless pressed to create such distinctions (that is, if they even have knowledge of such constructs of “Hindu” “animism” and so on, in the first place) live their 12

Gombrich 1971. Precept and practice: traditional Buddhism in the rural highlands of Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 319. 13

Hall 2010: 1284.

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We still see such terms employed in works on Buddhism. In Mediums, Monks, and Magic: Thai Popular Religion, for example, anthropologist of religion Pattana Kitiarsa starts off with good intentions to show that supernatural elements within what he terms, contemporary “Popular Buddhism” are not a symptom of the decline of Buddhism. Unfortunately, such an approach still presents us with an image of Buddhism that consists of different layers, with those at the top being more authentic. Moreover, the danger of such a study is that the author becomes the arbiter of what constitutes these strands. 6

religious lives and practices as a fluid, dynamic, ever-changing, amalgamation of thoughts, feelings and actions. People like U Kyaw draw on what they regard as coherent, well-formed practices of potency and that for us to attempt at dissecting them would be fruitless and perhaps disrespectful. I am uncomfortable with terms like “hybridization,” and especially, “syncretism” because of their historical uses and residual connotations.15 Toward the end of the Long Reformation (1500-1800CE), theologians gave the term "syncretism" a pejorative connotation in that it referred to the blending of non-Christian elements with supposed authentic Christian beliefs and practices. About two-hundred years later, historians of religion, tried to reframe syncretism as any mixing of elements from diverse religious traditions. They thought nothing problematic about the boundaries between those traditions and treated as given those definitive features separating the religions as qualities essential to the religions themselves, rather than as social constructions.16 It is important to point out that when I use the term “lived religion” that I am not simply substituting it for “popular religion” or any of the abovementioned terms I find problematic. That would just be reifying the stratified view of religion that I am trying to move beyond. Rather, I use it to represent, borrowing folklorist and religious studies scholar Leonard Primiano’s words, “a theoretical definition of another term, not just a terminological substitution for an older 15

A sample of works on Buddhism in Southeast Asia that have employed such terminology include: Pattana Kitiarsa. “Beyond Syncretism: Hybridization of Popular Religion in Contemporary Thailand.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 36 (3), pp 461–487 October 2005; Taylor, Jim. 2008. Buddhism and postmodern imaginings in Thailand: the religiosity of urban space. Farnham, England: Ashgate; and Swearer, Donald K. 2010. The Buddhist world of Southeast Asia. Albany: State University of New York Press. 16

There is a large body of work that addresses the use of syncretism as a category for the study of religions. See, for example, Syncretism in Religion, eds. Anita Leopold and Jeppe Jensen, and Syncretism / Anti-syncretism, eds. Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart, for especially thorough discussions of the use of syncretism. 7

concept.”17 I approach Buddhism from the perspective of a lived religion in order to shift our focus to the people (in this case, weizzā devotees), whether they be monastics or laypeople, elite or commoners, rich or poor, and so on. Although it is important to remain aware of the religious power dynamics that certainly exist between members of different socio-economic and religious backgrounds, the modes of practice that are explored in this dissertation are approached in a nonhierarchal way to highlight the ways a range of devotees (monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen) experience their relationships with the weizzā saints By now it should be clear that a second aim of this dissertation is to offer a provisional model for how we may approach Buddhism from a lived-religions perspective. Unfortunately, not much has been done in the area of Buddhism with regards to lived Buddhist traditions in Asia, and I have therefore had to look to research done on lived religion in other parts of the world and with non-Buddhist traditions, most notably, Christianity in North and South America. The methodologies and interpretative strategies I employ in this dissertation build not only upon such lived religion studies mentioned above but also on work done on Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia from the fields of Buddhist Studies and History and Anthropology of Religion. And although no lived-religion studies of Buddhism have been undertaken that approximate what I do here, important works that were published over the past several decades have greatly influenced and informed this dissertation. All of the works I discuss in the following section have contributed in some significant way to how I adapt a lived-religion approach to the study of Buddhism.

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Primiano, Leonard. 2012. “Afterword” Vernacular Religion in Everyday Life. Eds. Marion Bowman and Ulo Valk, 384. 8

From the Library to the Field: Where Text Meets Context and the Return of Ethnography to the Study of Buddhism With the United States’ steadily increased involvement in the area of Southeast Asia during the volatile years following World War II, several universities with the help of funds from the State Department and Rockefeller Foundation established programs dedicated to the study of Southeast Asia. It was at this time that, as Juliane Schober notes, “the Second World War disrupted both colonial rules as well as the episteme of colonial scholarship in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.”18 Whereas previous scholarship on Buddhism was dominated by historians, Indologists and philologists, the 1950s and 1960s saw the intervention of a growing number of anthropologists who also wished to be part of this venerable field of Buddhist Studies with the hopes of studying “Buddhism” as the object of an overtly social and cultural inquiry. One can get a sense of this newly emerging field and the problems anthropologists of Buddhism were preoccupied with by looking at the volume, Anthropological Studies in Theravāda Buddhism, which grew out of a conference of a similar name at the University of Chicago in 1962.19 The works included in this volume express the specific set of assumptions brought by European and North American scholars of Buddhism to their anthropological work. Such presuppositions were highly influential and went on to inform both the academic study of Theravāda Buddhism as well as the Buddhism(s) of South and Southeast Asia for years to come.20 Most notable, however, 18

Schober, Juliane 2008: Communities of interpretation in the study of religion in Burma,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 39.2:255–267, 258. 19

Conference on Theravāda Buddhism, and Manning Nash. 1966. Anthropological studies in Theravāda Buddhism. New Haven: Yale University 20

Scholars have noted the recent provenance of “Theravāda” as a general term for the Buddhism of Southeast Asia, probably gaining predominance around the middle of the twentieth century (Skilling 2009). I use the label, on occasion, to refer to a distinguishable form of Buddhism. To 9

were their ideas surrounding “text and context” and “the relations between the ongoing behavior of the ordinary Buddhist (both monk and laity) and voluminous canonical (in the Tipiṭaka) and semicanonical literature of Theravāda Buddhism.”21 In the field of anthropology, scholars tended to view Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia through the Redfieldian distinction between great and little traditions, which came to dominate the way ethnographic inquiries were carried out during the Cold War period.22 This binary differentiates between those religions shaped by elite groups of virtuosi on the one hand and village traditions composed mainly of the masses of non-literate peasants on the other. The works of anthropologists like Melford Spiro (1967, [1970] 1982), Gananath Obeyesekere (1963, 1966), and Manning Nash (1966) were largely predicated on such a view and “transformed in that way the epistemic focus of their orientalist predecessors” and failed to take seriously those beliefs and practices that did not correlate with what they read in Buddhist texts.23 Such work was not to be found solely to the fields of anthropology and sociology, however. In the 1971 classic, Precept and Practice, one can see that the anthropological spirit of the day even influenced the philologically trained Richard Gombrich to leave the confines of Oxford University and travel to Sri Lanka to conduct fieldwork for his dissertation. Upon his arrival, he was quickly confronted with the problem of how one could reconcile the practice of

do otherwise would create confusion, as it is now a common and indigenous term. 21

Nash (1966: ix). Manning Nash hoped that such a work would help foster cooperation between “field anthropologists (sometimes accused of ‘seeing everything and reading nothing’) and historians of Buddhism and textual scholars of Sanskrit and Pāli (sometimes maligned by anthropologists as ‘reading everything and understanding nothing’)” (1966: ix). 22

Redfield, Robert. 1941. The Folk Culture of Yucutan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

23

Schober 2008: 258. 10

“actual” Buddhists he observed in a Sri Lankan village with the information he learned from the texts. Borrowing an idea from Gananath Obeyesekere’s essay that was included in the abovementioned Anthropological Studies in Theravāda Buddhism (1966: 5, 8), Gombrich suggests that a fruitful way of looking at this seeming disconnect of “what people say they believe and say they do, and what they really believe and do” is to develop a cognitive/affective dichotomy: cognitively, Buddhists will attest to believing in such normative doctrines as anicca, dukkha, and anatta, while, at the same time, their actions indicate a supposed affective acceptance of, for example, an unchanging soul. In other words, Buddhists “cognitively” know the Buddha is dead and gone, but “affectively” or “psychologically” feel his presence and power working in their lives.24 Writing in a similar vein as those scholars whose work is included in the seminal Anthropological Studies in Theravāda Buddhism, B. J. Terwiel, in his work on Buddhist magic in rural Thailand discloses that when he first entered Thailand in the late 1960s to do 24

Gombrich, Richard F. 1971. Precept and practice: traditional Buddhism in the rural highlands of Ceylon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 9. For a more recent reworking of the ideas put forth in earlier works by Gombrich, see his monograph, co-authored with Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. In this work, their conceptual framework for what they term “Sinhala Buddhism” rests on the by now familiar bifurcated idea that there is, on the one hand, a Theravāda Buddhism that is rooted in Pāli canonical sources, and on the other, a “spirit religion” that is made up of those practices and beliefs that, if adhered to, make it difficult for Obeyesekere and Gombrich to “claim that they remain Theravāda Buddhists in any meaningful sense” (1988: 29). One can glean from such statements that Obeyesekere and Gombrich have strong convictions in their views of what constitutes “real” Buddhism. We see this most clearly, for example, in Obeyesekere’s review of Tambiah’s book Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. Obeyesekere compares the work to Michael Carrithers’ Forest Monks of Sri Lanka and goes on, not to critique the scholarship of each, but rather to show which Buddhism, in his opinion, is more authentic. He is uncomfortable accepting Tambiah’s position that the Buddhism of the charismatic Thai monks selling amulets and engaging in supernormal practices is authentic since their actions do not agree with Pāli canonical texts. He has trouble understanding how the Thai monks in Tambiah’s book reconcile their views and their quest for salvation with the practice of magic and economic relations with he laity (1985: 792). 11

anthropological work, he arrived with knowledge of Buddhism gained only from translated works from the Pāli texts. And, like Gombrich, he was thus surprised to find out that the practices and beliefs of those in the Thai villages he studied seldom, if at all, agreed with what he had read in the texts. When Terwiel began to interview people about the relationship between Buddhist and “non-Buddhist” elements of their religious lives, he quickly realized that such categories had little relevance in the minds of his informants.25 He struggles in his book with the issue of whether the Buddhism of his village is a harmonious blend of Buddhism and local creeds or whether an attempt should be made to delineate the two or more distinct strata found within it. The former view he terms “syncretist”; the latter “compartmentalized.”26 Those who adhere to a syncretistic model, he says, usually come to such a conclusion based on observations of the lesser educated members of one’s field site. The scholars who tend to compartmentalize their findings often base their opinions upon data drawn from informants of the educated classes. These two groups of scholars would have avoided such “apparent controversies had they made clear that their description of Buddhism does not encompass the whole Buddhist population, but refers only to certain sections of it.”27 It is necessary to point out that, despite Terwiel’s insistence that we view Buddhism in a more holistic manner (à la Tambiah), he nonetheless fails to recognize that his admission that the two groups of scholars are referring to different classes of the Buddhists in Thailand places him in the company of those who differentiate between the distinct strata of Thai Buddhism. As I discussed above, I find such two-tiered models

25

Terwiel, B. J. 1975. Monks and magic: an analysis of religious ceremonies in central Thailand. Lund [Sweden]: Studentlitteratur, 3. 26

Ibid., 5.

27

Ibid., 1. 12

problematic because it “residualizes” the religious lives of some Buddhists while simultaneously reifying an imagined Buddhist authenticity.28 Writing at least partially in response to Gombrich’s work, Stanley Tambiah argued for a more holistic approach when encountering apparent inconsistencies in precept and practice. Dismissing outright Gombrich’s affective/cognitive thesis as a “simpleminded proposition,”29 Tambiah sees it as an arbitrarily imposed dichotomy that is “theoretically untenable.”30 Tambiah even goes so far to say that this dichotomous way of looking at Buddhism is an “invention of the anthropologist dictated not so much by the reality he studies as by his professional perspective”31 and feels the need to “rightly repudiate” such a bifurcated notion because “as far as the villagers are concerned there are not two traditions but simply one, ‘which is their life’; for them village tradition is not conceptually separable into different elements.”32 He concludes that “Buddhism is a shorthand expression for a total social phenomenon, civilizational in breadth and depth, which encompasses the lives of Buddhist monks and laymen, and which cannot be disaggregated in a facile way into its religious, political, and economic realms as these are currently understood in the West.”33 28

Primiano, L.N. 1995. “Vernacular Religion and the Search for Method in Religious Folklife.” Western Folklore. 54.1: 39. 29

Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. 1984. The Buddhist saints of the forest and the cult of amulets: a study in charisma, hagiography, sectarianism, and millennial Buddhism. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 5. 30

Ibid., 375.

31

Ibid. 371.

32

Ibid., 369.

33

Ibid., 7. 13

Foreshadowing important work that would be undertaken by a new generation of scholars in the 1990s, Tambiah in 1984 offered prescient remarks when he wrote: I have found that those who espouse the narrow-minded view of religion … also frequently have a linear view of the development of Buddhism, from a pure, pristine, philosophical, salvation-search-oriented beginning, unstained and unsullied by the character and concerns of the social milieu in which it arose, to the later states of everwidening popularization and vulgarization and deviation from the initial purity, in which are at play all the human passions and this-worldly concerned of the masses. This posture can be baptized as ‘the Pāli Text Society mentality’ … which is not only portrayed by some Western scholars of a puritanical bent but also by some Sri Lankan scholars who have not emancipated themselves from the presuppositions of that ‘reformist Buddhism’.34 As if heeding Tambiah’s words, the 1990s saw the emergence of a kind of scholarship undertaken primarily by scholars who wished to supply a dialectical counterweight to the theoretical study of Theravāda Buddhism evident in the scholarship discussed above in the first part of this essay. Scholars, most notably Steven Collins, Charles Hallisey, and Anne Blackburn, have suggested new ways of conceptualizing the relationships among Buddhist textual, ethnographic, and historical evidence in relation to one another while studying Theravāda Buddhism and Buddhist practice in South and Southeast Asia. In his influential essay, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism,” Hallisey pushes us to uncover the assumptions and cultural and academic practices that have shaped the course of Buddhist studies over the past one hundred years. Most notable is his idea of “intercultural mimesis,” which Hallisey uses to describe the participation of both European philologists and Sri Lankan Buddhist themselves in the processes of delineating the

34

Ibid., 7. 14

parameters of "Buddhism.”35 Exploring the connections between colonialism and orientalism in the academic study of Buddhism, his essay lays out the ways in which precolonial constructions of what it meant to be a "Buddhist" in Asia while also helping to shaping colonial European understandings of Buddhist thought and practice. Anne M. Blackburn’s careful study of the role of the Siyam Nikaya of Sri Lanka brings into question the common colonial/post-colonial view that, prior to the intensification of colonial influence, “traditional” Theravāda Buddhism was essentially a stable and monolithic entity. Blackburn (2001) argues, on the contrary, that “pre- and early-colonial Lankan Buddhism was shifting, multiplex, and human” (2001: 139). In a related and equally important work, Blackburn (1999a), building on Keyes, Collins and Hallisey, proposes that we nuance our notions of the Theravāda Buddhist “Canon” by distinguishing between two different types, what she refers to as a “formal” canon and a “practical” canon. The former being those texts that serve as “the ultimate locus of interpretive authority in the Theravāda” and the latter as “those portions of the tipiṭaka with their commentaries as well as texts understood by their authors and audience as consistent with, but perhaps not explicitly related to, the tipiṭaka and its commentaries” (1999a, 303). Of the two, the practical canon, defined further as “the units of text actually employed in the practices of collecting manuscripts, copying them, reading them, commenting on them, listening to them, and preaching sermons based upon them that are understood by their users as part of a tipiṭaka-based tradition” (1999a: 284), plays a more central role in the lives of Buddhists.

35

Hallisey, Charles. 1995. "Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism." Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 33. 15

Other scholars, most notably Steven Collins, revisit the discussion of how to reconcile the seeming Weberian contradiction of a radical ascetic discourse of otherworldly salvation on the one had and a this-worldly gratification on the other. To my mind, the most nuanced and suggestive attempt to think about this has been provided in his Nirvāna and Other Buddhist Felicities. Upon first glance, one may think Collins to be reiterating what anthropologists like Keyes (1983) concluded at least ten years earlier. Indeed, as Blackburn and Hansen rightly point out, Collins has certainly been influenced by anthropological studies of South and Southeast Asia, especially by Keyes’ ethnographic data of illuminating the use and makeup of “canons” in modern day Southeast Asia (Blackburn 1999a: 283, Hansen 2007: 9). Collins, however, does not focus his work on studying Buddhist beliefs and practices and how they fit with that found in canonical texts. He concerns himself, rather, with looking at varieties of textual imagery and shifts in narrative to reveal, what he calls, a “Pāli imaginaire.” Collins’ innovative notion of the “Pāli imaginaire,” a cultural and ideological system he abstracts from pre-modern South Asian Buddhist civilizations, challenges the idea that nirvāna, and the ascetic, world-renouncing practices that lead to it, was the primary goal for Buddhists. This involves a very different history of Buddhist ideas that looks at philosophical and literary perspectives together, in order to understand how the summum bonum of nirvāna fitted into a wider discourse of "felicities." Integrating more worldly felicities allows overdue attention to such elements, usually overlooked by scholars, as heavenly rebirth, and health, wealth and other life enhancing merit making rituals. Collins’ treatment of nirvāna and localized supernaturalism differs significantly from previous studies. Arguing for a spectrum of felicities rather than an accommodation between Buddhist soteriological ideas and society at large. Thus, Collins de-centers nirvāna on his 16

spectrum of felicities, whereas previous scholarship on the Theravāda placed it at the front and center, perpetuating a dinstinction between Buddhists whose lives were centered around attaining nirvāna and the rest who were concerned with more worldly aims. Collins does not devalue these other felicities in which Buddhists engage. Another related perspective, which has not received nearly as much attention as it should, is found in the work of François Bizot. Bizot has given particular consideration to texts composed in South and Southeast Asian vernacular languages. Such texts (Bizot 1976, 1992, 1994) highlight the idea, with which I am in agreement, that such vernacular sources, and not those solely from the Pāli tipiṭaka, were what Buddhists in South and Southeast Asia had access to and that played an integral role in informing their ideas about Buddhist practices and beliefs. The texts include diagrams and sacred formulae used to create the Buddha within one’s body through the performance of ritual, thus indicating that the Buddha and his power are very much present here and now and can be accessed via certain practices.36 Donald Swearer’s recent work on Thai Buddhist statue consecration rituals, although the result of decades of research in Thailand, was nonetheless informed by Collins’ and Bizot’s work.37 Swearer’s work goes a long way in discrediting long-held notions of Theravāda Buddhism as a rational, nontheistic, philosophical religion by broadening our understanding of Buddhism “on the ground.” He sums up well the spirit of this period of scholarship when he writes: Are we then, witness to two oppositional forms of Buddhism – an ‘original’ monastic worldview of high moral philosophy and spiritual practice versus a thoroughly compromised, 36

While some scholars, like Kate Crosby (2000), have tended to refer to such practices as “Tantric Theravāda” I am in agreement with Peter Skilling who sees such a label as ahistorical and ill-fitting (2007: 16). 37

Donald Swearer, personal communication. Spring, 2003. 17

if not debased, popular tradition of magical expectation? Such a dichotomy is the projection of the logical mind uncomfortable with the incongruities within religious thought and practice, and the creation of Buddhist apologists whose relatively narrow view of a non-theistic, rationalistic Buddhism appeals to the modern mind. But the lived tradition of Buddhism – like all classical religions – is not so tidy (2004: 10). Giving attention to the “lived tradition of Buddhism” as it is played out “on the ground” has becoming increasingly en vogue among scholars trained as Buddhologists within the past ten years. Recent monographs like Buddhism in Practice (1997), Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia (1997), Life of Buddhism (2000), Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism (2005), and to a certain extent Constituting Communities (2003), are comprised of essays focusing, for the most part, on pushing beyond the confines of elite representations of Buddhism to popular expressions that often include lives of the laity and/or the wider arena of Buddhist communities at large. Reynolds and Hallisey astutely observed back in 1987 that the field of Buddhist studies was slowly beginning to focus less on those elements of Buddhism inside the monastic walls and of the elite lives of monks and more to the cultural surroundings and ordinary people who inhabited local monasteries and villages. It was not until the mid to late 1990s, however, that we really began to see a proliferating number of works that, as Reynolds notes, move away from “doctrinal issues toward a much greater emphasis on many various forms of Buddhist expression, including especially those that have been most deeply implicated in the everyday life of ordinary Buddhist practitioners” (1999: 479). The essays in the abovementioned volumes give much attention to what Buddhists do rather than what their texts say. The works direct our attention away from de-historicized discussions of philosophy to that of contextualized activities and practices by Buddhists. As Carl Bielfeldt says, these studies focus on “practices of what we might call the Buddhist silent majority: the men and women on the streets and in the rice paddies whose voices speak outside 18

the canon…” (Critical Terms: 243). Although such a project is certainly laudable and long overdue, it is still not without its problems. I worry that such studies still portray the image of a bifurcated Buddhist world of elites and non-elites; little and big people. I am not quite sure who Reynolds was referring to, or what he had in mind, when he referred to “ordinary Buddhist practitioners” in the quote cited in the previous paragraph, but I see it as giving the false impression that those Buddhists who do not live within the monastery walls are somehow unconcerned with notions of liberation, and conversely, that monastics do not engage in any worldly (P. lokiya) practices. For example, we see such notions of “ordinary Buddhists” and “Buddhist silent majority” lose meaning in Southeast Asia, where the line between monastic and lay is blurred due to the fluid movement of men, and now women, in and out of the monastery walls as they undergo temporary ordination sometimes several times a year for only days at a time.

Studying “Buddhism as Lived” This dissertation brings together a variety of primary sources and academic disciplines. Much of the research is based on interviews, conversations, and correspondences with the devotees --- altogether making up the most important foundation of primary sources. And in many ways, this source material shaped how this dissertation unfolded. I originally had different outlines in mind, but listening intently to informants over extended periods of time, collecting hundreds of weizzā related periodicals --- both published and private ---and reading over my fieldnotes upon returning to university, it quickly became clear that there was a story that wanted to come out (my informants said later that this was the story the weizzā had wanted me to tell). So in keeping with the aim of this work, I am letting the voices take the lead, all the while 19

recognizing that, as Orsi stresses, “the interpretative challenge of the study of lived religion is to develop the practice of disciplined attention to people’s signs and practices as they describe, understand, and use them, in the circumstances of their experiences, and to the structures and conditions within which these signs and practices emerge.” The model I propose employs a diverse set of ethnographic tools for engaging with my informants. My overall interview method was such that I did not attempt to hide my own intentions but rather reveal to my interlocutors what I was thinking, and in turn, did not edit their responses. As the reader will see when reading this dissertation, I take seriously my informants’ claims of the realities, relationships, and results of the saints they relished telling me about. I attempted to weave the apparatus of anthropology, history, religious and cultural studies, and at times, psychology in a non-intrusive manner while allowing the lives and voices of the devotees to remain in the foreground, thus resulting in a study that, while not acknowledging the reality of these weizzā, does not attempt to reduce my informants’ religious experiences as merely mental fabrications. When retelling devotees’ stories I have tried to preserve as much possible each individual's style and idiosyncrasies while translating the words into English, a language only a handful spoke. In some chapters I draw heavily on material transcribed from lengthy interviews, and in others I use short excerpts or quotes to illustrate particular points of argument. As a result, my narrative strategy is polyphonic; sometimes I rely heavily on the voices of my informants, building my analysis around their words, and at other times their voices recede into the background as sociological, historical, or theoretical issues come to the fore. Descriptive, first-



Orsi 2002 (1985), xx.


20

person ethnographic vignettes are woven throughout the text, especially in Chapters Two and Four. These vignettes are, in the words of ethnographer of religion, Karen Hayes, "word paintings," intended to provide what novelists refer to as local color, while also providing a “contrapuntal narrative of my own experiences in the field.” Central to this dissertation is an historical and informed anthropological study that actually attends to individual Burmese voices. I give sustained attention to the voices and writings of and about individual weizzā devotees, practitioners and the saints themselves. By situating my inquiry within the particularities of individual lives and listening to what they have to tell us, my aim has been to provide an empathetic picture of how healing beliefs and practices function in the daily lives of the devout. My work is the first on the weizzā phenomenon, and one of very few on Buddhism in South and Southeast Asia, that lets the voices of my informants take center stage.40 Other scholars of the weizzā phenomena have certainly included informants’ data in their works, but it was usually rephrased in the words of the scholar or sprinkled here and there throughout the works.41 In sources most scholars would have ignored, I hear life-giving

39

Hayes 2011, 35. In ethnographic research, four kinds of interviews are usually distinguished: 1) informal interviewing (characterized by total lack of structure or control; casual notes and memories from conversations), 2) unstructured interviewing, 3) semistructured interviewing (interview guide with written questions and topics), and 4) structured interviews (questionnaires). For more info, see Bernard 1995: 136-164 [Bernard, H. Russell. 1995. Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. London: Altamira Press; and Davies Reflexive Ethnography. 2003 [1999]: 67-93. I thank Niklas Foxeus for bringing this source to my attention. 40

Examples include Wilson (1997), Samuels (2010), and Cook (2011).


My

project differs from the few before it in that it is quite broad in its inclusion of devotees from various weizzā associations. While previous scholarship on the weizzā phenomena (Pranke’s article on the Mano-citta-uppada Association (1995), Tosa’s monograph on a handful of specific congregations in Yangon (2000), Rozenburg’s work on the Minbu Association (2010) and Shwe-yin-kyaw Association (2013), Foxeus’ dissertation on the Ariya-weizzā Association 21

voices. And it is these voices that I hope will deepen readers’ respect for the individuals who appear in this dissertation. Many readers may even recognize in them the voices of devout men and women from any number of religious traditions from around the world, and perhaps even from their own lives. I hope to show that what these devotees have to say is important: providing us with a window into the personal lives of Burmese Buddhists and what is important to them, their families and friends, their religious lives, and their relationships with otherworldly saints who have a very immediate presence in the lives of their devotees. My model for undertaking a study of lived religion in Myanmar takes seriously the Burmese devotees’ beliefs and practices on their own terms and for its own sake. And while I attempt to approximate the worldview of the people whose lives are enriched by the weizzā, I offer a synoptic narrative, which, as historian of religion, Jennifer Hughes defines, is “a comprehensive view of events pieced together from disparate and varied perspectives [where] multiple voices, including scholarly ones” are allowed to flesh out the lives and practices of weizzā devotees.42 Reiterating the primacy I give to my informants in this narrative, I try whenever possible to give the devotees the last world, for their relationship with the weizzā saints makes them, in my view, the ultimate authority on all matters pertaining to them. It is not

(2011)), my work is not specifically associated with any particular congregation but instead focuses on a range of individual devotees with a wide scope of association affiliation or who, due to the dearth of weizzā associations in contemporary Myanmar (for reasons that will be discussed in Chapter Three), do not affiliate themselves with any congregation and instead have entered into intimate, personal relationships with one or more sorcerer-saints and who may even engage in specific weizzā path practices outside of any institutional organization.
42 Hughes, Jennifer. 2010. Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, x. 22

because I believe them to possess some direct and unmediated access to divine forces but rather, “it is this very contingency that makes theirs the privileged voice.”43 I find my dissertation especially complementing that of Niklas Foxeus’ 2011 dissertation on the Ariya-weizzā Association. Foxeus writes in his introduction that: In the present dissertation, it is this official agenda of the organization that shall be delineated, interpreted, analyzed, and set in its contemporary context. This focus entails that I have mainly interviewed leaders and used textual sources written by the founder and local leaders… Consequently, the diversity of views and interpretations of certain tenets, practices, myths, and so forth among the ordinary members to a great extent remains to be investigated. My dissertation picks up where Foxeus leaves off, namely by asking, “Instead of looking at affiliation or organizational participation, what would I uncover if I focused first on individual devotees, the experiences and stories they consider most significant, and the practices and rituals that make up their personal religious experience and expression?” My examination, then, deals with people who develop strong bonds with these saints and who share a common set of practices, stories, and beliefs regardless of their organizational affiliation. Whereas Foxeus gave us an in-depth historical and ethnographic analysis of a single organization in upper Myanmar, especially focusing on the chief members and their writings, my project hopes to be more synchronic in its range about the weizzā phenomenon as it is found broadly in contemporary Myanmar, especially as it relates to healing and devotional practices, while at the same time being a diachronic examination of how such beliefs and practices developed over the past century. My dissertation is certainly concerned with some of the more prominent saints

43

Ibid., x.

44

Foxeus, Niklas. 2011. The Buddhist World Emperor’s Mission. Stockholm: Univ. of Stockholm Press, 39. 23

(several of whom, like Bo Min Gaung and Bo Bo Aung, will appear continually throughout these chapters), but it is centrally a study of the people whose lives are touched by the saints. These people may not belong to an organized weizzā association or engage in any practices directly related to the goals of an aspiring weizzā, but as the forthcoming chapters reveal, they still align themselves with the weizzā path, or at least acknowledge that the saints, practices, and beliefs of the sorcerer-saints play important roles in their lives. Keeping all of this in mind, it is my hope that by the time the reader has finished this dissertation, he/she will realize that the phenomena herein are nothing at all exotic and esoteric. There is the tendency by those unfamiliar with the weizzā phenomenon to characterize it as occult, otherworldly, esoteric, and even bizarre.45 But investigation shows us that people who belong to such associations are people who lead quite ordinary lives. They go to work in the morning, return home, and perhaps attend weizzā activities in the evening or on the weekend, or simply incorporate their practices into their daily devotions. I hope the reader will realize just how commonplace this form of lived religion in contemporary Myanmar is and that it is not that of a select few members of secret societies concerned with obtaining supernatural powers and waiting until the Buddha Metteyya appears. While this is certainly the case for some, the vast 45

It is true that those following the weizzā path or who belong to a weizzā association do enjoy putting on a front of a mysterious aura, and unless one is initiated into the path or association, it is often difficult to make sense of the teachings and writings associated with the weizzā. It is not difficult, however, to decode such teachings oneself whether by employing the help of an expert in such matters or by studying any number of handbooks or magazine articles that provide instructions for how to understand the teachings and writings. In that sense, then, it is esoteric, but esoteric in the way that, as Steven Collins puts it, the way James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake is esoteric; it is not easily understandable to an uninitiated reader, but one can nonetheless go to any bookshop and purchase the book, take a course on it, read any number of websites devoted to the novel, or seek out the help of an expert on Joyce’s writings (Collins, Personal Communication, 2010). In the same way, weizzā materials are easily accessible but are often confusing to one unfamiliar with the words and phrases that are often written in code. 24

majority of weizzā devotees incorporate practices and beliefs associated with the weizzā path into their everyday lives. One cannot understand Buddhist practice in contemporary Myanmar without knowledge of such widespread weizzā practice. Recalling my earlier discussion of popular, syncretic, and hybridized forms of religion at the beginning of this chapter, I would also ask the reader to resist the temptation to explain away these weizzā related practices as a degenerative syncretism comprised of Buddhist and nonBuddhist elements. Such outdated analytical frameworks, although attractive in their simplicity, are unhelpful. Nonetheless, such a bifurcated way of looking at Buddhism, especially with regards to studies of the weizzā phenomenon, has had a lasting durability among scholars of Burmese religion. This is due in part, perhaps, to the way scholars have and, in many cases, have not dealt with certain source material, as well as the ways certain data collected in ethnographic research has been interpreted. Firstly, scholarship has tended to ignore Burmese sources concerned with those Buddhist elements that clash with notions of a non-theistic, rationalistic Buddhism that many scholars still seem to associate with as “authentic” Theravāda Buddhism.47 As discussed above, I suspect that the lack of references to certain Burmese Buddhist beliefs and practices, like those examined in this dissertation, is connected with the way scholars of Buddhism in Southeast Asia continue to address a-historical and essentialist questions of what constitutes a “real” Buddhist and how one determines who is not. Such frameworks often consider such “magical” or “occult” practices as

46 47

Tambiah, 1984: 316.

Especially, as Peter Skilling (2009) points out, what is meant by the term, “Theravāda,” is far from clear. 25

non-Buddhist in nature, but gradually incorporated into Buddhism by people who use them as tools to deal with the vicissitudes of everyday life. Another reason why such practices are often ignored or, if addressed, are seen as later accretions to the Buddhist tradition may have to do with scholars’ unfamiliarity with the extensive and complex histories of the beliefs and practices of modern day weizzā path practitioners. There is a vast corpus of vernacular literature on the weizzā phenomenon that is comprised of published reference manuals, biographies and histories; unpublished textbooks and pamphlets circulated among practitioners; monthly journals that focus specifically on the weizzā phenomenon; and paper-folding books (B. parabaik) and palm-leaf manuscripts that provide detailed information of practices used by those on the weizzā path. I have made it a point to make such valuable textual material an integral part of my research for even anthropological studies of the religious developments of the weizzā phenomenon should integrate historically based comprehension of the complexities of how such phenomena developed. Moreover, as the following chapters reveal clearly, contemporary Burmese Buddhism and practice is strongly shaped by the literary vernacular print material and culture.

Historical Evidence of Weizzā Before commencing with our examination of the weizzā phenomenon in Myanmar, I would first like to explore possible historical antecedents of the weizzā figure based on the few textual and pictorial sources available to us. Probably the first appearance of the word, “weizzā,” to be referenced outside of Myanmar can be found in Reisen in Birma in den Jahren 1861-1862 by the German ethnologist, Adolf Bastian. When describing images he sees sculpted on a boat, Bastian writes that there was, “a stone seat meant for preaching monks to sit upon had, at its 26

corners, a naga (serpent), galon (dragon), a weizzā (sage or magician) and King Koyopamingyi.” After that instance, we find Judson, in his 1893 Burmese-English Dictionary, gloss the word, following the traditional Pāli meaning, of “knowledge or wisdom.” But he also includes the meaning of “one possessed of certain magical powers,” following from his understanding of the term, “weizzā-dho” (the Burmese pronunciation of vijjādhara). James George Scott (AKA Shway Yoe) makes reference in his 1910 book to weizzā as “good people” who can divided into distinct types in accordance with their specialties. He also notes that the word can simply refer to wisdom or knowledge, as well as the sorcery studied by those traversing the weizzā path. The term appears a short time later in George Orwell’s 1934 Burmese Days, although often as a charlatan or expert in legerdemain. ust what kind of figures these European writers were referring to as a “weizzā” is not clear, however. As there has traditionally not been a uniform or agreed upon set of attire for weizzā to wear, thus distinguish themselves from other members of society, there must have been something about the appearance of these weizzā that caused these writers to identify what they saw as weizzā. Looking at how weizzā have been portrayed in earlier eras may give us a clue as to what such European writers encountered.

“An den Ecken des überdeckten Steinsitzes (Teahosinoder Kanzel) fiir predigende Pungyi's, der von Löwen getragen wird, finden sich placirt, als Zuhörer, ein Naga (Schlange), ein Kalon (Drache), ein Witya (Weiser oder Zauberer) und König Koyopa-iningyi" (199? [1866] 75).
49 “A weiksa, or magician, was said to have appeared from nowhere and to be prophesying the doom of the English power and distributing magic bullet-proof jackets” (1974, 9); “The so-called weiksa, who is no other than a circus conjurer and the minion of U Po Kyin, have vanished for parts unknown, but six rebels have been Caught” (20); and “During all this time, unknown to anyone of importance, further sedition was afoot. The 'weiksa' (now far away, peddling the philosopher's stone to innocent villagers in Martaban) had perhaps done his job a little better than he intended” (20). 

27

What exactly was meant by the term, “weizzā,” what constituted such a being, and if a weizzā belonged within the Buddhist religious landscape was a concern of Burmese from as early as 1761. King Lekwaynawyata asked one of his religious advisors what weizzā are and whether they are Buddhist or not. The religious advisor responded by citing an instance in the commentary to the Dhammapada where a weizzā appears, thus supporting the claim that weizzā and their practices are indeed in line with the Buddha sāsana. The weizzā in this story, the advisor says, is an example of a “sulagandhari-mantat” weizzā who has the ability to fly.

The DhA text in question is 33 C. “Story of the Present: The Elder Jatila” and may even provide evidence for why weizzā, especially those associated with powers of healing, flight, and invisibility, are often connected with the Gandhara region and city of Takkasila. The story, as summarized by Burlingame and Lanman, is that a “Vijjadhara flies into the apartment of a treasurer's daughter and has intercourse with her. The treasurer's daughter gives birth to a son, and causes him to be placed in a vessel and set adrift in the Ganges. He is rescued by two women bathing in the Ganges and adopted by one of them, who is a retainer of the Elder Maha Kaccana. His foster-mother brings him up with the intention of having him become a monk under the Elder. When the child was bathed on the day of his birth, his hair remained matted, and therefore he is given the name Jatila. When Jatila is old enough to walk, his foster-mother commits him to the care of the Elder Maha Kaccana. The Elder takes him to Takkasila and commits him to the care of a lay supporter of his. Jatila sells in one day the goods which have been accumulating in the layman's house for twelve years. The layman is so pleased that he gives him his daughter in marriage and has a house built for him. As soon as Jatila sets foot on the threshold, there arises in the rear of the house a mountain of gold.” (Buddhaghosa, Eugene Watson Burlingame, and Charles Rockwell Lanman. 1921. Buddhist legends. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ. Press.) In his study of paritta in South and Southeast Asia, Jaini points out that the term, vijjādhara, only appears in commentarial and paracononical literature and is used when referencing a class of practitioners, similar to what he sees with the siddhas of the Tantric texts (77). Jaini, Padmanabh S. 1965 " 'Mahādibbamanta': A 'Paritta' Manuscript from Cambodia." Bulletin of SOAS, Vol. 28, no. 1: 61-80. Jaini notes that Jataka Atthakatha (J, III.303, 529) and Milindapanha (pp.153, 200, 267) are two such texts that contain the term, “vijjādhara.” 

51

A common belief among present day weizzā devotees is that the some of the weizzā saints, like Bo Min Gaung, for example, are Gandhari weizzā (this type of weizzā will be explained further on in the dissertation). But what is important to note here is that weizzā devotees believe that, in ancient times, there was a university in the city of Takkasila, which was located in the province of Gandhara (modern day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan) that educated its students in obtaining many of the supernatural powers, like that of flight and creating multiple images of oneself, that are associated with contemporary weizzā path practitioners. 28

Around this same period, we see the figure of superhuman vijjādhara in an 18th century Mon chronicle where a monk by the name of Gavampati was, in a previous life, born from the eggs that resulted from the sexual union of a weizzā (Mon: wijadhuiw; from Pāli: vijjādhara) and a serpent princess. In addition to the abovementioned texts, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of manuscripts that, although they may make no explicit mention of weizzā, are nonetheless associated with beliefs and practices of sorcerer-saints that, as Christian Lammerts, a specialist of the Burmese manuscript tradition, writes, “one would expect to constitute the primary field of research for anyone interested in understanding the history of these traditions” (2010: 22).53 One such manuscript is the Kappālanṅkāra, a palm-leaf manuscript about the sorcerer-saint phenomenon that was allegedly compiled by a monk during the first century CE, and which is extant in an 18th century Pāli-Burmese commentarial version. The text is meant to explain the

The commentary to the Patisambhidhāmagga (488f) contains information about such a weizzā, named, Abhibhū, who, in the Patisambhidhāmagga Commentary (488f ), his story is given as an example of vikubbana-iddhi whereby a person could make himself seen in many places at the same time. We are told that he developed nīlakasina, to attract to himself the attention of the world systems (Pāli Dictionary of Proper Names). 52

See Strong (1992: 180-181) and Stadtner (2008: 35) for more detailed accounts of this chronicle. We find mention of a vijjādhara, also, in the Uppātasanti, a Pāli work written by an unknown monk of Laos in the sixteenth century that deales with rites or charms for averting evil omens or public calamities (Bode, op. cit., 47, and n.5.,): “pātāle bhūtalākāse / devayakkhapisācakā / vijjādharā ca gandhabbā / nāgakumbhan,d,arakkhasā / sabbesamānubhāvena / sabbamańgalamatthu no” verse 261. 53

Lammerts, Dietrich Christian. 2010. Buddhism and written law dhammasattha manuscripts and texts in premodern Burma. PhD diss., Cornell University. 29

meaning and varieties of a number of magical diagrams and spells that are used for a wide range of aims, such as achieving immortality, gaining supernatural powers, or averting danger.54 Iconographic representation of weizzā are rare, but we do find instances in 18th and 19th century mural paintings. Wearing white robes and turbans, they resemble modern day “bodaw,” (bodaw, literally, “noble grandfather,” are religious mendicants who are almost always associated with the weizzā phenomenon in contemporary Myanmar) or wearing brown robes like that of the Burmese hermit (Sanskrit, rishi; B: ya-they). The list of beings at the bottom of a 19th century mural painting from Mau U, for example, portrays the weizzā as a white-clad figure nearly identical to that of a bodaw: “The Buddha entered nibbāna and his body was cremated. Monks, lay people, Sakka, devas, nagas, galons, weizzā and zawgyi came and paid homage.” The weizzā being referred to is the figure in the center of the image wearing a white robe and turban (see figure 1).55 In an 18th century mural at Laung U Hmaw (located in Sagaing Division) that depicts a final scene from the Bhuridatta Jataka, we see the central figure dressed in a brown hermit’s robe and wearing the characteristic hat (B. dauk-cha) of a hermit, who is referred to as “bodaw ya-they,” thus conflating the two figures mentioned above (see figure 2). 56

54

For more on the Kappālanṅkāra, see Lammerts, Christian. 2010. “Notes on Burmese Manuscripts: Text . Journal of Burma Studies. 14. pp. 229-253.

55

I thank Lilian Handlin for bringing this mural to my attention.

56

Green, Alexandra (2005) "Deep Change? Burmese Wall Paintings from the Eleventh to the Nineteenth Centuries" The Journal of Burma Studies 10: pp. 1–50, page 45. 30

Figure 1

31




Figure 2


Images of weizzā began to appear with increasing regularity as the use of parabaik (paper folding books) and other types of manuscripts became more widespread starting in the 19th century. Such manuscripts were, and continue to be, important sources for understanding the historical development of the weizzā phenomenon as well as what scholars observe in contemporary Myanmar among those Burmese Buddhists who associate themselves with the weizzā path. Firstly, we see that until fairly recently, perhaps as late as the early twentieth century, weizzā were portrayed as four semi-divine beings not unlike devas and nats (see figures 3 and 4) that were associated with each of the four types of weizzā techniques (masters of iron, medicine, sacred diagrams, and alchemy). At other times they were portrayed wearing 19thcentury military style uniforms and associated with other kinds of weizzā saints who possess an array of supernatural powers. There is even one weizzā who is portrayed as a “patron saint” of 32

sorts of a sacred diagram associated with the Buddha’s teachings on the bodhipakkhiya (see figure 5).


Figure 3: The four figures in the lower half of the parabaik represent four kinds of weizzā: Mercury Weizzā, Iron Weizzā, Medicine Weizzā, and Yantra Weizzā. UCL11180.vijjādharas


33

Figure 4: Another 19th century representation of the four weizzā that are depicted in figure 3.




Figure 5: Bodhipakkhiyā In Weizzā From MssBSB-Hss Cod.birm. 286 One of a dozen different kinds of weizzā depicted in this 1883 parabaik.

34

Sometime in the early to mid-twentieth century, such representations were replaced as changing understandings of what constituted a weizzā evolved. A weizzā came to include any human being, whether monastic, hermit, bodaw, or layperson, who, through various techniques learned while traversing the weizzā path, has transformed himself from a human to that of an enlightened and divine being, replete with all the powers of a celestial deity (see figure 6). He is a being who has “exited” from this world to remain in his weizzā abode helping those in need and guarding the Buddha sāsana. He is referred to as a “twet-yat-pauk” being and, according to how one interprets this phrase, the compound htwet yat pauk can be understood and explained in two main ways. For some, htwet yat pauk means “to reach (pauk) the place (yat) of exit (htwet)”, in reference to the “exit” both from the cycle of rebirths and toward nirvāna. A second gloss is “to exit (htwet)” from the cycle of rebirths – “to stop” (yat) rounds of rebirths – “to break out” (pauk) from current earthly state. Rozenberg notes that “the label of ‘htwet yat pauk individual’ (htwet yat pauk poggo) remains less generic than that of weizzā because it usually describes individuals who, after achieving the state of weizzā,” have transformed themselves into an ethereal state.57 Such transformation is done in one of two ways: Leaving dead (B. athey-htwet) or leaving alive (B. ashin-htwet). Those who attain weizzā-hood by the first method undergo a dying state similar to what an ordinary human being would experience, except that his spirit, or “nān” (P. nāma) leaves the body to be free to dwell where it wishes. Those who become weizzā

57

Champions of Buddhism: Weikza Cults in Contemporary Burma, Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Guillaume Rozenberg and Alicia Turner eds. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press) forthcoming 2014. 35

by the latter method leave this world with their physical bodies intact disappearing from this realm to dwell in a Shangri-La-like abode hidden somewhere in the Himalayas.58

Figure 6: On this cover of a weizzā handbook from 1963, we see, from left to right, a bodaw, hermit, monk, and zawgyi (powerful sorcerer).

According to manuals and individual devotees of some modern day weizzā associations, specifically those belonging to the Mano-citta-pad Gaing and Shwe-yin-Kyaw Gaing, a weizzā is 58

Although both methods are equally viable for achieving the state of weizzā, their does seem to be more auspiciousness placed upon exiting the world with body in tow than leaving the body behind, evidenced by the long and involved discussions that would take place amongst devotees of Bo Min Gaung, arguably the most revered weizzā saint in Myanmar today, about whether or not he had truly exited dead. 36

a being who attempts to prolong his/her life thousands of years so as to be present at the end time of the current sāsana era when Gotama Buddha’s relics come together, form a “phantom” buddha, and disappear completely from this realm (as is the belief among members of the Manocitta-pad Gaing), or prolong his/her life millions of years in order to gain enlightenment in the presence of the next buddha, Matteyya (as is the belief amongst Shwe-yin-kyaw Gaing members).  I do not believe that such an understanding of a weizzā is accurate for the pre-colonial era. Based on my examination of hundreds of Burmese manuscripts from the 17th-19th centuries, weizzā were understood to be experts in particular varieties of mundane or worldly sciences, such as alchemy, medicine, or sacred diagrams, that often resulted in obtaining power (P. iddhi) for flight, healing, invisibility, material gain, etc.  I have come across no instances in such vijjādhara related texts that make mention of near-immortality for the sake of enlightenment or a desire for Buddhahood. The practices of alchemy, medicine, and sacred diagrams were also commonly represented as associated with bedan (astrology) and nakkhatta (astronomy) and the boundaries between vijjādhara and bedan and nakkhatta often overlapped as they do today. I would venture to guess that this is why, insofar as they were regarded as practitioners of these worldly arts, that weizzā were akin to hermits (San. rishi; B. ya-they), who were seen as the mythic authors of the bedan tradition, though certainly there are different genealogies behind these figures that need to 59

See Pranke (1995), Rozenberg (2010), and Foxeus (2011) for more on this “phantom Buddha.”

60

See Schober (1988), Foxeus (2011), and Rozenberg (2013) for more on this belief.

61

Bechert, Heinz, Khaṅ Khaṅ Cu, and Tin Tin Myint. 1979. Burmese manuscripts V.1-6 Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag. 37

be unraveled.62 I would not want to suggest that all varieties of these practices had a necessary connection with discourses concerning vijjādhara, but rather that there is a relation that has yet to be adequately explored. The idea that the weizzā traditions developed earlier than the 17th century practices is problematic for it fails to take into account regional Buddhist and Burmese history. While I have shown above that the figure of the weizzā is found in Pāli literature, we should also be aware of the resonance of weizzā traditions with South Asian vidyādhara and siddha traditions, mantra/yantra practices, and even Taoist alchemical traditions.63 The character and cult of the semi-divine vidyādhara of South Asia can be traced back to at least the beginning of the Common Era and continued to be popular in Indian literature throughout the medieval period. With regards to alchemy, as there were no mercurial cores indigenous to India (and Tibet), mercury therefore had to be brought in from elsewhere from the subcontinent. David White, in his work on alchemical traditions of South Asia, says that Tibetans got their mercury from Chinese traders who most likely would have gone overland via the supposed ancient overland trade route which linked Szechuan with India, via Yunnan, Burma, and Assam and goes on to suggest that a highly alchemical tradition intermingling elements from across South and East 62

The lawgiver Manu is always characterized as a ya-they. (Christian Lammerts, personal communication.) 63

The vidyādhara was a standard fixture of Indian fantasy and adventure literature throughout this period. For more on vidyādhara, see Snellgrove’s Indo-Tibetan Buddhism (135) and J. Przyluski, “Les Vidyaraja,” in BEFEO 1923, pp. 301-18. See also, Von Hinuber. 1994. “The Vidyadhara’s Sword.” Selected Papers on Pāli Studies. Oxford: The Pāli Text Society, pp. 101106. Taoist alchemy may have reached India via maritime routes beginning in at least the sixth century Common Era (White, 2003: 53). For more on possible weizzā connections to Taoism, see Patrick Pranke’s “On Saints and Wizards: Ideal of Human Perfection and Power in Contemporary Burmese Buddhism.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 33.2: 453-488. 38

Asia arose in Myanmar in about the 5th century.64 Chapter Outlines The chapters that follow, then, provide an analysis of a religious phenomenon that I have observed in contemporary Myanmar, as well as a model for how such an analysis might be done. I therefore remind the reader that the choices I have had to make as an ethnographer means that certain aspects of the weizzā phenomenon are to remain in the background. In choosing to focus on Burmese devotees relationships with mainly two specific weizzā saints, Bo Min Gaung and Bo Bo Aung, arguably the two most revered weizzā in Myanmar, for example, I have bracketed devotees’ engagement with other sorcerer-saints who also play major supporting roles in their lives.65 My analysis, then, is provisional and limited, especially given the complexities of motivation, power relations, desires, and other factors that are at work in any aspect of a social sphere. Nevertheless, I am confident that the cases I present provide insight into the power of the individual weizzā devotees and their communities to create and recreate their own religious expressions as they unfold in the context of their relationships with the saints.66
In Chapter Two, an evocative chapter on visions, possessions, and healing, I examine the Burmese cultural atmosphere in which magazines, devotional literature, and other forms of popular media all recognize, endorse, and publicize the ways certain Buddhist saints interact with their female devotees to heal specific illnesses. I argue that these female devotees, when 64

White (2003: 65). See Needham’s Science and Civilisation, v.2 p.174 and v.5, pt. 3, p.166 for more on this. What is all the more tantalizing to support this thesis is that the 11th century CE Kalacakra tantra also contains detailed alchemical data. This text just happens to be one of the few Sanskrit texts donated to a monastic library in Pagan in the year 1442 CE. 65

Some of these weizzā saints will be introduced in the following chapters.

66

Primiano 2012: 383. 39

possessed by a saint and carrying out his bidding, for example, can be seen as a creative yet culturally sanctioned response to restrictive gender roles, a means for expressing otherwise illicit thoughts or feelings, and an economic strategy for women who have few options beyond traditional wifely or daughter roles.67 They are able to renegotiate the often silent and passive roles assigned to them by the religious and medical culture by setting the experience of sickness into a new narrative framework where the sorcerer-saints are the source of all healing. Women expressed their own needs and desires and, through their relationship with the saints, found the strength to insist on them. On another level, illness was recast as a sacred drama in which the healing power was understood to come ultimately from the weizzā saints, whether they were entreated or not. Though never directly challenging the social structures that oppressed them, I will show that through the power of their wishes and within the flexible parameters of devotional practice these women were able to enact significant and positive changes in their lives and those around them. In Chapter Three I examine conceptions of the Buddhist category of sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how, although considered an essential continuity in an ever-changing world, is given varied inflections. Sāsana, and how it should be sustained in the face of inevitable decline, has meant different things to different people, and even different things to the same person or group, depending on context. This chapter explores how understandings of sāsana protection and propagation have evolved in Myanmar starting from the years immediately following Independence of 1948. The chapter looks at how devotees believe the weizzā to be working in the world and through the lives of 67

Hayes 2011: 9. See Kitiarsa, “Magic Monks and Spirit Mediums” and Fjelstad and Maiffret “Gift from the Spirits” in Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Societies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell SEAP Publications 2006) for specifically Buddhist discussions on female spirit mediumship as means for navigating and transforming life situations for the better. 40

devotees to help guard and propagate the sāsana while address such questions as, “Why do they think the sāsana needs this extra protection?” and “Are there context-specific threats to the sāsana that require their intervention?” Chapter Four may at first appear to be a biography of the most popular weizzā saint in Myanmar today, Bo Min Gaung, because it deals, on the ethnographic side, heavily with the life of the saint and the lives of his devotees. As an ethnography, looking at the social dynamics within a larger-scale social group, the chapter employs both saints’ and devotees’ lives to get at a study of lived religion in contemporary Myanmar through the lens of the Bo Min Gaung who is referred to by many as the “King of the Weizzā.” Drawing from the biography of Bo Min Gaung and the experiences of his devotees, the chapter engages the larger questions of how beliefs and practices are strategically employed by individuals, under what conditions, and with what consequences. The devotees’ experiences reveal much about the interface between ordinary individuals and a larger network of forces --- social norms and expectations, religious constructs, economic and political pressures, and historical conditions particular to a specific time and place --- and how these forces are expressed through the bonds formed between Bo Min Gaung and his devout. The final chapter takes up issues of weizzā marginality in contemporary Myanmar. We look specifically at reasons for expressed hostility and mistrust towards the weizzā phenomenon from segments of Myanmar’s governmental and ecclesiastical authorities, as well as from large segments of the lay Buddhist population. I will take this opportunity to offer some methods for how an ethnographer, such as myself, can navigate these (and personal) dilemmas using a lived religions perspective.

41

Chapter Two Encountering the Sorcerer Saint: Nocturnal Healings and Spirit Mediums

In 1994, editors from the popular religious magazine, Nekkattha Yaung-kyi, dispatched to upper Myanmar one of their top investigative reporters, Aung Khain Lin, to look into the claims that a twenty-four year old woman named Ma Myin had the ability to heal people through power she received from a weizzā. This kind of assignment was nothing new for Aung Khain. He had been investigating such events for many years now and had learned to take such claims with a grain of salt. “The number of strange and wonderful events like this has been on the rise all over Myanmar within the past fifty years,” he reports, and “with this, comes an increase in the number of charlatans and fake stories.”68 Taking an overnight bus from Yangon, Aung Khain arrived at the outskirts of the village at dawn and wearily disembarking from the bus, hired a tri-shaw driver to take him to the young woman’s home. Pedaling along the dusty backroads to the village center, the driver told Aung Khain that “there’s been a rise in the number of these “female ‘faith healers’ (B. pyauk-se sayama-dwe) in this area lately, and that makes us happy.” When asked why, the driver smiled and replied, “More business for us tri-shaw drivers!”69 Aung Khain arrived at the home of the young woman, Ma Myin, at six o’clock in the morning and was surprised to see a large gathering of people already sitting in front of Ma

68

NYK no.100 (1994): 37.




69

Ibid., 38. 42

Myin’s home apparently waiting to be healed.70 “It’s not easy getting the opportunity to see the young female master (B. sayama-lay),” remarked a passerby who saw the out-of-towner, Aung Khain, staring at the group of people, “Only when your name is called, can you enter her house. I don’t know where they get the names, but all’s I know is that not everyone who comes is allowed to see the female master, Ma Myin.”71 Asking around where he might give his name to request an audience with Ma Myin, he was directed to a middle-aged man who turned out to be Ma Myin’s uncle. Upon introducing himself as a journalist from NYK magazine and, that he had come to do a story on Ma Myin, Aung was told by the uncle that it was not up to him to decide if he could see the healer for “only if she allows it, will you be able to meet with her. Go inside and speak with her parents first.”72 Aung entered the house to see a group of monks and nuns all sitting in front of a Buddha altar using their prayer beads to chant paritta (protective verses). After exchanging introductions, Ma Myin’s father and mother began to relate to Aung Khain particular events in their daughter’s life that illustrated her keen interest in religious activities from a very young age. Admitting to Aung Khain that they were not an overtly religious family, their daughter, Ma Myin, however, could always be found holding prayer beads and doing random acts of kindness. But it was not until Ma Myin was a teenager that she was chosen by the weizzā to help those in need through the power of healing. Ma Myin’s father recounts the following incident that marked this turning point in his daughter’s life: 70

The term used for these people is “vedanā-shin,” which literally means “possessor of pain and suffering.”

71

NYK no.100, 1994, p.38. In this context, the word used to describe her is “sayama-lay,” literally “little teacher,” a term often used with thilashin (Burmese Buddhist nuns) and with young women worthy of respect. 72

Ibid, p.38. 43

When she was young, my daughter and I headed into the forest to collect wood and water for the day. When we took a break, a very old, yet distinguished, man approached us and asked for some water to drink. But upon seeing that this old man had snotty, mucousy discharge coming from his eyes and nose, I did not want to offer him our water. The old man said that he had come to drink the water from my daughter because they have a karmic connection from a previous life. My daughter took a cup of water and offered it to the old man, and asked, “Where did you come from? Have you eaten yet?” When the old man said that he hadn’t and that he was vegetarian, she replied that she too was vegetarian and immediately offered him her food. As the old man ate the food, the discharge oozing from his face disappeared! The old man said that because of the little girl’s goodwill (P. cetana), he would watch over and protect her during her entire life. Before leaving, he told Ma Myin to open the palm of her hand. When she did, the old man slapped a sama into the palm of her hand,73 and before walking away he said, “From this day onwards, you must help and protect others and do sāsana works.”74 The father went on to relate how when they returned home, Ma Myin fainted, and that when she regained consciousness, she suddenly had the ability to foresee events before they occurred. It was not until twenty years of age when she realized she had the ability to heal people. As word spread throughout the village about her healing powers, more and more people from all over the area began coming seeking her help. Suddenly, as if anticipating Aung Khain’s next question, her father made it clear that “all of this is done out of her own goodwill, mind you. No money is charged.”75 While conversing with the parents, Ma Myin appeared in the doorway. When her father asked if she wished to speak with the reporter, without saying a word, Ma Myin turned around and left the room. “It is time to begin the healing,” whispered her mother to Aung Khain.

73

A sama (sm) is a drawing made up of Burmese characters compiled in such a way as to produce images of Buddhas, holy figures, and animals. See Patton (2012) for a more detailed discussion of the role of sama use among weizzā devotees. 74

NYK no.100, 1994, p.39-40.

75

Ibid. p.39. 44

Before long, Ma Myin re-entered the room dressed in a red shirt and skirt and immediately sat down in front of a Buddha altar to, according to her parents, develop concentration using her prayer beads. After a few moments, she donned a white shirt and placed a checkered longyi around her waist.76 Noticing that the checkered pattern of the longyi was similar in style to that worn by the popular weizzā, Bo Min Gaung, it was at this point that Aung realized which weizzā was possessing Ma Myin. His hunch was confirmed when he witnessed two men each light a “Duya” brand cigarette, very popular in Myanmar and supposedly Bo Min Gaung’s favorite brand to smoke. Handing the cigarettes to Ma Myin, she took a puff from each, and after eating an astonishing amount of rice, her entire countenance suddenly changed from that of a gentle young woman to that of a gruff, older man. Her voice became deeper and louder. At this point, she was no longer Ma Myin. She was now Bo Min Gaung.77 At this point Aung Khain also no longer addressed Ma Myin by her name, but instead by “Abho,” a word that means “grandfather” but which is used when addressing male individuals who have attained some degree of success on the weizzā path. The following is the transcribed exchange that took place between Aung Khain and Ma Myin while the latter was possessed by Bo Min Gaung.

“Look at my granddaughter’s arms and face,” Bo Min Gaung began. “You will see knife wounds on her arms and face. See? These are from her previous life when she was murdered. She has been Mon, Shan, Pa-o, and Karen in her past lives. Now she is Burmese.” 76 77

A longyi is a skirt worn by men in Myanmar.

This change is further evidenced by the pronouns used. As Ma Myin, she addressed herself as “kyama,” which is the female pronoun for “I.” When possessed by Bo Min Gaung, she used the words “nga” (“I,” but as a senior would use to a junior) when referring to himself and “nga mye” (“my granddaughter”) when referring to Ma Myin in the third person. 45

“When I first came to her, my granddaughter, I showed her how to use prayer beads by teaching her to chant ‘arahaṁ.’78 Gradually, over time, I taught her other chants. Now I have her chant ‘Oṁ buddhaṁ saranaṁ gacchāmi’ (Om, I go to the Buddha for refuge). It is this chanting that I have taught her that gives her the power to heal.” “Since my granddaughter cannot reject my working through her, I will always protect her. Don’t think that my granddaughter is ridiculous. Don’t think that what occurs here in this house is untrue. I only ask that you donate money to her and her family so that they can engage in sāsana propagation activities.” “The money raised is used for sāsana propagation, but as Bo Min Gaung says, ‘I don’t like accepting money from those I help, even if it is donations.’” “Wait a minute, won’t you. I need to eat some medicine. Hey! Give me some medicine, man!” The male attendants near Ma Myin placed some medicine in a large tobacco leaf which, to Aung Khain’s amazement, she put the entirety into her mouth. “Wow! If I were to put that in my mouth, I’d become dizzy!” Aung Khain remarked. “But as I am Bo Min Gaung, I am able to do such things that regular people cannot. Is this not correct?” Bo Min Gaung asked. “Not everyone agrees with what goes on here, but for those who do, they donate as they like. But I don’t cure for money. I cure for metta (“lovingkindness”). You all work for money, but can you use it in the next life? Make sure you write this all down, ok?” Bo Min Gaung shouted at Aung Khain. “I’ve never allowed anyone to write about me before.”

78

Araham refers to one of the qualities of the Buddha of “being worthy of homage.” Using the prayer beads, one would chant “arahaṁ,” aloud or to one’s self, for each bead on the rosary. 46

“Let me show you how Bo Min Gaung sits. He sits like this.” Ma Myin crossed her legs to illustrate how Bo Min Gaung is often portrayed seated in iconographic representations and continued to puff on the cigarettes. “Many weizzā are here in the world helping the country. They are doing healings and dhāt-si’ing.”79 At this point, Ma Myin’s uncle popped his head into the room to tell them that they had more patients than usual today. Bo Min Gaung told Aung Khain that “my granddaughter (Ma Myin) is exhausted. She worked the whole day yesterday without a break. But she happily healed everyone. You know, my granddaughter has been saying her prayer beads since she was three years old. Her entire family now does it as well. Tears come to her eyes when she does it.” “In the past my granddaughter’s family was very unlucky and poor. It was also very noisy at her home. But she would continue her prayer beads, and eventually was able to gain deep concentration despite the racket. When I speak about my granddaughter, I feel bitterness in my heart. She did not have an easy life as a child. She had a bad life. But she had patience. The sāsana shines bright here in Myanmar, and I have come to keep it strong. But it is not easy.” “Please continue to write while I heal people. Write thoroughly and omit nothing so that your readers can learn. By the way, I wish to say something to those bad people in our country [who doubt me]. I heal, and I dhāt-yaik/dhāt-hsin.80 And as opposed to what others may think, I don’t do it as a means to make money. Sure, I may get 10,000 kyat one day but absolutely nothing the following day. Some people don’t want to see or hear the truth. They close their eyes and ears.”

79 80

The term, “dhāt-si,” will be discussed below. These terms will also be discussed below. 47

“Hey! Are you writing this all down accurately? If it is exaggerated or wrong, I’ll be upset. ” “Don’t worry, sir. I am being true to your words,” assured Aung Khain. “I will only remain with Ma Myin for a short time before moving on to another woman who was born on a Monday. The previous woman whom I possessed was a Wednesday born.” “My granddaughter never forgets to offer small donations to her parents and grandparents. And with this money, her family is able to do sāsana works because they don’t have much income. “My granddaughter only takes money that is offered to her out of faith from others. With that she can continue to do sāsana works.” “People are always judging weather I am really Bo Min Gaung. They look to see if I do the things that he used to do. But I don’t do those things. I only practice mettā.” “Nan-kyin/dhāt-si --- many people claim to be able to do it, but they are really just speaking their own words [and not those of the weizzā].”

48

Figure 1. Ma Myin dhāt-si’ing Bo Min Gaung. The caption points out that she is holding prayer beads in one hand and cigarettes in the other.

I began this chapter with the story of Ma Myin because it highlights central themes that are found in the relationships that are formed between weizzā saints and their devotees; themes that will prominently throughout this dissertation. In this brief anecdote alone, we saw how issues of health, religious propagation, and gender roles, to name just a few, are found in the ways people see the weizzā working in their lives and how they, in turn, work in the lives of others around them through the power granted to them by the weizzā. This chapter specifically 49

examines the linkage between people's religious practices and their practices for health and wellbeing, and explores how, perhaps more than any other factor, healing becomes the central element for devotees’ bonds with weizzā saints. Although weizzā visit this world for other reasons (as we will see in the next chapter), we will look here at the ways weizzā are thought to interact with humans to use their incredible power of healing to cure people and allow their devotees to live their lives in more meaningful and dignified ways. Moreover, paying attention to devotees' religious practices, I will show how healing and maintaining health are often prominent parts of their religion-as-practiced and examine instances of individuals' lived religion as it intersects with their healing experiences. That connection between religious practices and healing practices then serves as a springboard for interpreting the following important features of healing aspects of individuals' religion-as-lived: Psychological conflict and mental distress appear to be expressed in a specific ‘system repertoire.’ This ‘repertoire’ is not atemporally and stably ‘cultural’ but rather produced through oral and textual fascinations with weizzā practice that have achieved a high level of diffusion in contemporary Myanmar partly through print media. Moreover, a general lack of access to allopathic medicine and/or lack of confidence in allopathic medicine enhances the attractiveness of weizzā healing. Before we begin, we should address the issue of how exactly these weizzā are believed to interact with their devotees, especially, as we saw in chapter one, the weizzā have left the human realm. How, then, do people believe these weizzā to be acting in their lives in these therapeutic ways?

50

Exiting Alive; Exiting Dead Devotees usually come across weizzā saints for the first time in one of several ways: A) Seeing a statue, picture, or prayer card of a particular saint at a pagoda or in a home shrine, B) Reading about them in a magazine or book; C) Hearing about them from someone else, a family member, friend, or even a stranger with whom they had a brief encounter with; or D) Having a visual, aural, or mental experience of a weizzā either directly or through a medium.81 The defining characteristic of these first encounters need not be one of extreme need or despair, and one that may not have a profound impact on the person at that particular moment. In fact, many times a person would not even recognize the saint who visited them until much later --- either realizing the identity of the weizzā themselves or having it revealed to them by someone else, usually a fortune teller.82 It was only later, when a person faced a particular hardship in life, did their previous encounter with the weizzā saint present itself in all its profundity. During such intensely charged periods of suffering where a weizzā would appear to offer help, a person could always trace back to their first ever encounter with that particular saint. Regardless of the circumstances, the first realization of a saint intervening in the life of the devotee was an emotional moment, “marked in memory and experience both by its intensity of its need and the suddenness of the saints’ interventions,” and every person I spoke with or read about could remember the details of these occasions clearly and specifically however long ago they may have been.83 “For years I would have a reoccurring dream of an old man telling me he would watch

81

As we will see in a later chapter, such brief encounters are often unexpected meetings with wandering hermits while on pilgrimages to Buddhist holy sites throughout the country. 82

NYK #125, 1996 pp.65-69.




83

Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude p.105. 51

over and protect me,” one nun related to me. “He was distinguished, and I could tell he was powerful. But I had no idea who he was. When I was going through an especially sad period in my life, though, this older man appeared to me again in a dream, and it was then that I suddenly realized that he was a weizzā.”84 For such individuals who had unexpected encounters with weizzā saints, while there may have been some initial uncertainty about which particular saint it was who came to visit, there was never any doubt about the kind of being it was. The saints “were newly encountered but familiar”85 and one knew immediately that it was a special being who had come bearing an important message. The devout themselves explicitly made the connection between a particular event in their life and the timing of the weizzā’s appearance And as seen with the nun’s experience above, there was almost always the feeling that the weizzā acted as something akin to invisible guide helping the devotee through life. How a weizzā is believed to manifest himself (for the weizzā is always a male) to his human devout assumes several possible forms.86 A devotee usually perceives the presence of a weizzā in dreams or through ritualized trance states. In addition to these means, devotees may also communicate with the saints through auditory or visual signs, bodily sensations, meditative states, telepathy, divination, prayer, and various forms of inspiration. Once cultivated, the relationship between a devotee and weizzā saint can last a lifetime. Before examining each of these methods in further detail, we must first explore what it is about the nature of a weizzā that enables him to work in these various ways. 84

Interview, DM-F-55.

85

Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude p.106.

86

Females do have the potential to become weizzā, however. 52

A weizzā, through various techniques learned while traversing the weizzā path, has transformed himself from a human to that of an enlightened and divine being, replete with all the powers of a celestial deity. He is a being who has “exited” from this world to remain in his weizzā abode helping those in need and guarding the Buddha sāsana. As discussed in the previous chapter, he is referred to as a “twet-yat-pauk” being and according to how one interprets this phrase, the compound htwet yat pauk can be understood and explained in two main ways. For some, htwet yat pauk means “to reach (pauk) the place (yat) of exit (htwet)”, in reference to the “exit” both from the cycle of rebirths and toward nirvāna. A second gloss is “to exit (htwet)” from the cycle of rebirths – “to stop” (yat) rounds of rebirths – “to break out” (pauk) from current earthly state. Such transformation is done in one of two ways: Leaving dead (B. atheyhtwet) or leaving alive (B. ashin-htwet). Those who attain weizzā-hood by the first method undergo a dying state similar to what an ordinary human being would experience, except that his spirit, or “nān” (P. nāma) leaves the body to be free to dwell where it wishes. Those who become weizzā by the latter way leave this world with their physical bodies intact disappearing from this realm to dwell in a non-human abode. It is this “nān,” for instance, that acts through the minds and bodies of people like Ma Myin who, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, was possessed by the nān of Bo Min. Throughout this chapter we will see how the nān of certain weizzā manifest themselves through possession and dreams for purposes of healing.

“What’s the Frequency, Master of Virtue?” In the case of Ma Myin we saw an instance of a weizzā seeking out an individual to act through. For the majority of devotees, while perhaps feeling brief periods of weizzā intervention in their lives, have never (nor will ever) experience something in such a physically and mentally 53

powerful way. Regardless, people who are visited by weizzā are understood to be receptacles for the weizzā’s power to work through them. This is often attributed to the person’s pāramī (acquired virtue) that, often unbeknownst to them, has made them a worthy vessel for the weizzā’s nān to settle. Referred to as pāramī-shin, or “master of virtue,” such an individual is granted direct access to the powers and teachings of the weizzā. Although common, it is not expected that devotees must have vivid aural or visual experiences of these saints to experience the weizzā power working in their lives. In fact, many of the saints’ most ardent devotees have never encountered weizzā through the more direct methods of possession or dreams. These devout, nonetheless, believe the saints to communicate directly with them, either through direct mental communication or from feelings one receives at various times throughout one’s life. “The weizzā work on a different frequency than what us humans work on,” Zaw Min, a computer engineer, explained to me. “Think of a radio. We are like a radio whose function is to tune in to the same frequency that the weizzā work on.” Continuing with this radio analogy, I asked how one can turn one’s “dial” to tune into the weizzā’s transmission waves. “It’s not that there is a standard frequency,” he answered, “which makes it all the more difficult to tune in. But through various practices, one can develop the mind in such a way as to make it receptive to the radio waves being emitted by the weizzā.”87 Such “tuning in” to the weizzā wavelength was a constant refrain amongst my informants when discussions arose about how best to make contact with the weizzā. Again, this tuning in can be 87

Interview, ZMO-31-M. Collins (2011, unpublished manuscript) sees the metaphor of radio waves and antennae as evidence that, regardless of its historical antecedents, the weizzā phenomenon is “now a fact of modernity.” Spiro (1982: 177) makes note of a “tall brick tower” that was used as a station to receive messages transmitted by the weizzā. In the next chapter, I will address similar structures found throughout Myanmar that were erected by weizzā devotees. See Rozenberg (2010b) for the usage of such terminology amongst his alchemist interlocutors and Brac de la Pierre (2012) for instances of such analogies as described by spirit mediums. 54

active or passive. For some whose pāramī is particularly advanced, they are, by their very nature of purity, already in tune with the weizzā and merely need to acknowledge it and embrace the workings of the weizzā within themselves. For the majority of devotees, like the head nurse of a hospital in Yangon, communicating with the weizzā is accomplished “by putting up one’s antenna. Anyone can have access to their saint, so long as they practice lots of meditation to help develop the faculties necessary to be in touch with him.”88 This concept of radio waves and electricity will be examined in further detail in Chapter Three when we look at how many devotees erect pagodas of specific architectural designs that are believed to act like antennas, converting the power and teachings of the weizzā “electric currents” into radio waves that are disseminated across the world. It is not just the weizzā’s spirit that can make contact with the human world. A weizzā can appear in his physical form as well. Whether or not a weizzā has left this world alive (ashinhtwet) or via death (athey-htwet), all weizzā possess the power to manifest themselves materially. Although a weizzā may currently exist as a spiritual being, he can, it was explained to me, touch and grasp things, as well as manifest his bodily features to people.89 The large number of corporeal encounters with weizzā saints over the past fifty years has warranted the development of a peculiar practice of setting up beds for weizzā to rest upon should they decide to pay a visit to the human realm. In many dhāt-kan, or spirit shrine rooms, around the country, devotees install beds in private rooms reserved specifically for the use of their patron weizzā saints.90 88

Interview, DTP-65-F. When meditation is mentioned, it is almost always in reference to samatha meditation. Reasons for this will be discussed in Chapter Five. 89 90

Pers. Corr. KYH-75-M.

Spiro (1982: 178) makes brief mention of a weizzā devotee who claimed to have slept together in the same bed as Bo Min Gaung after the saint had materialized in physical form. 55

Elaborately and haphazardly decorated with a wide assortment of religious paraphernalia,91 these rooms are often found in homes and monasteries that affiliate themselves with a particular weizzā saint or lineage. As shown in figures two and three from a monastery outside of Yangon, beds are made-up with the expectation that they would be slept in should the weizzā, whose picture is hung just above the headboard, decides to visit. These “guests” often stay just one or two nights before moving on to their next destination.92 But they are thought to leave signs of their nocturnal presence for the devotees that are collected as evidence for the devotee’s close connection with their saint. Ruffled comforters, creases in the sheets, food and drink missing from the previous night’s offerings, displaced objects, and an assortment of pleasant smells are just some of the signs accepted by followers as indications that they had been visited by a weizzā.93

91

Statues, lithographs and photographs of famous weizzā, prayers beads, gongs, assortments of yantra designs, and so on, clutter these shrine rooms.

92

It should be pointed out that this is not only done in weizzā temples. One also finds similar rooms or beds maintained in temples that have no association whatsoever with the weizzā but whose sayadaw passed away and is something of a shrine to remember the deceased monk. That of the late Mahagandayon Sayadaw of Amarapura is an example of this. People can come and visit the bedroom to see how it looked just before the abbot passed away. What is different with the weizzā temples, however, is that the residents believe that their weizzā visits from time to time.

93

A Burmese teacher of weizzā practices based in California told me that “yes, there is the tradition of keeping beds for the weizzā. At my Center here I do keep chairs for them but not beds. I don't want to freak out my American students.” Pers. Corr. DTT-70?-F 56

Figure 2: Bed reserved for Yar-kyaw Sayadaw. The money placed on the bed is not for the weizzā to use during their visits to the local tea shop. Rather, it is placed there by devotees as offerings of respect.

Figure 3: Bo Min Gaung’s Resting Place. The table to the right of the bed is for devotees to make offerings of incense, cigarettes, water, and so on. 57

Figure 4: A nun reverently observing the row of beds made up for weizzā saints while a monk in the background prepares the morning offerings. An elderly couple from Yangon who attributed their considerable wealth to the longstanding relationship they enjoyed with the weizzā saint, Bo Min Gaung, invited me to stay in their home for one night. Convinced that I would obtain data crucial to the successful completion of my dissertation, Daw Pan Nu and U Saw Win had me sleep in the dhāt-kan that they had made on the top floor of their suburban home. Reserved for “VIP guests,” as they put it, they installed one such bed to be used by Bo Min Gaung or any other weizzā that happened to be passing through. As I entered the room for the first time, I was struck by the stale, eerie quality of the room. Dimly lit by a naked light bulb, it was lifeless and cold. And while it took several minutes as my eyes became adjusted to the dark room to take notice of all that was there, “I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed.”94 The room was overflowing with once splendidly gold and silver religious objects that had since lost their shine from disuse. 94

Dickens, Great Expectations 44. It was not unlike what Pip must have experienced when first entering Miss Havisham’s room. 58

Although tidy in outwards appearance, layers of dust and cobwebs covered everything in the room. The flowers, cooked rice, and green tea that had been placed upon the offering table were fresh, but that was the extent of any new life that may have been in the room. I walked over to the offering area and seeing the couple nod to one another, set down my cot at the spot where I would be sleeping that night. My hosts proudly told me that Bo Min Gaung visits them occasionally and the proof was that the tea and water they offered him on the altar would be half gone when they entered the room the next morning. Although usually expressing the utmost respect for my interlocutors about their practices and beliefs, I could not help but just this once jokingly remark to the old couple that I felt like a little kid on Christmas Eve waiting to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus. “Ah, but the difference here is that Santa Claus is fake while the weizzā are real,” Daw Pan Nu quickly admonished me with a scowl before turning off the lights and leaving the room.95 Admittedly, I felt somewhat uncomfortable about sleeping in this room where a saintly nocturnal visitor could potentially appear. It was already late in the evening at this point, and after an hour or so of wishing that I was laying in my bed back home, I eventually fell asleep. Sometime in the middle of the night, however, I was awoken by a clatter coming from atop the Bo Min Gaung altar. It was such a loud bang that sounded like metal pans smashing against one another. I would not be lying when I say that the hair on the back of my neck stood up from fear. After what seemed like fifteen minutes of fumbling for my flashlight, I immediately shone it in the direction of the sound. Completely unfazed by the light were two small mice lapping up the water from one of the shallow bowls that was placed there for Bo Min Gaung. They had apparently knocked down a metal serving tray on their way to the water. Not wanting to deprive 95

Pers. Comm., DPN-79-F. 59

them of sharing in the offering and thus possibly accruing merit to help them out of their animal state, I let them be and fell fast asleep laughing to myself that for a split second, I thought that perhaps Bo Min Gaung really had come to visit. The next morning when Daw Pan Nu entered the room to wake me for breakfast, the first thing she did was approach the altar. “Look! Come here! Abha (“grandfather,” as she affectionately called Bo Min Gaung) did come! He told me he would come sometime this week. Isn’t it amazing?” Not sure what she was referring to, I crawled over from my cot to see her admiring, as if it were a precious gem, one of the shallow bowls of water she had placed out the night before. “See, the water from this bowl is almost all gone,” she beamed. “Wow, that is amazing,” I said. “It’s too bad I was here the whole night and didn’t see him.” Any evidence of a possible weizzā’s presence in the human world is taken very seriously. Nothing, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant to an outside observer, is what it appears to be when dealing with the weizzā world. One cannot fathom the ways weizzā work in the world, and such small tokens of presence are therefore taken as evidence by the devout that they are in a special bond with their weizzā saint. And although the weizzā may not have appeared to them in more obvious visual or aural ways, followers are confident that if the time comes when they are in dire need of help, their weizzā will come to their aid.96 I encountered countless instances like the one described above where it appeared to me that devotees were grasping at straws trying to create meaning from where there was none. This means, as should be obvious by now, that I am not concerned with interrogating the empirical validity of the claims that are made in these accounts. Rather I am interested in how they function as part of a larger process of identity construction in which the unpredictable actions of the weizzā saint continually 96

Interview, ZMO-31-M. 60

introduce new levels of meaning into the lives of their devotees. Over time I came to realize that, as we will see in Chapter Four, it is the shared experiences of these same occurrences, witnessed over decades, appearing in different locales and amongst diverse groups of people, that devotees recount when attempting to describe the essence of their relationships with these weizzā saints. These are the incidents that matter to them; the ones they relate over and over to one another (and to ethnographers like myself). When relating the incident to a Burmese friend of mine who does not believe in anything related to the weizzā phenomenon, thinking he would go on one of his usual rants about the absurdity of such beliefs, surprised me by asking me in all seriousness, “How do you know that Bo Min Gaung had not transformed himself into a mouse in your presence, especially as he knows you have some doubts about his power?”97 Now that we’ve looked at a number of ways weizzā are believed to interact with their devotees as well as methods for followers to make contact with the weizzā world, the remainder of this chapter will focus on those individuals who, due to their spiritual maturation along the weizzā path as a result of their present or previous lives’ good karma, are privileged to experience powerful encounters with weizzā, either during periods of possession or in dreams.

“Riding the Medium; Channeling the Saint” and “Dream Weavers” The phenomenon that I refer to as “possession” is, in Burmese, “dhāt-si” (Dat\s^:) --- a word that has no English equivalent. Broken down into parts, however, the word “dhāt” derives from the Pāli, dhātu, and carries with it similar meanings of “element,” especially with regards to the elementary particles of a physical object, except that it carries with it stronger connotations of

97

Interview, KST-32-M. 61

“power” or “force.” Si can mean to ride, as in a vehicle, or flow, as in water or electricity.98 The common interpretation is taken as the dhāt of the weizzā rides, or flows through, the medium.99 A senior member of a weizzā association from Yangon explained to me that as weizzā are beings that live on a spiritual plane more refined than that of the human realm, and have shed or transformed their physical bodies for that of immaterial ones, that they essentially consist of only the air element (vāyo dhātu) giving them the basic characteristic of motion. As such, they act according to this nature by permeating the medium with their dhāt (energy) that is sent from their immaterial nām (mind-substance).100 “It’s like they send their, how do you say in English, ‘spiritual force field’ into a practitioner whom has done much practice on the weizzā path or who has good pāramī,” he stressed making the hand gestures of his fist hitting the palm of his other hand.101 The development and accumulation of such energy is the result of years, if not lifetimes, of intense and disciplined spiritual practice that granted the weizzā supernatural powers with the abilities to transform himself from a mere mortal to that of a super, semi-divine deity capable of operating in the human world in an immaterial way. Although I use the expression “possession” to gloss the phenomenon that I am describing in this chapter, this is not exactly how practitioners themselves characterize their relationship 98

Interestingly, the two words “dhāt-si” and “pat-lan” (pt\lm\; , circuit) are combined to refer to an electric circuit, or current, thus further supporting the electrical analogies mentioned above.

99

Guillaume Rozenberg (2010: 211) encountered informants who described the weizzā riding a person like a rider his animal. I have not encountered this gloss.

100

Pers. Comm. KYH-75-M. This is an admittedly sophisticated explanation; one that most informants could not (or would not) put into such words. I have had to rely solely on oral sources for most of my information on this phenomenon because none of the vast number of Burmese books on the weizzā subject even begin to offer an analysis of the inner workings of dhāt-si. 101

Interview, KYH-75-M. 62

with a guardian weizzā for it carries certain connotations that may be misleading. In addition to the negative meaning that possession has in the context of Euro-America, as well as in most areas of contemporary Myanmar, the term also obscures, as Joan Dayan observed in the case of Vodou, the reciprocal nature of the relationship between a saint and its servant and the gradual, and often rigorous, disciplined mental and physical training necessary for such temporary manifestations of the saints to take place.102 The mediums we will meet in this dissertation describe this relationship in relational terms: they "strive" (a-toke Aa;Tut\) to "receive" (ya r) the “dhāt” of a particular weizzā.103 The above discussion of fulfilling series of adhiṭṭhāna (firm commitment) attests to the belief that at least some degree of effort is required on the part of the devotee. The word, dhāt-si, is used in two different ways, each signifying the same phenomenon, but which places agency in two different subjects. For example, while it is common to talk of a weizzā possessing or dhāt-si-ing a human, it is just as common to talk of a devotee dhāt-si-ing a weizzā. This is illustrated by the way the term is used in the following two ways: “The person who receives the ‘dhāt-si’” (dhāt-si-khan-puggo Dat\s^:KMpugi©ol\)104 and “the female master who is channeling (dhāt-si-ing) Bo Bo (bo bo dhāt-si ne-de sayama Dat\s^:ent.|´ Sram) 105 . Both are used

102

Hayes, Holy Harlots, 34.

103

NYK, no.104, 1995: 34; interview SML-24-F. NYK, no.104, 1995: 38. Sayama: “at 7pm, I received [the weizzā’s] dhāt.” 104

NYK, no.102, 1995: 17. Although less common, the phrases win si (wc\s^;), “to enter and flow” and “nan-hkyin” (nam\K¥U\;) (“bridging the nama”) can be used as synonyms to describe the phenomenon. Ma Myin, for example, is also called a Bo Min Gaung nam\K¥U\;K´.q¨ (“she who approached the Bo Min Gaung’s nama.”). Still another uncommon term, as encountered by Brac de la Pierre during her fieldwork, is nan kein (nam\kin\;) “the mental is staying” (2012, 169). 105

NYK, no.102, 1995:18. 63

when referring to those individuals who possess the power to act as mediums for a particular saint. The two ways the term is used provide clues into how the process is believed to unfold. Devotees place the agency in the weizzā as the agent of action, in that it is the weizzā actively working through the medium who is often portrayed as a vessel suitable for holding the weizzā’s energy. Not long into my research, however, I realized that the mediums themselves play an active role as well. After learning that they have been chosen as mediums for a particular saint, devotees gain the knowledge of channeling the weizzā, and their words and actions at the beginning stages of the possession period suggest to me that they have some control over when and how a weizzā possesses them. This is especially true when the weizzā seems to appear at the same time every day.106 When we see a medium just prior to being possessed chanting gāthā while fingering a rosary, or using objects or wearing clothing similar to that which a particular weizzā is thought to possess, she is engaging in preliminary activities that she knows will bring the weizzā’s “dhāt” to her. Eventually, there comes a moment when, like turning a light switch, the person has channeled the weizzā, or, alternatively, the weizzā has possessed the medium, and in the midst of the possession, when the medium is healing and preaching, acting and speaking like a weizzā, we no longer need to ask, “Is the weizzā dhāt-si-ing the medium or is the medium dhāt-si-ing the saint?” At this point it is irrelevant because they are both two sides of the same coin. I belabor the point somewhat because it is important to establish the relational aspect of this 106

This, of course was one of the things that critics of such phenomenon lobbied at these mediums --- that they are practicing self-suggestion or that they are faking the event entirely. None of these critics, however, discounted the existence of weizzā. On the contrary, they all firmly believed in their existence but doubted the authenticity of the mediums’ claims of being in contact with them. A further discussion of critical reflections of the weizzā phenomenon can be found in the concluding chapter of this dissertation.
64

phenomenon that places it in contradistinction to other forms of possession that exist in Myanmar.107 It is also to show that these women, despite claims that they have no choice in being possessed, take on the role of medium and healer for very real, this worldly concerns. In most cases, those individuals who are dhāt-si’ed by the spirit of a weizzā cannot recall the events that occurred during their possessed states. However, after speaking with several of these mediums, and reading dozens of reports about dhāt-si, there are common elements that appear in their accounts. While the medium is “saying her prayer beads” (B. pad-dee-seik day), for example, the weizzā will send out his power “dhāt” to her. When this powerful force makes contact with the body of the medium, she will feel a strong tingling sensation, and since the force that is entering the body is great, the medium will often feel that she is growing in size or expanding. As the dhāt enters the body by way of the crown of head, the medium will feel that her head is swelling. Within moments, this dhāt descends to the rest of the body, going into the arms and hands, then down the spinal cord into the legs and feet. The first time this happened to Ko San Lwin, a young man who was attending a military college in upper Myanmar, “my fingers began to twitch. I was scared at first, but then I remembered that sometimes when I am reciting a gāthā, like the Itipiso, there might be unseen beings sitting nearby listening to me reciting. I can feel their presence. I know they are there because I feel goose bumps all over my body.”108 An alumnus of Rangoon Institute of Engineering had such an experience that he had to share it with his fellow alumni by publishing it in one of the school’s annual newsletters. Making it a point to 107

For detailed studies on such forms, see Brac de la Perrière, Bénédicte, 2009, « “Les naq sont là !” Représentation et expérience dans la possession d’esprit birmane », Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 145, pp. 33-50 and Brac de la Perrière, Bénédicte (1989) Les rituels de possession en Birmanie : du culte d’Etat aux cérémonies privées. Paris : Editions Recherche sur les Civilisation. 108

Interiew KSL-21-M. 65

remind his readers that he is a man of science who is not supposed to believe in such things, he was therefore shocked when a weizzā decided to use him to heal others: “Like I said my whole body felt like I was fully charged with static electricity, and my hairs stood upright and my speech and my hand went into autopilot. Whatever I touched in the process became blessed with healing power.”109 At one of the possession sessions I attended in Mandalay, a gentleman, who had come to obtain holy water from the medium, described this idea of “autopilot” in a different way. Sitting next to me while we watched a female medium undergo a possession by Bo Min Gaung, he interpreted what he understood to be happening to the medium. He said that the people being dhāt-si’ed often feel as if they want to cough. This is the weizzā activating and taking control of the vocal chords (B. hnoke-si).110 As we observed the medium gradually entering a state of possession, we noticed that her movements were more pronounced and jerky unlike the graceful and smooth movements she exhibited when not possessed. The man told me that the weizzā had taken full control of the young lady’s body and voice at this point, controlling all her strings (B. kyo-sone). Like a puppet master controlling his puppet, the weizzā was manipulating his medium to help heal the many people who had assembled there that afternoon.111 Among mediums and devotees, there seems to be an agreement on what takes place physiologically when the weizzā makes contact with the person. As Brac de la Pierre’s informants told her, “encountering the weizzā does not imply that they enter the body, but that

109

Saya U Htin Paw. “An Engineer and a Healer.”

110

Hnoke being “lips” and si, as we saw before, “flow” or “ride.”

111

Interview AY-40?-M. 66

their mind (manaw) sends their energy (dat) to ‘ride’ the medium.”112 Celine Coderey, in her research amongst mediums in Rakhine State, made note of informants who told her that weizzā do not enter the bodies of mediums and that whoever insists to be possessed is such a way is a lying.113 I encountered similar explanations when I visited the healer-medium, Ma Tin Tin at her home in Yangon on a day when she was to conduct a healing ritual for ill people who had gathered in front of her house. When I arrived, I noticed that there was a cordoned off by rope area where no one could enter. Ma Tin Tin was behind that line and she began the ceremony by taking a vow of truth and sending metta (loving kindness). She recited these words: “All the bodaw, please watch over and protect your parami-shin, your reverend daughter. Please know that my body is also your body, so please use it. My ten fingers are also your ten fingers.” When I asked her later what she meant by this, she told me that a medium can be completely in a trance state or can be partially possessed while still retaining full consciousness. What sets such an experience apart from other types of possession, she told me, is that with dhāt-si a weizzā will activate at least one of the following “dhāt”: a-kya dhāt (hearing), a-myin dhāt (seeing), and mano dhāt (intuition).114 Possession by weizzā is quite different from possession by other beings in several ways. First, the terminology used to describe the phenomenon is different. Instead of dhāt-si, the phrase “nat-win” is used. Nat-win refers to deities (nat) entering (win) the body/mind of an individual. Belonging to a group of deities called the “Thirty-seven Lords” these nat are trapped in the karmic cycle without any possibility of escaping by themselves and must, therefore, look for 112 113

Brac de la Pierre (forthcoming 2014).

Coderey, Celine. 2011. Les Maitres du “reste”: La Quete de l’equilibre dans les conceptions et les pratigues therapeutiques en Arakan (Birmanie). Diss. Marseille Universite. 114 Interview MTT-27-F. Coderey’s informants also make reference to the amyin dat hpwin, “the skill of seeing is opened” as evidence of a weizzā’s contact with a medium (Coderey 2012). 67

embodiment opportunities by grasping the soul (B. leikpya) of living beings. 115 In addition to such types of spirit possession, other lesser deities and spirits can possess a person. When an individual is possessed by a demon, for example, he/she will usually exhibit characteristics commonly associated with demon possession in other parts of the world. Other instances involve witches and sorcerers taking possession of an individual through the use of spells.116 As for the weizzā, who have “exited” together with their bodies as htwet yat pauk with no physical remains, they still can act upon the world by staying available to help living beings in their transient existence. Not surprisingly, both kinds of entities manifest themselves to humans through very distinctive forms of possession although both are considered positive in the sense that they do not warrant a ritual specialist to exorcise the entity from the person being possessed. For the remainder of this dissertation, however, we will be looking at “possession” as it refers to the weizzā phenomenon. Looking at possession as it refers to the weizzā phenomenon, initial experiences of possession are often met with fear and disbelief within the medium (as much as he or she is aware of what it happening and even more so when they emerge from their trance-like state) and for those around them. Ma Myin’s parents “were so worried the first time she went into a state of

115

Anthropologist, Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, has devoted her academic career to studying in great detail the relationships of spirit mediums to such nat. See the following for an especially illuminating studies on the subject. 2011 « From Weikzahood to Mediumship. How to Master the World in Contemporary Burma” in Religion Kompass, Wiley Online Library; 2011 « Being a spirit medium in contemporary Burma » in Engaging the Spirit World. Popular Beliefs and Practices in Modern Southeast-Asia, Eds. Kirsten W. Endres & Andrea Lauser, Berghahn Books, Asian Anthropologies 5, New York, Oxford : 163-184; Brac de la Perrière, Bénédicte, 2009, « “Les naq sont là !” Représentation et expérience dans la possession d’esprit birmane », Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 145, pp. 33-50. 116

Rozenberg (2012). 68

trance after saying her prayer beads. We cried because we saw that she was tired and could not get her to come out [of the trance].”117 The father of another well-known medium, Ma Win Yee, was so afraid when his daughter awoke in the middle of the night the first time she had come under the influence of the weizzā, Bo Bo Aung’s power that, even though she reported seeing a white clad, weizzā figure sitting in her room two days prior, “I thought for sure that my daughter had fallen under an evil spell … She began shouting, ‘father, wake up! Light some incense! It’s done, man, it’s accomplished! Your entire village will be peaceful. I am Bo Bo Aung, and I will give you my medicine!’” 118 Another father of a teenage girl capable of channeling the weizzā Bo Bo Aung had a similar reaction the night he first heard her frantically calling for him: “When I went over to her and asked what was wrong, she was shaking and was acting as if she had lost her mind. It seemed as if she was dhāt-si’ing [because] …she said, ‘I have succeeded, man. And because of my success, light some incense, won’t you?! Light some incense!’”119 Such fears of insanity or other illnesses befalling a medium are often allayed when someone from their community familiar with these kinds of experiences informs them that weizzā will not make contact with a human being unless there is a special need.120 Sometimes, a person might have been related to a weizzā in his past life as a son or daughter or a sibling.121 In that case, the

117

NYK no.100, 1994, p. 42.




118

NYK no.100, 1994 “Bo Bo Dhat-si Ma Win Yee” By San Lwin Ko pp.133-137.




119

NYK #101, 1994 pp.33-38.




120

Such individuals can range from fortune tellers to monks to the man on the street who is an avid reader of weizzā material. 121

This idea, known as pathan hset, and often glossed as ”to be in contact through successive existences” or “karmic connection,” will be addressed in further detail in Chapter Four. An 69

weizzā might try to establish contact and help that particular person when he is in trouble or when that person has fallen into wrong ways. The weizzā cannot send his dhāt to a person unless that person has fulfilled the basic conditions to be a recipient of the weizzā’s power. For example, the person has to, at the very least, keep the five precepts and recite gāthā using prayer beads on a daily basis, for the weizzā dhāt can be received only when the recipient is “pure at heart and when his mind is in deep concentration.”122 When the weizzā arrive, it is always for a noble purpose. They come when they want to give guidance in the personal spiritual development of a devotee, cure someone from an illness, or help a person successfully complete sāsana propagation work, such as building a pagoda or a meditation center.123 Dreams are the other means by which the majority of my informants experience weizzā coming into their lives. Unlike dhāt-si, however, these experiences are completely passive in that, although devotees can engage in preliminary religious exercises, like various adhiṭṭhāna (resolutions), to increase the chances that a weizzā will visit them during their sleep, they are pretty much at the mercy of the will of the weizzā as to when and how such a visitation may occur. As there are no meditation techniques of dream yoga like that found in Tibetan Buddhism,

example of this being expressed by a weizzā devotee can be seen here: Sayama: “at 7pm, I received [the weizzā’s] dhāt.” Author: “How do you two have a karmic relation (pathan hset) with one another?” Sayama: “In a previous life I was his daughter.” NYK, no.104, 1995: 38.
122 Corr. UKM-75-M.
123 Foxeus (2011) notes that this kind of possession is usually temporary, but that in some rare circumstances, it can be permanent in the sense that the weizzā uses the medium’s body until it dies, thus leaving to find another body to inhabit. 70

a devotee has no control to actively engage a weizzā while in a dream state or attempt to create a scenario within a dream whereby a saint might appear.124 Unlike dhāt-si, which is an avenue of supernatural interaction for only a select few devotees, dreams are the typical way for how the majority of my interlocutors experience the weizzā in their lives. And for those whose first contact with a weizzā saint was made during a dream, they frequently cite that initial experience as the most formative and influential in the bond that developed with the weizzā world. Dreams offer glimpses of devotees’ connections to certain weizzā which is important for providing confidence in their roles as healers or guardians of the Buddha’s teachings. One female healer, whose power stems from her relationship with the weizzā, Bo Min Gaung, traces her and her mother’s healing powers to a dream where, “when my mother was pregnant with me, she had a dream where she held a mercury ball in her mouth and flew through the air.”125 These are the dreams that are often referred to whenever devotees share stories with one another and in devotional literature about how initial contacts with these saints impacted the ways they saw the world around them and the spirit entities that inhabited it. Articles about, and interviews with, weizzā path practitioners that appeared in the popular weizzā related magazines of the late 1980s to the early parts of the 2000s consistently included the content of individuals’ dreams as they pertained to the ways the saints worked in their lives. The detail with which these dreams are recorded offer valuable insight into the reoccurring 124

On Tibetan “dream yoga” see, for example, Guenther, Herbert V. (1963). The Life and Teaching of Naropa, Oxford University Press and LaBerge, Stephen (2003). 'Lucid Dreaming and the Yoga of the Dream State: A Psychological Perspective' in Wallace, B. Alan (editor, 2003). Buddhism & Science: Breaking New Ground. Columbia Series in Science and Religion. New York, USA: Columbia University Press. 125

NYK #102 1995 “Sagaing Moe-hnyin-kyaung hma. Medaw-gyi” By U Than: Hpe Myin. pp.113-116. MG-F-60. For the significance of the mercury ball, see Rozenberg (2010).
71

themes and elements considered important by devotees of a wide spectrum of socio-economic and religious backgrounds. For my informants, regardless of their level of commitment to the weizzā path, dreams are more than just visions created by the mind during sleep. They are windows into the weizzā world that offer people ways of communing with the saints that are otherwise not readily possible during their waking states.126 There are aspects about the dream state that my informants believed to be just as real as what they would experience in their waking states. While other dreams are just that, dreams, the ones that contain weizzā are thought to be more real than regular dreams in that the weizzā are understood as directly influencing, in tangible and concrete ways, one’s experiences with the waking world. This will become clearer when we look at the ways weizzā saints appear in dreams for the sake of curing disease.

Patterns of Healings More than half of all narratives shared with me by my interlocutors and gleaned from magazines and devotional literature that pertained to peoples’ relationships with the weizzā saints had to do with receiving relief from illness or giving power to heal peoples’ suffering of sickness, both physical and mental. These narratives were split roughly fifty-fifty between healing by a medium who is possessed by a weizzā and healing directly through dreams. Attracted by this emphasis, stories of weizzā possession and dream accounts made for popular material for articles that appeared in the weizzā related magazines throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s before government censorship restricted the kinds of articles that could appear in these 126

The experiences shared with me by my interlocutors were not unlike the phenomenon of “lucid dreaming.” For more on dreaming and being aware that one is dreaming, see LaBerge, Stephen (1985). Lucid Dreaming. Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher. From a Tibetan Buddhist perspective, see First Karmapa: The Life and Teachings of Dusum Khyenpa (2012), Translated by Michele Martin & David Karma Choepel, KTD Publications, New York. 72

magazines.127 Stories like Ma Myin’s possession by Bo Min Gaung as well as pitches for traditional medicine healers, clinics, and medicine, and, for a brief period of time, advertisements for healers who could supposedly cure HIV-AIDS appeared in popular magazines like Nekkatta Yaung Kyi (Star Rays).128 Although the number of articles pertaining to weizzā saints has decreased considerably over the past ten years, these magazines are still full of various spiritual remedies for ailments afflicting many Burmese.129 I have determined that sickness and relief are felt and conveyed in terms of, and with reference to, culturally available idioms. Here we will look at two such idioms: 1) perceptions of the modern medical landscape of Myanmar and 2) the ways devotees make sense of and interpret the diseases that they experience. How weizzā 127

See Chapter Three for more on government censorship. This concern with healing and alleviating pain became such a central element of peoples’ relationships with the weizzā saints that the organized cults that developed around specific weizzā identified themselves as healing associations. Rozenberg and Pierre point out that even today weizzā cults “belong predominantly to a variety of cults that could be awkwardly termed “anti-suffering cults.” Rozenberg and Pierre (forthcoming 2014). Such cults, like the Mano-seitu-pad Gaing and the Shwe-yin-kyaw Icchāsaya-maheiddhī-se Gaing, focus much of their practices on healing people who suffer from illnesses thought to stem from witchcraft or black magic. Members undergo a lengthy training program to become “faith healers” (B. payoga saya) and receive copies of training manuals that act as beginner’s guide for curing a wide range of ailments. Although I found used copies of some such handbooks in Yangon bookshops, most of my informants who were members of these associations obtained their copies at the time they officially enrolled as members at their local branch. (Patrick Pranke’s seminal article, “How to Become a Buddhist Wizard,” is based on his translation of a Mano-seitu-pad Gaing pamphlet.) 128

I visited one such healer who had set up shop inside a pagoda compound in Mandalay. With a small signboard in red letters that read, in Burmese, “HIV-AIDS Cure,” taped on the front of a small table, he sat there in front of a statue of the Buddha every day. He was also a palm-reader, so under the guise that I wanted my palm read, I asked him if this cure was for real. He said, “Of course it is! It is through the power of samatha meditation. I, and many of my friends, have seen it with our own eyes.” 129

One way editors and writers have gotten around the problem of censorship has been to publish their stories under the guise of fictional accounts. See Jennifer Leehey’s Open Secrets, Hidden Meanings: Censorship, Esoteric Power, and Contested Authority in Urban Burma in the 1990s (PhD Diss. Univ. of Washington, 2010). 73

devotees became ill and are made well can be better understood in relation to these two culturally specific expressions. Due to the lack of national standards for medical training, ignorance of public medical knowledge, and lack of access to healing techniques and drugs in Myanmar, the weizzā saints play important roles as healers. The medical revolution that has taken places in other parts of the world has yet to occur in Myanmar.130 As a result, local medical healers’ power and prestige are still intact, all the more so if they can trace their powers to a specific saint or practices that helped to bring about such healing powers.131 Those therapeutic powers that are understood to have their origin in the weizzā are thought to be of a higher order than even those of modern medicine and indigenous healing methods.132 Supernatural in nature, and stemming from the power of the Buddha, such curative forces wielded by the weizzā can eradicate a wide spectrum of illness ranging from physiological ailments recognized in the modern medical world to those

130

Burma ranks 190 out of 191 countries in terms of ‘overall health system performance’ (WHO 2000). However, even for those devotees who do have the means to obtain state-of-the-art medical care rely in the saints for healing, for even with the best medicine and hospitals, people still get sick and die.
131 Following Coderey, I prefer to speak of “indigenous/local medicine” instead of “traditional medicine”, for as Coderey (2012) reminds us “’traditional medicine’ is a phrase generally used in the literature and by the Burmese Anglophones, because the term ‘traditional’ has been criticised as it refers to something fixed, immutable and for this reason is considered unsuitable to define this kind of medicine which undergoes constant changes under the influence of social, historical, political forces. The idea of ‘indigenous/local medicine’ better translates the vernacular designation taing-yin hsay pyinnya, ‘knowledge of indigenous/local remedies’.”
132 For more on the primacy of weizzā-related knowledge and power over that of modern science, see Chapter Four. 74

thought to have developed as a result of “bad luck, karma, planets, powers, and aggressive agents.”133 But even with the meager growth of modern medicine through the first decade of the new millennium, there is hardly any awe inspired by the modern doctor and his discriminatory powers and accuracy of diagnosis. It’s not necessarily due to a lack of money on the patients’ part to afford such services (although of all the South-East Asian nations, Burma ranks first in terms of the amount that individuals spend on health care --- 80.6 per cent of the total expenditure on health in Burma in 2006)134 but rather a lack of trust in the expertise of the country’s medical field as a whole. With only one doctor for approximately every 2700 people,135 unless a doctor has had training outside the country, there is the feeling amongst many patients that the doctors in Myanmar lack the education and skills necessary to make accurate diagnoses and perform surgical operations. Faced with few alternatives, however, patients who can afford it, undergo treatment in the hopes of being prescribed foreign medicine, thought to be pinnacle of medical advancement. This is their last hope for being cured through modern medicine. In lieu of, or simultaneously with, this type of treatment, Burmese rely on indigenous medicine for cures.136

133

Coderey (2012).

134

Skidmore (2008).

135

WHO 2006.

136

Indigenous medicine, according medical anthropologist, Monique Skidmore, “has been and remains a priority area for the previous and current military council and the healthcare system is designed to integrate traditional medicine through all levels of community health care, including education, training, registration, licensing and research.” http://epress.anu.edu.au/myanmar02/html/frames.php 75

Despite this, or more likely because of this, weizzā saints figure prominently into hospital stay, bed-ridden devotees’ accounts of being healed.137 With the growth of hospitals came with it an increase in the presence of weizzā saints within these places of healing. Placed at bedsides, hung on walls, or carried in pockets, images of these saints accompany the patients through their times of illness. When visiting hours are over, and one’s family and friends return home, patients turn to the saints for worship, guidance, assistance, or to express one's thoughts and emotions. Devotional literature and reports from patients contain vivid accounts of weizzā visiting them at night in dreams providing miraculous cures. One twenty-nine year old female patient, who was not a follower of any particular weizzā nor had any interest in such things at her time of illness, was admitted to hospital with a loose bowel disease that left her weak, malnourished, and unable to move.138 The doctors and her family all thought that she was to die soon and left her alone in the room to discuss the formalities of how to deal with her final hours. “While lying there in bed all alone and with doctors, nurses, and family all down the hall,” she reports, “a large man appeared in the doorway. As he stared at me, he gradually approached. I could tell that his body was strong and full of vigor, yet still bearing some harshness to his demeanor.” At first she thought that it was just a hospital orderly come to check on her. But she was shaken when he pointed his finger at her and said, “If you want to take a shit, go ahead and go. If you want to take a piss, go ahead. You don’t have any disease. Everything is all right.”139 After saying this, he left the room. She

137

Rozenberg records some of his informants’ discomfort and mistrust of Western, modern medical facilities and science (2010). 138 139

NYK no.93, 1994 pp.33-37.

Such a harsh tone and rhetoric is common of Bo Min Gaung. As we will see in Chapter Four, Bo Min Gaung was remembered as a cussing, insult hurling, curmudgeon with a heart of gold. 76

had no idea who this person was but had an instinctual feeling that he was extraordinary. “I needed to know who this person was and immediately called out to my family,” she continued, “but when I asked about that man, they responded that they did not see anyone. Thinking I was hallucinating, they had the doctors give me some sleeping pills.” She spent the remainder of the night in and out of sleep. But at one point when she believed to be awake, she saw a white clad individual standing near her bed. She took it to be a weizzā figure due to the way she describes him (hwet-pyu-shin) --- a stock phrase used when referring to a weizzā figure, such as a Bo Bo Aung, who is often portrayed wearing white robes but can include even those weizzā not donning such garb. She tried hard to reach out and touch him but became so fatigued that she couldn’t help but fall back to sleep. “When I awoke the next morning I found that I was completely changed. My entire body was free from sharp pains. Starting from that day onwards, I no longer had loose bowel movements,” she said before stressing that “I continue to hear the voice of that man in my head, and I shall never forget him.” She has accepted that Bo Min Gaung, and “other persons not seen with the naked eye, are important to my life and continue to protect me.”140 Such accounts of bed-ridden hospital patients who have weizzā experiences at critical points in their illness, usually just prior to surgery or when expected not to recover, are quite common. Stomach illnesses make up the majority of ailments that are reported, which is not surprising as the gastro-intestinal problems are common in Myanmar where sanitary conditions are poor.141 In my early days of fieldwork, I came across so many reports of weizzā healing

140

NYK no.93, 1994 p.37.

141

Skidmore (2008) makes note of the high frequency of bowel cancer in Myanmar that has necessitated surgery and then the use of colostomy bags. 77

people from incontinence, gas, ulcers, food poisoning, constipation, hemorrhoids, and fissures, that I thought for sure weizzā, like Bo Min Gaung or Bo Bo Aung must be the patron saints of gastrointestinal disorders. Patients reported suffering from such sharp pains that doctors on duty thought required surgery. “Preparations were made to cut open my stomach,” one woman told me. “The night before the surgery, a weizzā monk arrived and gave me some medicine that made me feel at peace. The next morning when the doctors came in to check on me, they were amazed to find that I was better.”142 No longer needing surgery, she was discharged from the hospital. She was not sure which weizzā saint it was who visited her that night, but as he was a monk, she knew it couldn’t be Bo Min Gaung or Bo Bo Aung. It was only later, after a fortune teller interpreted the experience for her, that she learned that the weizzā was a monk from the Mebegon Weizzā sect.143 While she had always been a devotee of Bo Min Gaung and Bo Bo Aung before

Gastrointestinal diseases, often associated with severe bouts of diarrhea or vomit, can be fatal. As a New York Times report recently showed, “Gastrointestinal infections are killing more and more people in the United States and have become a particular threat to the elderly, according to new data released last week. Deaths from the infections more than doubled from 1999 to 2007, to more than 17,000 a year from 7,000 a year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Of those who died, 83 percent were over age 65” (Grady, Denise. March 19, 2012. “Gut Infections Are Growing More Lethal.” New York Times). 142

Interview DTT-54-F.

143

The weizzā monks in question whom she believes to have helped her are U Kovida and U Pandita leaders of the Mebegon Sect. For more information see Rozenberg (2010), Kassapa (2005), and U Hpe Myin (1979). To my mind, the only English language source that provides similar accounts of gastro-intestinal healing by these same weizzā is the devotional tract, Wonders of Mebegon Village (U Hpe Myint, translated by Ashin Kunsal Kassapa, 2005). Brac de la Pierre’s main informant, who is also of the same name as my informant (Tin Tin), had a very similar dream of this same weizzā monk appearing to her while she was in a Yangon hospital (de la Pierre, forthcoming). 78

her hospitalization, she has since added several weizzā monks to her retinue of divine beings she attributes her miraculous healing to.144 Some devotees report having actually been operated upon by weizzā saints who visited them during periods of hospitalization.145 Also suffering from gastro-intestinal illness, an elderly hermitess recounts a time when she was forty years old and was admitted to a hospital to have surgery performed to help alleviate intense pain she was experiencing in her abdomen.146 She recalls that at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon she was visited by an old weizzā who appeared to be dressed as a monk: “He told me that ‘now is the time. Will you follow?’” When she asked him where he wanted her to go, he answered, “Day-soon-ba Hill. There you will enter into an adhiṭṭhāna and develop your pāramī. From these good deeds (P. kusala), you will live to

144

The leader of this Mebegon Weizzā sect, Sanay-tha Sayadaw, incidentally, has reported that he came into such a position as the result of being healed from a fatal gastrointenstinal disease by one of these weizzā monks, U Pandita, in 1952. Fearful of having to undergo major surgery, Sanay-tha Sayadaw fled from the hospital the evening before the surgery was to take place. On his way home, he was visited by the weizzā monk who told him, that although his disease was at an advanced stage, to not worry because he would be cured so long as he agreed to allow the weizzā to possess his body (dhat-si) for five years in order to propagate the Buddha sāsana. Sanay-tha Sayadaw consented, and the weizzā gave him medicine that promptly cured him of his gastrointestinal disease (Wonders of Mebegon Village (U Hpe Myint. Translated by Ashin Kunsal Kassapa, 2005, pp.90-91). The story can also be read here at http://www.trikaya.es/en/Mentors/the-sayadaw-sanathar.html last accessed January 24, 2013. One devotee of another weizzā monk, Shwe Paw June Sayadaw, owes her life to him for curing her of amoebic dysentery. “I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Sayadaw. I would have died from chronic dysentery,” she recounts, adding that she is a medical doctor and that even no medical doctors in her country were able to treat such a disease (pers. Corr. DTT-70-F).The prevalence of gastrointestinal ailments is found among Rozenberg’s weizzā informants as well (2010: 248). 145

Interview MAK-32-F; USL-54-M.

146

NYK 1995 pp.13-15 “Amay Hkin from Kyauk-tee Adhithan Place and her Strange Experiences” by Aung Za. 79

be an old woman.”147 After agreeing to his request, the weizzā took out a knife and cut open her stomach removing that which was making her ill. He then stitched up her stomach, laid his hands upon her abdomen, and disappeared. Trying to describe the texture of the experience, the hermitess recalls that it “had a dreamlike quality to it, but I was fully aware (B. thatilit).” Anticipating that some readers may doubt the validity of her story and say that the figure she encountered were most likely a surgeon whom she, in her anesthesiazed, intoxicated state, mistook the doctor for a diving being, she stressed that no medical staff was in her room and only arrived the next morning when it was time to operate. She remembers that after being prepped for the procedure, the electricity suddenly went out. “I immediately began reciting…gāthā. 148 When the electricity came back on the radiologist used the machine to x-ray my stomach and was amazed to find that whatever it was that was causing the illness had gone! The doctors and nurses were also very amazed and did not have to operate.”149

147

Day-soon-ba Hill is located in a remote forested area outside of Pago. It has witnessed the growth of weizzā related activities and groups, made up mostly of hermit communities and two pagodas looked over by a monk who is thought to be a living weizzā. Considered a major pilgrimage spot due to its association with this monk-weizzā and other deities, such as Me-daw (buffalo goddess), pilgrims, that include wealthy Taiwanese businessmen and women, are transforming the area to something of a “boom town.” Day-soon-ba Hill and its association with weizzā activities will be addressed in a future article on Burmese hermits.
148 The gāthā she recited were the Sarasvati Gāthā, Sambuddhe Gāthā, and the Parimitta-jala Sutta.
149 Oliver Sacks, in his book Hallucinations, which is an overview from the neurology doctors' perspectives on what kinds of hallucinations there are, how common they are and why they happen, writes about how visual hallucations are overwhelmingly (when they are not basicgeometric, color, etc. as happens in some blind people), culturally decipherable: Christians see angels, Buddhists the Buddha, etc. But he stops there and does not go further. As an anthropologist of religion, I feel we can go much further in terms of how hallucinations are generated, perceived, interpreted, and how the interpretations disseminated among people sharing a certain cultural context (socio-cultural structured frameworks of reference as guides for action, a k a "culture"). 80

What struck me about these experiences, and which did not escape the attention of my informants as well, is that none of these patients requested intervention of the saints. This is a typical organization for the devotional healing stories, especially for those that take place from within a dream: not being a follower of a weizzā or the weizzā path, I was suffering from a debilitating illness that required surgery or was considered by medical experts to be incurable, and a weizzā saint intervened to heal me, whereby I decided to then become a devotee of this saint. The saints were unknown yet intimately recognizable and their appearance had the quality of a perfectly timed appearance. The weizzā appeared with their own volition to provide healing to someone they deemed worthy of such divine intervention. Sharing these stories with me, my informants always expressed in excited, out-of-breath tones, that “you never know when they will appear” … “for they only come when they think you are ready; when your pāramī is good.”150 So we see something quite interesting in the way the devout imagined the weizzā to work in their lives during periods of sickness. Again, the logic of devotion would assume that, having some foreknowledge of these saints, that the devotees would call upon them during their times of need. What we see instead, however, is that the weizzā insert themselves into the lives of these people during crucial moments of sickness and despair whether they are entreated or not. Many

And of course, Sacks is telling us fabulously interesting things about how culture works at the most basic level of the brain receiving sensory signals and transforming them into understanding according to experience and more importantly, culturally transmitted and learned frameworks, that the individual brain has internalized and adopted for its use. 150

USL-56-M; DKT-49-F. 81

times a person would not even recognize the saint who visited them until later --- either realizing the identity of the weizzā themselves or having it revealed to them by someone else.151 It was not just Buddhists who are thought to be the recipients of weizzā power. Adherents to other religious traditions are also visited by weizzā saints, and it is these reports that Buddhist weizzā devotees especially delight in sharing. Devotional literature and informant accounts are full of stories of sick Christians and Muslims being healed by weizzā who appeared to them in dreams during periods of illness. A well-known account from the early twentieth century, told to me by many informants and included in a recent magazine article, tells the story of a seventeen year old woman dying of polio in a Yangon hospital.152 At one point, as the young woman later told her story, she felt as if she had died. Lying there in the hospital bed and unable to move her body, she was approached by an elderly man dressed in white robes. She did not know who he was at the time but later on “discerned him to be Bo Bo Aung.” He gave her three medicine pills to take. Other figures soon surrounded her and presented her with pills to eat: After ingesting the pills, my senses returned. My soul (B. leikpya) became so light that it left my body and floated upwards to the sky. When it arrived in the sky, I witnessed a monk sitting in a forest below chanting Pāli gāthā. I also saw a hermit sitting in meditation and realized that the monk was teaching the hermit how to gain the power of flight. Eventually, my soul descended back into my body and found myself back in bed. After recovering, I converted to Buddhism. Muslims, too, were also granted the beneficent grace of the weizzā saints’ interventions. During one period of my fieldwork in Myanmar, I would spend days at the famous Shwedagon

151

NYK no.125, 1996 pp.65-69. “Me-daw Gyi Daw Zā Zyi Aung” By Aung Hkain Lin: She says that she previously did not know who Bo Min Gaung was (she did know Bo Bo Aung). But Bo Min Gaung did appear to her during a meditation session one day.
152 Weizzā Magazine no.1, 2006, p.63 “Daw Aye Aye Myin Pathamam Bo Bo Aung hnin ko-twe pyit-yat-mya.”
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Pagoda sitting upon the same raised platform in a shady corner of the compound watching the days’ events unfold. I would always see the same middle-aged woman arriving around lunchtime to my platform and leave three hours later. After several days, she offered me some tea, and we got to talking. She was dressed in brown like a yogi or hermit and on her shirt was pinned a small plastic amulet of Bo Min Gaung. When I casually made notice of her pin, she immediately made it known to me that she was not a Buddhist, but a Muslim whose son was very ill. She had a dream where “Bo Min Gaung came and said that if I were to enter into a three month adhiṭṭhāna here at Shwedagon, my son would be healed.”153 The way she told me this, I could tell that she was still beside herself that she would have such an experience as a Muslim. She went on to tell me that she comes daily to the pagoda to chant the word, “araham,” on her prayer beads three hours a day and has so much respect for Bo Min Gaung that she wears a picture on her shirt for the entire period of her adhiṭṭhāna. “Bo Min Gaung does not belong to any particular religion. He helps everyone, even foreigners,” she smiled. We enjoyed daily tea with each other for another two days, but, unfortunately, I never saw her again after that. Perhaps she had completed her three month resolution, which, if so, I can only hope that Bo Min Gaung kept his end of the bargain by healing her son. What should we make of the surprising number of similarities and common themes that make up the content of these dreams that reflect the ways in which the devout understand the weizzā to be acting in such healing ways? How can one undertake a scholarly examination of healing experiences without trivializing religious practices and beliefs when reducing religion to non-religious terms? One way of skillfully navigating between these two extremes is by looking at healing phenomena and imagination in an ongoing, dynamic relation with the realities and 153

Interview DMM-50?-F. 83

structures of everyday life in particular times and places (insofar as these are both the framework of interpretation for locals, and something the locals re-construct, in their life). As I wrote in the introduction, Robert Orsi reminds us that people in these situations do not simply act; “they attempt to understand and narrative themselves as actors” and it is my task as a scholar of lived religion to recognizing that the stories they narrate and interpret are part of the “ideas, gestures, and imaginings, all as media of engagement with the world … [for] it is pointless to study particular beliefs and practices apart from the people who use these ideas in the definite circumstances of their lives.”154 In other words, the religious lives of weizzā devotees are not located in a vacuum or a separate, cordoned off section of their lives. When examining the stories shared by my interlocutors, we must take into account how they describe and understand by them by also taking into account the circumstances of their experiences and the cultural structures and conditions from which these stories emerge.155 A useful heuristic for such an endeavor can be found in the notion of cultural repertoires. Such “repertoires,” as Justin McDaniel puts it, “do not pre-define how a person embedded in a certain culture will act but shape the way she or he interprets, recounts, and manipulates the events they take part in in creating, as well as shaping the way new information is processed and 154

Orsi (2002: xx-xxi).

155

Anthropologist, Bruce Kapferer, accomplishes this in his work on Sinhalese sorcery practices by illustrating that sorcery is one of a number of practices through which human agents create, experience, and comprehend reality. He weaves, what is in my mind, a middle path between, on the one hand, taking seriously his informants’ claims while attempting to understand the sorcery activities and beliefs as the Sinhalese actually do and imagine it in the circumstances of their everyday lives, and on the other hand, placing Sinhala sorcery practices within “their social and political contexts and showing that the often grand themes that the practices display find their force in a capacity to gather up the deep psychosocial problematics that ordinary people confront in their daily lives” (The Feast of the Sorcerer: Practices of Consciousness and Power. 1997: 21). 84

articulated.”156 In addition to respectfully entertaining the possibility expressed by my informants that weizzā actually work in their lives through such healing capacities, this approach also accepts the possibility that these stories of weizzā healing, by virtue of circulating through networks of family and friends as well as through a wide range of popular media, have become, for the time being, solidified and perpetuated as a Burmese culture’s “symptom repertoire”,157 that is, a range of physical symptoms available to the conscious and unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict.158 For instance, medical historian, Edward Shorter, points out that “in some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”159 Keeping in mind that “culture shapes the way

156

McDaniel (2011: 104-05). It is important to note, however, that this is not a one-way process. The actors also take part in reconstructing the repertoires; they will jettison parts of it, redefine other parts, put it together in new ways, and so on. For more on this, see Marshall Sahlins’ Apologies to Thucydides Understanding History As Culture and Vice Versa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 157

Recent work on ethnographic methodology has shown that I do not necessarily have to raise this as an “either / or” dilemma. Nils Bubandt, for example, has argued that these other-worldly entities be treated as interlocutors in their own right because that is how devotees themselves treat them (Bubandt, 2009: 295). Tim Ingold has attempted to show that his interlocutors have very different concepts of the life of animate and inanimate objects than Americans, for instance, and that this should be taken seriously (Ingold, 2006). 158

The following reflects my reading of medical historian, Edward Shorter’s “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom” and journalist, Ethan Watters’s Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. “Thus, expressions of illness can serve as idioms for communicating distress, suffering, and dissent.” Scheper-Hughes and Lock (1986; 1987). 159

Shorter, Edward. 1986. “Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom.” Journal of Social History, Vol. 19, No. 4, p. 549.
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general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology,” can provide us with a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering.160 Dreams and possessions are two ways in which we see the how the formation and dispersion of such repertoires are expressed. I think that popular media has contributed significantly to the formation and dispersion of these repertoires. Stories shared amongst family and friends, magazines like the ones discussed in this chapter and books making up the genre of popular occult Burmese literature focus on accounts of peoples’ dreams and possessions of weizzā and the extraordinary events that occurred as a result of such divine interactions.161 The stories, interviews, and anecdotes that appeared in magazines and books, for example, offer unique narrative spaces in twentieth and twenty-first centuries Burmese religious life. And it would be difficult to find another avenue where the difficulties and complexities of modern life are so unambiguously disclosed. It is through this media that we see popular traditions remembered and transmitted, and how aspects of these social processes of transmission 160

Watters. 2010. Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. New York: Free Press 29. This is similar to the findings made by Burmese anthropologist, Soe Thein, who, in the 1970s did fieldwork among weizzā devotees who were believed to have been healed by weizzā or their devotees from a variety of ailments, many of them gastrointestinal in nature. His informants would complain about head ache, giddiness, weakness of the voluntary movements, and abdominal pain and connected them to aggravations brought upon by domestic problems, business breakdown, bad marriage life, and so on. 161

For more about how the mass media and related popular culture are more likely to spread cultural ideals of health, see Featherstone, Mike. 1991. "Consumer Culture, Postmodernism, and Global Disorder." In Religion and Global Order, edited by R. Robertson and W. R. Garrett, 13359. See also Freund, Peter, Meredith B. McGuire, and Linda Podhurst. 2003. Health, Illness, and the Social Body: A Critical Sociology for a study of how officially promulgated ideals, whether promoted by heads of governmental health agencies or by school curricula, are likely to reflect political agendas (e.g., the deflection of responsibility for health maintenance away from statesponsored social services and community preventive efforts and onto the individual or immediate family). 86

and memory affected how the weizzā changes, develops, and endures, while others become static, irrelevant, or forgotten. Perhaps most striking about these stories was the appearance in them of the figure explicitly excluded by the fantasies of the Burmese Buddhist environment that was so heavily dominated by the exploits of monks and government sanctioned religious virtuosi. Instead of popular vipassanā (insight meditation) monks or revered arahants (fully enlightened beings) appearing in healing capacities, we encounter saints that, as we will learn in Chapters Three and Five, governmental and ecclesiastical authorities have attempted to marginalize. Moreover, here were stories that gave voice to men and women (but especially women) from all facets of socio-economic backgrounds: uneducated cleaners, women who had left their families to become nuns or wandering hermits, well-to-do jewelers, etc. These were strong-voiced women who were giving sermons, healing large numbers of patients, had cult followings and raised large sums of money to do Buddhist propagation works. The weizzā are sought out for their abilities to cure a wide gamut of ailments: gastro-intestinal diseases, anxiety, randomly occurring bodily pain, and so on as well as somatogenic ailments like asthma, paralysis, arthritis, and blindness to name just a few. Humans are not disembodied entities. Individuals’ religious expressions are linked to material bodies and become manifest at the intersection of where the senses (both physical and social) move through space and time, and as we will see in the next section, devotees’ lived religious expressions develop out of a set of embodied practices.162

162

Such views are inspired by, and adapted from, my readings of anthropologist, Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977). In addition to our six senses, Bourdieu suggests that humans also experience life through “social senses.” Such social senses are learned and are not identical across cultures. Although he was using the term in reference to how dominant groups within a culture literally “inculcate, embody, beyond the grasp of consciousness,” a form of reality that is in their best interests, I have 87

Abha’s Granddaughters: Embodied Constellations of Behavior The distinction between the weizzā’s intercessionary healing power and the mediums’ own roles in the healing processes are not absolute. Although these mediums would never claim to be directly responsible for the healings that take place under their auspices, as we have seen in their accounts and in the popular devotional literature that highlights the lives of these healers, the intensity with which they understand the weizzā to be working through them, and the importance with which they see their job as healer to be, allow for a blurring of the lines between the weizzā’s powers and those of the healers who channel them for the daily healing events that take place at their homes. Returning to the report of possession that appeared at the beginning of this chapter, we see Ma Myin continuing in her role as healer even after the spirit of Bo Min Gaung has left her for the day. Attending to the many patients whom she allows to stay at her home, Ma Myin says that she works most days morning till evening, treating dozens of people a day even when she is not under the influence of Bo Min Gaung. Part of her success as a healer no doubt stems from her pleasant disposition and compassionate way in which she interacts with her patients, all of whom are allowed to rest and recuperate in her home until they are ready to return to their homes. She makes rounds visiting with each patient reassuring them that they will get better because Ma Myin, speaking as herself and not Bo Min Gaung, has taken the illness from their bodies: “Go ahead, now. Give me all your illness. Give to me your ailments. Only then will you get well,” and “Starting from today your illness is no more. I’ve taken it all. You’re cured.”163 It appears that she understands herself as having an active role in the healing process adjusted it in this context to refer to a repository of psychophysical ailments and ways of dealing with such ailments through religious encounters with weizzā saints. 163

NYK no.100 (1994): p.41. This taking in of disease and illness was a common practice amongst the healers I met. One female hermit from Sagaing reported in a magazine interview 88

itself. Being asked how taking on all this illness must make her feel, visibly exhausted she says that she often feels the same ailments as her patients, but that she has the ability to take it all in.164 The ways in which such profound experiences have affected the lives of these devotees, especially the female followers, is how I would like to end this chapter. Scholars of the weizzā phenomenon have provided much evidence of how such instances work in generalized ways across a wide swath of devotees. I also did this to an extent at the beginning of this chapter when illustrating the different ways the weizzā communicate with their devout and how the weizzā are believed to be working through the bodies and minds of their elect for purposes of healing. But moving from the macro to the micro level, and especially after having gotten to know some of these devotees whose lives have been changed by their interactions with the weizzā saints, we that, when healing her patients, the disease usually leaves the person through the ear or mouth and enters into her own mouth. NYK #102 1995 “Sagaing Moe-hnyin-kyaung hma. Medawgyi.” By U Than: Hpe Myin.pp.113-116; DTM-F-60-Sagaing A typical exchange between the possessed medium and her patient transpires as follows: Medium: “What’s the problem, my son.” Patient: “I’m exhausted, Bo Bo.” M: “Give me all of the disease.” P: “I give, Bo Bo.” M: “This problem is gone. I offer some water [over which mantras have been recited for therapeutic effect].” After speaking, she took her staff and touched him all over the patient’s body. Then with the water that had been chanted over, had him rub it all over his entire body. NYK no.102, 1995 p¥U\;mna;®mio>m˙ Dat\s^;eS;kuq¨ Am¥io;qm^;n˙c\. kiuy\et∑>em;®mn\;K¥k\m¥a; sn\;l∑c\kiu author, pp.17-19.
164 “Besides,” she says, “this ability to heal people will disappear at the end of five years. After that I will be able to devote my life to propagating the Buddha sāsana.” NYK no.100 (1994): p.41. Weizzā working through devotees for five year increments was a common theme shared with me by mediums. We see it appear in other works on weizzā mediumship as well. See, for example, U Hpe Myint (2005: 90) and Rozenberg (2010: 247).
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can’t help but seriously examine what their lives are like now. What do they understand their role in their communities to be with such newfound power? What has the impact of being contacted by these saints had on their lives and with the relationships with others around them. Similary, when the weizzā has left for the day and the female mediums are back to their ‘regular’ selves, how do they feel? Are there any subconscious factors or significant life events that may have contributed in triggering such personal experiences with the weizzā? These are the issues I wish to address in this concluding section. The reader will have noticed that the majority of my accounts in this chapter comes from, or deal with, female devotees. This is partially intentional on my part. First, what is not intentional is that over half of the accounts found in popular literature and provided to me by my informants that deal with healing through possession and dreams came from, or were in reference to, women. While it would be wrong to give the reader the impression that this is a female-oriented phenomenon, I simply encountered a larger number of instances of female possession and dream visitations than I did of men.165 However, the weizzā do not discriminate whom they will visit based on gender, and instances of men with the ability to dhāt-si weizzā are known and appear in other works.166 I intentionally chose to focus solely on female mediums, and in large part how female devotees are healed through dreams, for a couple of reasons. First, I 165

This seems to agree with Brac de La Pierre’s recent findings whereby she notes that prior to 1992, the role of medium was “clearly conceived as a masculine one” and that “in the more formalized session presented [in her article], the mediums are women in an ancillary position compared to the masters of the cult group.” After 1992, however, “when the cultic group became more institutionalized, embodiment of the weizzā was abandoned by new male leaders, in want of differentiating themselves from mere devotees, and left to female members. Thus gender distribution of the role may be reversed according to contextual status of possession by the weizzā” (2012: 176). 166




See, for example, Brac de la Pierre (2012); Rozenberg (2012); Foxeus (2011); Spiro (1982). 90

wanted to take up the call by Steven Collins that more “work is necessary on the terminology – and hence the imagined phenomenology– of weizzā possession. This is an area also ... where further differentiation and nuance in the involvement of women in the weizzā phenomenon might be possible.”167 Second, I wished to examine social aspects of female weizzā mediumship, in particular, that directly impacts the women involved and how they relate to members of their community. Pouring over thousands of pages of literature on the weizzā phenomenon, I was taken aback at encountering so many female voices. A cursory examination of the subject would give one the impression that it is a phenomenon consisting of only male actors. While this is certainly true in that it is only men we find who have attained to the state of weizzā and who are the authors of the books, leaders of the congregations, and preachers of the disciples, examining the variety of source material on the weizzā, we see that it is women who act as the cornerstones of this phenomenon. Such women are part of the weizzā world through their positions as healers, clairvoyants, meditation masters, hermitesses, and, although rarely, weizzā association leaders.168 I have come to see that being visited by a weizzā and carrying out the saint’s bidding can be seen as a creative yet culturally sanctioned response to restrictive gender roles, a means for expressing otherwise illicit thoughts or feelings, and an economic strategy for women who have 167

Collins, Steven. “Afterword” Champions of Buddhism: Weikza Cults in Contemporary Burma, Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Guillaume Rozenberg and Alicia Turner eds. (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press) forthcoming 2014. 168

This is the case even in spite of the data collected by Rozenberg and Brac de la Pierre that “some weizzā cult followers object to the fact that a weizzā could possess an inferior and impure being such as a woman. Others, conversely, consider possession as a lower form of manifestation for a weizzā which must be solely the business of women. In short, when it comes to entertaining a relation with some invisible weizzā, there is no stable gendered distribution of relational modes” (forthcoming 2014). 91

few options beyond traditional wifely or daughter roles. Juliane Schober makes a similar point when writing that “weizzā knowledge may also appeal to those who are displaced at the social margins of a field of merit and who suffer a lack of power that is manifest in social or physical injury or other forms of ill fate.”169 In this sense channeling weizzā saints provides a set of symbolic resources and ritual strategies by which these women are empowered to work on themselves and the world around them. Daw Vaṇṇathingagī used to be a nun but found the life and its rules too strict and not conducive for helping people with the powers bestowed upon her by Bo Min Gaung.170 She found it best to disrobe and, instead of returning to lay life, re-ordain as a hermitess (B. yathey-ma). 171 Dressed in the brown robes and signature cap (B. dauk-cha) of the hermit, Daw Vaṇṇathingagī moved to a small hut on the outskirts of Yangon. Living as a hermit afforded her the luxury of devoting all her time and energy to spiritual pursuits without the responsibilities that were expected of nuns or female householders, many of which involve domestic duties catering to monks or male members of one’s family. The eldest of nine siblings, she recalls the evening when she was first visited by a weizzā. She had a dream “that seemed so real,” she remembers. “A voice said, ‘Awake, my child.’ When I sat up and looked around the 169

Schober, Juliane. “The Longevity of Weikza and Their Practices.” Journal of Burma Studies, 16.2: 2012, pp. 283-307: 286. 170

There are nuns to be sure, but unlike the monks, these nuns do not enjoy the status of being fully ordained, due to certain institutional and historical factors that are too complicated to go in to here. 171

Hermits (B. yathey, which is the Burmese pronunciation of the Sanskrit, rishi) often live alone in small communities in forest or near major pilgrimage sites. They wear robes similar to those of monks, except that their robes are dark brown, and they also wear a large, conical hat made of leather. For details of the ordination procedure of a hermit, see Bizot, Francois. 1988. Les traditions de la pabbajja en Asie du Sud-Est, Recherches sur le bouddhisme khmer IV, Göttingen, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (PhilologischHistorische Klasse, Folge 3, Nr. 169). 92

room, I saw an old man dressed in white standing there.” The weizzā (she believed it to be Bo Min Gaung) continued, “My child, enter into an adhiṭṭhāna for three days atop Nemindara Hill.”172 She replied, “Grandfather, I have never been to this hill. I don’t even know where it is. Please let me enter into a resolution at the local temple.” Bo Min Gaung reassured her, “Child, you have a connection with Nemindara Hill and it is there where you must go.” “Grandfather, I am a single woman and must get permission from my parents,” she continued. “Moreover, it will be difficult to sustain myself up on that hill.” “You will get their permission. And as for surviving up there, you will succeed,” Bo Min Gaung said before disappearing. Daw Vaṇṇathingagī was fortunate with the ease in which she was able to make the transition from laylife to that of a renunciate. She was able to obtain permission from her parents to ordain first as a nun and then as a hermit. Being the eldest, unmarried child, she would have been expected to remain with her aging parents to care for them until their deaths. Most women face significant obstacles in their desires to live a life centered around religious activities. However, not every woman wants, or even has the chance, to ordain as a hermit. It is not as easy as leaving home, finding a community of hermits and requesting permission to ordain. If the woman is single, she must still get permission to ordain from her parents or, if they are no longer alive, the next eldest male member of her family. And if married, her husband must consent to her request before she is able to lead a life of a renunciate. Although changing, the image of a female renunciate in Myanmar is still considered by many people, monastic and lay alike, as the 172

NYK #143, 1998. Nemindara Hill, like Day-soon-ba Hill, is another site associated with weizzā activity. 93

domain of spinsters, widows, and broken-hearted girls. Families are therefore cautious of granting permission to their daughters or sisters to enter the renunciate life out of such preconceptions or fear of having them being labeled so by others. This is made all too clear in the following account of Daw Sumangala, a hermitess who was forced to endure years of suffering until she was able to freely live out her days as a renunciate. “When I was 12 years old I had the desire to ordain as a nun, but my parents did not agree,” she recalled. “At age 18 I was told to marry, but I did not want to. Without any interest [in marriage], though, I was eventually wed anyways at age 22 … I cried so much that blood, not tears, spilled from my eyes. But the doctor found nothing wrong. I finally decided to leave home at 41 years of age to become a hermit, but my family came looking for me and when they tried to forcibly drag me home, I ran away to another temple” and has not seen her family since.173 The scenario of her leaving home only to be forced back by family was a common theme found in many female weizzā devotees’ accounts. Another hermitess, Daw Vimala Candārī, remembers her early days of trying desperately to avoid being married so as to devote her life to religious works as directed to her by weizzā saints that appeared to her in dreams. Continually being brought back home after each attempt at leaving, she was finally successful one evening when she “left home quietly so that no one would know and went to … Shwedagon Pagoda” to enter into an adhiṭṭhāna. “I ate only a little fruit, bread and water. I didn’t shower, and so that no one would see me at night, I hid and practiced meditation without going anywhere.” After some time, her family came looking for her one last time. She was still legally married and needed to return home to dissolve the marriage. 173

NYK no. 102 1995, DTM-F-60-Sagaing. For some fanscinating parellels of sexuality and tension with family members in Chinese societies, see Sangren, Paul Steven. 2000. Chinese sociologics: an anthropological account of alienation and social reproduction. London: Athlone. 94

She went back just long enough to give her husband permission to marry another woman before leaving for a pilgrimage to visit weizzā holy sites all around the country.174 Other female weizzā followers who have families of their own feel particularly strong obligations to take care of husbands, children and extended family members, and are thus hesitant to leave home at the request of a weizzā saint. “I want to devote my time to the sāsana, but many people depend on me at home,” one woman told me whilst another confided that “even though my husband is a drunkard, he still needs me to take care of him. He’s not such a bad man.”175 Many times, these women participate in the much needed income to help keep the family fed and clothed, especially as Burmese norms expect women to be wives and mothers whose activities are restricted to the domestic arena where their reputations are based on the successful management of the home and financial resources. As much as they would like to go off and use the powers given to them by weizzā to help others, it is not a realistic way of life for most Burmese women. “Although women in Burma had for a long time an influential presence in the economic sphere, as in other premodern Southeast Asian societies,” historian of gender in Myanmar, Chie Ikeya, writes, “the active role of women as economic agents --- the very attribute that gave women their autonomy and power --- subordinated them to men socially, spiritually, and politically.”176 Even if women do get the chance to leave home to follow a religious life, any number of circumstances, such as family illness or economic hardships, would require them to rejoin their families to help deal with the problems. 174

NYK #116, 1996, DVM-F-81-Bago.

175

KTS-F-48-Yangon; ?-F-?-Mandalay.

176

Ikeya, Chie. 2011. Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma (University of Hawai’i Press), 51. 95

Respecting my informants’ claims that the weizzā saints are autonomous and selfsufficient entities, I also entertain the notion that weizzā, like Bo Bo Aung and Bo Min Gaung, are “imaginative figures who concretize otherwise subterranean ideas about gender and power, morality and desire, bringing them to the surface, where they are subject to reflection and manipulation.”177 The allure of weizzā mediumship, and similarly related healing vocations, is that for those women who believe to have been granted power by weizzā, they acquire a similar degree of power, status, and influence in their communities and families as that of a renunciate without having to leave the home. Possessed of a way for living such a life while also engaging with the dissatisfactions that result from the limiting life of a householder, these avenues offer culturally sanctioned ways for working through frustrations of restrictive gender roles, prohibited thoughts or feelings, and economic instability. We see is these circumstances how being a weizzā medium is not gender neutral.178 The young women who channel the male weizzā undergo sex changes of sorts by wearing men’s’ clothing, smoking cigarettes, speaking in deep, forceful tones, etc. These can be seen as transgressive actions and taking a cultural repertoire and putting

177

Hayes (2011: 42).

178

Pattana Kitiarsa makes a similar claim with regards to Thai spirit mediums when he writes: “Popular religion is engendered, framed and practised along the existing gender divisions… [P]opular religion is never gender-less. Instead, it reflects the pattern of gender construction widely adopted and practised in Thai society, where most active roles in the Buddhist Sangha have been traditionally reserved for men, and women have long been conventionally engaged in the spirit cult.” “Magic monks and spirit mediums in the politics of Thai popular religion.” InterAsia Cultural Studies. 6: 2, 2005, 222. For a comparative perspective in Sri Lanka, see Obeyesekere, Gananath. 1981. Medusa's hair: an essay on personal symbols and religious experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 96

their own spin on it, thus supporting McGuire’s claim that “the religious meanings attached to gendered bodies are likewise socially defined, contested, and changeable.”179 Observing closely and getting to know some of these women over the course of my several years of fieldwork, I have learned that such bonds with weizzā have been positively lifechanging experiences for most of these women.180 For example, I remember meeting one young woman, Ma Aye Aye, who had just recently before my arrival to Mandalay come into her own as a medium of the weizzā Bo Min Gaung. I was able to observe the early changes in her life that occurred as a result of her powers of healing. Ma Aye Aye was of a very shy disposition, but with her new-found abilities and confidence in the weizzā’s power, she suddenly became a selfassured, strong-willed woman fond of, especially during periods of possession, barking orders at her family, most notably her husband and mother-in-law. Always modest, she did admit to me that although being a medium and healer was “physically and mentally exhausting” she did find delight in the respect shown to her by members of her family. “At first they thought I was crazy, but when they saw me heal people who came to our home, they were amazed,” she said with a smile before lowering her eyes and with a deep sigh. “But you have no idea how mean by mother-in-law was to me over the years. She struck me whenever I made mistakes with cooking and cleaning, and even when she saw me crying, she wouldn’t stop. Always yelling at me.” Ma Aye Aye’s smile returned to her face, though, when she said with a giggle that “now my mother179

McGuire (2008: 173).

180

Pattana (2005: 221) proposes something similar with regards to spirit mediums in Thailand who work within “specific religious channels” as a means of empowering themselves so as to “get themselves out of their socially and economically marginal positions.” Similar instances of positive life transformations were reported by Vietnamese spirit mediums (see Fjelstad and Maiffret “Gift from the Spirits” in Possessed by the Spirits: Mediumship in Contemporary Vietnamese Societies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell SEAP Publications 2006). 97

in-law is scared of me! She doesn’t dare do such things to me now that I am Abha’s granddaughter.”181 We see, then, that entering into relationships with, and identifying themselves with fiercely powerful otherworldly beings allows these women, to borrow Daniel Gold’s phrase, “alternative models of being religiously powerful in the world.”182

At times while observing dhāt-si sessions, I could not help but be impressed with the power and influence that these young women exerted over their communities. Arriving early to a medium’s home in Mandalay one morning, greeted at the door by Ma Soe, a twenty nine year old female medium, I was immediately struck by her countenance: smiling, radiant, and with an unassuming charisma, she invited me inside to have tea with her parents while she got ready for her healing session. When the moment arrived for channeling Bo Bo Aung, I was shocked the moment I witnessed her dhāt-si’ed by the weizzā. The transformation was striking. Her presence became immense, seemingly encapsulating the space of the large room filled with over fifty kneeling guests whose palms were raised in respect. Thunderously chanting the Metta Sutta (discourse on loving-kindness) at the front of the room near the Buddha altar while grasping rosary beads, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Men and women around me were weeping and the little girl next to me suffering from first-degree burns was quivering. I found myself to be swept up in the waves of emotions that seemed to be washing over the audience. At the beginning of my research, I found my attitude to be somewhat critical of these healing activities. I approached them with the same skepticism I felt towards healers from certain Christian groups who are often accused of taking advantage of people for the sake of money. 181

Interview MAA-28-F. “Abha,” or “grandfather,” being a term of endearment for Bo Min Gaung. 182

Gold, Daniel. 1999. “Nath yogis as established alternatives: Householders and ascetics today.” Journal of Asian & African Studies. 34: 1, p.84. 98

Such skepticism became less intense the longer I observed and interacted with Burmese people involved with weizzā mediums and healings. I soon came to see that the relationships, roles, and motivations of the agents involved were much more complicated and nuanced than I had initially imagined. People’s suffering was being allayed. Women were gaining a voice in their families and communities. Sāsana and public works were being completed with donated money.183 These vocations of faith-healers, hermits, and clairvoyants provide women avenues of employment, power, and self-esteem not easily found in other parts of Burmese society. They are often sought out for help even during those times when they are not possessed by a weizzā. And it’s not only those women who hold such positions who benefit, but the women who come to seek their help as well. “I feel shy going to a monk to tell him about my problems,” one woman told me. “There are certain things we can only share with other women,” giggled another, while her friend added, “Family issues, female only problems, and” smiling shyly, “relations with one’s husband.” 184 Indeed, the hermitess, Daw Vaṇṇathingagī, and others like her, say that most of her clients are women who come seeking her advice on marital, money, and job problems.185

Conclusion For the weizzā devotees in this chapter, the saints are mediating entities in more ways than one. Firstly, the appearance of, and healing by, the weizzā saints, either through dreams or visions, act as specific manifestations and appeasements of physical maladies that manifest in 183

This fits with Ikeya’s findings that “economic prowess enabled women to undertake meritmaking activities such as contributing donations to pagodas” (2011: 51). 184

KMT-F-42-Yangon; MML-F-45-Mandalay; KSA-F-48-Mandalay.

185

NYK no.143, 1998, p.101. 99

forms of culturally specific repertoires. Secondly, the weizzā saints act as supports for their (mostly female) devotees against communities that challenge the devotees’ hopes and aspirations. My findings fit with well-established analyses of similar spirit possession phenomenon throughout the world as forms of “conflict management that disguise and yet resolve social tensions.”186 Certain ways of conceptualizing problems that devotees might be dealing with, as well as understandings of healing power, are dispersed, internalized and propagated throughout the country through various media, which helps people to experience their material bodies as closely linked with their religion-as-lived. Common themes that continually appear in interviews and literature of the devout include poverty, physical or mental trauma, domestic problems, desire for freedom from their current lot in life, and the sudden increase in social and economic prestige as a result of their power.187 In the process of telling their stories devotees move from being casualties of karmic circumstances to the narrators of them. They realign themselves in relation to what is happening and seize the authority of identifying cause and effect, and mapping the chain of events, they impose and discover patterns and order in their situations that seem chaotic, meaningless and threatening. 186

Ong, Aiwa. 1988. “The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia.” American Ethnologist, Vol. 15, No. 1, Medical Anthropology, 28. Pattana Kitiarsa’s fieldwork among Thai female spirit mediums uncovered similar themes. For example, one of his informants indicated to Pattana that she had gone insane after her husband had left her for another woman. The woman’s mental health returned soon after allowing a spirit to use her as a medium. Pattana notes that “her life has gradually improved and returned to normalcy as she accepted her new identity as a female spirit medium…For [her] Spirit mediumship can be seen as her new gender and self identities (identity) were born out of life crises and suffering. Experiences of encountering the deity provide her with an organized framework to contemplate her past and present existence.” Pattana Kitiarsa. 2005. “Magic Monks and Spirit Mediums in the Politics of Thai Popular Religion.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. 6:2, 2005, 218. 187

Rozenberg (2010) refers to such individuals as “vulnerables,” in that they are mainly poor, uneducated villagers who find their newfound vocations of mediums and healers to be avenues to fame and fortune. Pattana (2005: 218) calls the urban counterpart, “urban marginal population.” 100

Chapter Three: Vanguards of the Sāsana Outside of issues involving healing the sick and protecting humanity, weizzā devotees are most concerned with ensuring that the Buddha sāsana continues to thrive in Myanmar, and ideally, throughout the world. Sāsana (broadly, the teachings of the Buddha and the institutions and practices that support them) and how it should be sustained in the face of its inevitable demise has been a central concern of weizzā devotees and their associations expressed in both their textual and oral representations. To illustrate this tension between endurance and change, this chapter explores ideas of the life cycle of the sāsana and how it intersects with weizzā activities, particularly addressing how ideas about sāsana responsibility to wider communities of Buddhists become expressed through the intersection of sāsana and weizzā from the years immediately following Independence of 1948.188 I will examine the ways weizzā associations and individual devotees understand themselves to be protecting and propagating the sāsana through various means provided to them by weizzā to show how ideas about sāsana vitality give some forms of weizzā practice a distinct collective and collectively ethical tone.

Decline of the Sāsana The first half of the twentieth century can be seen as the high point for the formation of lay Buddhist associations and especially those dedicated to the weizzā path and whose primary

I chose the period because it is around this time that we begin to see the formal organizing of weizzā associations taking shape, a sudden outburst of print media put out by these associations occurs, and is about as far back in time as my oldest informants can recall memories regarding their knowledge of weizzā activities.

188

101

aim was to strengthen the sāsana throughout the country.189 Those groups that have advanced to some degree of institutionalization are referred to as gaing, a word that has a range of synonymous meanings that include “community,” “congregation,” and “association.”190 They are often exclusive associations, organized around a set of tenets, headed by a charismatic leader, and with devotion centered upon one or more weizzā saints. Members are given esoteric teachings aimed at developing supernatural powers through the practices of meditation, alchemy, reciting of mantras and magical incantations, ingesting sacred diagrams, and studying cabbalistic squares. These associations were often made of members who came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Merchants, office workers, taxi cab drivers, booksellers, housewives, and monastics all joined these gaing to varying degrees of involvement and engaged in activities that included pagoda construction, healing ceremonies, sermonizing, and general Buddhist missionary work throughout the country (all of which were understood by members to be part of strengthening the sāsana). Regardless of weizzā affiliation of these associations, and the activities they chose to focus on, they all had one thing in common, and that was to defend and propagate, at all costs, the Buddha sāsana. What was this concern of defending the sāsana in response to? And why was the sāsana seen as something so important as to justify the large amounts of time and effort associations put into defending it? Protecting and maintaining the sāsana was important because it presented the 189

Turner’s research shows that hundreds of Buddhist lay associations were founded in Myanmar from 1890 to 1920 in an attempt to stem the decline of Buddhism. She writes that already “by the first years of the twentieth century the quantity and diversity of the Buddhist associations well outstripped the other religious and ethnic organizations.” Turner, Alicia. Saving Buddhism: Moral Community and the Impermanence of Colonial Religion. Univ. Of Hawaii Press, forthcoming. p.29. 190

The term is not only reserved for weizzā groups. It also refers to monastic lineages. For more on this aspect of gaing, see Carbine, Jason. Sons of the Buddha. 2011. 102

potentiality of people who came into contact with it to attain nibbāna, i.e. escape from the rounds of perpetual rebirth. Of course, the number of Buddhists who were actually intent on achieving such a goal in the immediate future was small, but the belief that the Buddha sāsana was the means for such an ambition was “a powerful impetus for preserving it in the present.”191 If the sāsana presented the only gateway to Buddhist salvation, then one can easily imagine how crucial it was for Buddhists to protect and propagate it. Secondly, for the vast majority of Buddhists who did not wish to (as is the case for many weizzā path practitioners) attain enlightenment in their current or proximate lifetimes, the sāsana offered a means for improving their lives as they traversed the cycle of rebirths. As Carbine rightly points out, in addition to enlightenment, the sāsana offered “various kinds of action conducive to better rebirth,” which, in turn, would help to further sustain the sāsana because those beings reborn into better lives would be more likely inclined to support and carry out activities related to the sāsana.192 What had happened to the sāsana in the years prior that inspired such large numbers of people to take up the charge as vanguards of the sāsana? Historians of Burmese Buddhism have shown how Buddhists, both monastic and lay alike, found it increasingly difficult to sustain the sāsana during the unstable period of British colonial rule, especially after the British dissolved the monarchy in 1885. Kings in Myanmar and throughout South and Southeast Asia had long acted as promoters of the Buddhist faith in order to justify their rule.193 In Burmese royal

191

Carbine 2011: 170.

192

Ibid., 170.

193

Cady 1956: 8. 103

coronation ceremonies for example, kings were asked whether they would protect Buddhism.194 Jason Carbine notes that with the British’s dissolution of the monarchy, legal authority of the state-supported head of the monastic community, and monastic-based educational system, among other things, Burmese Buddhists perceived the British to be undermining “the stability of certain kinds of communal activity long connected to the persistence of the sāsana” and thus hastening the sāsana’s decline.195 The deposition of the Buddhist King, Thibaw, by the British in 1885 required Buddhists to quickly think of new and innovative ways for protecting and promoting the sāsana. One of the main ways Burmese went about accomplishing this task was to come together and take responsibility for the Buddha sāsana by forming Buddhist associations. Through these associations, Buddhists carried out programs for educational, moral and religious reform with the idea that a renewed enthusiasm and devotion among Buddhists could counter the erosion of the Buddha’s sāsana. The idea that responsibility for the sāsana fell to the laity after the fall of the monarchy constructed Burmese Buddhists as a new collective, uniting geographically and socially disparate Burmese in a common endeavor. Turner proposes that “projects of Buddhist associations offered a means to approach the changes Burmese could feel but could not quite describe … [while offering] a language to conceive of the seismic shifts that came with the colonial condition, a means of understanding how the ground was shifting under their feet.”196 We see, then, that a strong awareness of social turmoil and the fragility of the sāsana mobilized 194

Smith 1965: 21.

195

Carbine 2011: 86. Cady notes that when the laity realized that they could not save the monarchy, lay and clerical leaders from Mandalay and Yangon attempted to get the British to “establish a religious primate for all Burma and undertake to support his authority” (1958: 152). 196

Turner 2009: 213. 104

the wider Buddhist public with such intensity. For instance, the sharp and terrifying rise in alcoholism, and the damaging mental and physical illnesses that resulted from it, were tangible examples understood by the Burmese to be consequences resulting from the deterioration of the Buddha sāsana under colonial rule.197 An increase in young peoples’ involvement in gambling, wearing British styled clothing, growing lack of respect for Buddhism and the elderly, and other negative influences of British culture, were all perceived to have caused Burmese to turn away from, or lessen their preoccupation with, Buddhism, which lead to a decline in the sāsana’s vitality.198 As historians of Buddhism in Myanmar have noted, large segments of the Buddhist population decided very soon after the fall of the monarchy that the most efficient way of combating such societal ills was to band together and engage in activities and that would renew the power of the sāsana.199 Bolstering the sāsana through Buddhist means, therefore, quickly became a rallying cause of solidarity; an organizing principle for Burmese Buddhists from a range of socio-economic backgrounds to get behind and work together to explicitly strengthen the sāsana while challenging the colonial regime and its degenerative legacies. 197

British policy licensed the sale of liquor and opium and made hefty profits from their trade. As a result, drinking and opium use had increased among the Burmese population, and Buddhists at the turn of the century responded with their own calls for temperance. 198

Chie Ikeya (2011) shows how initially good Buddhists had become corrupted by the nonBuddhist influences of British culture. 199

Erik Braun has shown how the activities of the monk, Ledi Sayadaw, in the 19th and 20th centuries, spurred laypeople to engage in large movements of studying Buddhist philosophical systems and engage in mass meditation practice --- all as attempts to bolster the strength of the sāsana (Braun, Erik. 2013 The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. Chicago Univ Press, 2013). Turner, focusing especially on the lay segments of the Burmese Buddhist population, similarly shows how groups of religious lay organizations sprung up all across the country during the Colonial Era to engage in widespread Buddhist propagation activities to improve the populations’ moral discipline, which would lead to a stronger sāsana (Turner, forthcoming). 105

We see a different set of concerns for why the sāsana was declining when we examine weizzā-related sources from the post-colonial era. Rather than looking to the past for evidence of the sāsana’s decay, weizzā devotees looked to the current political and religious state of affairs of their time and read into them, with the help of prophetic literature, information of what was to come and how to act. Books and magazine articles related to the weizzā that began appearing in 1948 (the year Myanmar gained independence) contains little to no vitriolic rhetoric targeted at the British (or Japanese) nor any mention of exactly how colonization was thought to have directly hastened the sāsana’s demise.200 In place of the British and their lack of sāsana patronage, weizzā devotees worried about other issues that could threaten an already weakened sāsana. The monk and weizzā devotee, U Jotipala, for instance, complained about the proliferation of socialists and communists in the world and the suffering they cause the people of their respective countries because their ideologies were opposed to Buddhism.201 Another author of weizzā-related publications, U Paw Oo, looked to the Yangon newspapers for evidence of a world that was in its final days. This period in Burmese history was a tumultuous one, marked by

200

U Paw Oo, for example, wrote in a popular 1949 book with strong weizzā overtones that, starting from the moment when the pagoda “finial and its bells were broken” (referring to the deposing of King Thibaw in 1885 by the British) that the Burmese have been hoping for a “royal defender of the faith” (B. thathana-pyu-min) to arrive (1949: 5). Of course, with the demise of colonialism, one can point out that there was no need for anti-colonial sentiment in the weizzā writings that began to significantly proliferate in the early years of independence, and thus no need for writers to paint a picture of a sāsana that needed defending from an occupying power. But we should take seriously Yaoko Hayami’s proposition that we be wary of “automatically label[ing] such acts as ‘anti-British.’ Rather, we should take into account that these millenarianist cults just happened to take place in British occupied territory and ‘had become ‘anti-British’ when the British had defined it as resistance to their rule by sending forces against them” (Yaoko Hayami Between hills and plains: power and practices in socio-religious dynamics among Karen. 2004. Kyoto: Trans Pacific Press, 181).

201

Jotipala 1952: 13. 106

waves of insurgencies by communist factions, rebel army groups, and ethnic minorities.202 U Paw Oo read in the local newspapers that Kareni soldiers killed over 900 people in the town of Pyin Oo Lwin, communist forces entered Mandalay,203 large numbers of people were being murdered throughout the country, poverty was widespread,204 rebels killed monks and laypeople on a daily basis;205 ethnic groups, like the Shan, Kachin, and Chin peoples were constantly quarreling due to their adherences to false and heretical ideologies.206 All of this, couple with similar political and societal unrest around the world was evidence to U Paw Oo, and others like him, that the sāsana had reached an all-time low. It was not all doom and gloom, however, as these events were also taken as signs that Myanmar was on the threshold of a new and better future.

“Liberation Era” and a New World Order What exactly did weizzā devotees envision this future to be? To help us with this question, we must first understand the overarching narrative of sāsana decline that informed the devotees present and future worldviews. The Buddhist temporal scheme for the life of the sāsana is comprised of cyclical progressions of eons of decline, destruction and renewal. Some eons have buddhas while others do not, but for those eons fortunate enough to have a buddha, this buddha puts forth teachings that will endure for a finite period of time before they disappear 202

Smith, Martin J. 1991. Burma: insurgency and the politics of ethnicity. London: Zed Books.

203

U Paw Oo 1949: 69.

204

Ibid., 103.

205

Ibid., 109.

206

Ibid., 143-44. 107

from the world at which time a new eon will commence. These teachings, and the institutions and practices that support their flourishing, are what is meant here by “sāsana.” For example, the period of time for the flourishing of the current buddha’s sāsana (5000 years) is the temporal scheme that has been informing Buddhists’ conceptions of duration of the sāsana and with it, the eon in which they live and will be reborn into. While Buddhist sources offer a variety of schema for sāsana decline and disappearance, the one proposed by medieval Indian commentator, Buddhaghosa, was the one that became normative for Buddhists in Myanmar. Appearing in the Manoratha Pūraṇī commentary on the Anguttara Nikaya, Buddhaghosa details a five-fold sequence through which the sāsana will disappear over the course of a five-thousand year period beginning with the demise of Gotama Buddha. The following five components that contribute to the life of the sāsana will take place --- each corresponding to a one-thousand year time span: inability to attain insight, monks no longer living in accordance with monastic discipline, loss of textual knowledge, lack of adherence to the ascetic life, and finally the disappearance of the Buddha’s relics. Jan Nattier has pointed out that Buddhist texts from both the Theravāda and Mahayana traditions say little about whether human intervention has an impact on the decline of the sāsana: “In a number of narrative texts where the effects of human actions are the center of attention, we find specific timetables for the duration of the Dharma. Yet the very existence of these timetables suggests that the lifespan of the Dharma is fixed, and thus not subject to human intervention.”207 Alicia Turner and Tilman Frasch have illustrated how such ambivalence has allowed Burmese in 207

Nattier, 1991 : 119. For an overview of stories of decline in Buddhism, see Nattier, Jan. Once Upon a Future Time : Studies in a Buddhist Prophecy of Decline. Nanzan Studies in Asian Religions. 108

the colonial and post-colonial eras to allow diverse readings that were, as we now see, determined by the conditions of the time.208 One such reading was to be found amongst weizzā association members in the midtwentieth century. A popular belief that had spread through Myanmar around this time was that as the halfway point of the Buddha’s sāsana was approaching, the country would soon be entering into what was to be known as the “Vimutti Yuga Khit,” or “Liberation Era.” As Gustaaf Houtman and Niklas Foxeus have pointed out in their research of this period, the notion of this Liberation Era --- a time of prosperity and relative ease in making progress along the Buddhist path to nirvāna --- was widespread, most likely brought upon by a powerful sense of optimism experienced by Burmese in light of the country’s newly gained independence, proliferation of lay associations working to strengthen the sāsana, and Prime Minister U Nu’s Buddhist revivalist plans.209 This view of a coming “Liberation Era” was part of a sāsana temporal scheme that differed from the one put forth by Buddhaghosa. This more conventional theory, if you will remember, also postulated that the sāsana would endure for 5000 years but that its deterioration would take place in five, 1000 year increments starting from the moment of the Buddha’s

208

Turner, 2014 : 47-48. Frasch, Tilman. 2013. “Buddhist Councils in a Time of Transition: Globalism, Modernity and the Preservation of Textual Traditions.” Contemporary Buddhism 14.1. 209

Foxeus 2011: 202. For a concise and thorough discussion of U Nu’s plans for Buddhist revivalism, see Mendelson (1975: 262-276). Pranke notes how a cult of charisma surrounding various monks thought to be arahants developed around this time, most likely part of the hopefulness surrounding newly won national independence in 1948, and the 2500th anniversary of the Buddha’s parinibbāna in 1956 (Pranke 2012). 109

enlightenment and continue to gradually decay until it vanished completely from the world.210 While such a theory had provided the Burmese Buddhists with a basis for how to make sense of the fall of the monarchy and subsequent social ills that were brought upon by colonialism, for instance, it was not adequate to explain for weizzā devotees how the sāsana was to survive once the colonial power left and Myanmar was granted independence in 1948. The alternative chronological scheme addressed this. With the colonial powers gone, weizzā lay associations could now focus on restoring the Buddha sāsana to its earlier, albeit imagined, splendor. Not on their watch was the sāsana to disappear from their country, and with lots of hard work, they could counter-act the negative effects that had been wrought on the sāsana, stabilize it, and then propel its power into the future, that weizzā devotees believed, would be a liberated future. Foxeus has brought our attention to the importance placed on notions of this “Liberation Era” among weizzā devotees by showing how important the cyclical scheme of decline was central to their mission of strengthening and propagating the sāsana.211 Like the decline theory found in the commentaries noted above, the waning of the sāsana was believed to take place in two, 2500 year phases. This theory differed in that, instead of a long, sustained decline lasting 5000 years, the sāsana would 210

This theory can be found in the Manoratha pūraṇī commentary on the Anguttara Nikaya Anguttara Atthakatha (Buddhaghosa. 1956. Manoratha-Pūranī; commentary on the Anguttara nikāya. Vol. V. London: Published for the Pāli Text Society by Luzac.) See Houtman 1990: 84 for a more detailed analyses of this schema. Turner (forthcoming: 42-48) provides valuable information on a theory of decline from the Anāgata Vamsa (History of the Future) that discusses the eventual arrival of the next buddha, Metteyya. She illustrates how popular and widespread it was among Buddhists in Myanmar during the colonial era. A common belief among members of some weizzā associations is that they can, through various practices learned along the weizzā path, prolong their lives so that they can be around when Metteyya arrives. My recent ethnographic work has shown that such a view is not as common as it may have been in the twentieth century. 211

Foxeus 2011: 202. 110

decline for 2500 years, renew itself, and go through another decline until it disappeared completely from the world. Foxeus explains this complex theory well: The cyclical scheme comprised five stages as follows: 1) the Liberation Era, 2) the Era of Concentration Meditation, 3) the Era of Suttas, 4) the Era of Buddhist Precepts, and 5) the Donation Era. After the Donation Era had reached its end, the Liberation Era would thus begin again.212 The weizzā-related source material Foxeus examined placed the Donation Era during the years of colonial rule, and that at the point when the Donation Era reached its lowest, “the cycle would all of a sudden shift to the highest point of the first phase, the Liberation Era.”213 According to most sources, the Liberation Era would re-commence sometime in the 1950s.214 Along with this idea of the arrival of a golden era of the sāsana, we also see prophecies spreading of a messianic Buddhist king appearing in Myanmar during this exact time period. Two well-known prophetic sayings at this time were: “at the midway point of the sāsana, a virtuous king will shine”215 and “at the midway point of the sāsana, a virtuous king will carry on 212

Ibid., 202. Houtman (1990) and Jordt (2010) indicate that this second, cyclical theory of decline was well-known and discussed among non-weizzā associations and communities of the time. 213

Ibid., 203.

214

See, for example, U Paw Oo 1949: 63. Members of the Ariya Weizzā association believed the Liberation Era to have already commenced at about 1957 (Foxeus 2011: 196). Houtman shows how this cyclical schema of the sāsana lasting over two cycles of 2,500 years after the parinibbana of the Buddha's demise, in which the focus of Buddhist action deteriorates from that of vipassanā meditation to carrying out acts of charity, to make place for an upturn during the twentieth century with vipassanā again, was accepted by most vipassanā meditation communities. Juliane Schober (2012), drawing on Patrick Pranke’s (2010) article on vipassanā meditation and the weizzā phenomenon, writes that “the formation of weikza practices in Burma occurs in concert with the rising popularity of rational vipassanā (insight) meditation practices…thus situat[ing] the construction of weikza practices within a broader discourse of the Burmese encounter with modernity in the 19th century” (2012: 282-83). 215

“Thāthanā ta-wek, min-kaung ta-kyek.” 111

[the sāsana into the new era].”216 This, no doubt, added a sense of urgency to weizzā associations’ missions. This period during the 1950s happened to coincide with a historical moment characterized by millennial beliefs in the Theravāda world about the approaching midpoint of the Buddhist dispensation and the imminent arrival of a Universal Monarch whose reign would bring prosperity. Such beliefs were linked to notions of religious decline and revival by way of a messianic figure who was often associated with the Buddha Metteyya who was prophesied to appear in a future time and restore the dhamma and the sangha.217 Even the location chosen for the 6th Buddhist Council is linked with the weizzā when, in 1948, a “Holy Man, who was dressed in pure white clothes” presented a devout layman with a staff and urged that it be handed over to Prime Minister U Nu so that he may be convinced to erect a pagoda that, if built, would usher in an era of peace and prosperity across the world.218 “There is all sorts of news and rumors going around these days about weizzās appearing soon to protect the sāsana and country,” a lead figure from one of the weizzā associations of this period writes. “Some even believe that Bo Min Gaung is [this king] coming to protect the sāsana and country at the halfway point of the sāsana's dispensation.”219 Both U Pwa Oo and U Jotipala, the weizzā 216

“Thāthanā ta-wek, min-kaung ta-sek.” Sarkisyanz notes that such prophecies were popular during his visit to Myanmar in the 1950s. (1961: 55). 217

Frasch 2013.

218

Brohm 1957: 395. As noted in the previous two chapters, the religious figure dressed in white robes (B. hwet-pyu-shin) is almost always in reference to the wandering religious mendicants, or bodaw, associated with the weizzā path. They are often seen, as well as portrayed in iconography, carrying a staff or long walking stick. Mendelson, too, sees messianic Buddhist elements in this account, especially in that the mysterious white clad mendicant was “intimately related with the idea of the Sangayana…” (Mendelson 1977: 273). 219

Pathamam Taya Magazine: p.36 “Aung Min Gaung and the 80,000.” The fact that Bo Min Gaung’s name contained the words, “min-gaung” (noble king) was certainly not lost on the devout. Bo Min Gaung was also considered by his devotees to be Buddha Metteyya in the form 112

authors we saw above, writing in 1949 and 1952 respectively, proclaimed that the country was on the threshold of a new era --- an era governed by the weizzā. U Paw Oo wrote that there is hope among the Burmese people that “the era will arrive soon to usher in peace and prosperity in the world”220 while U Jotipala stressed the need for weizzā devotees to go to all parts of the country to convert the Chinese, Indians, Kachins, Chins, and other ethnic Burmese minorities to Buddhism in order to help usher in this new era.221 U Kyaw Hein, an elderly gentleman who shared his experiences as a young weizzā association member, told me how his, and his friends and family’s, involvement in the association actually grew considerably in the years immediately following liberation as they got swept up in the euphoria of a potential new era of Buddhist ruled democracy and that “our association kept on doing the same thing after the British left as when they were here: collecting donations, using them for sāsana related activities, like building pagodas and rest houses, and practicing meditation” but that the focus shifted from doing these activities so as to keep the sāsana from disappearing under British rule to “repairing it from the damage [it sustained] under colonialism to make it stronger than ever before for future Buddhists.”222 Much of this activity and religious fervor are reflected in, and no doubt heightened by, the convening of the Sixth Buddhist Council and its preoccupation with how to protect, sustain,

of a phaya laung, or, “imminent Buddha.” 220

U Paw Oo 1949: 4. The Liberation Era being the sixth of ten 500 year periods until the complete disappearance of the Buddha sāsana. 221

U Jotipala 1952: 13.

222

Interview UKH-88-M. 113

and propagate the sāsana. The Sixth Buddhist Council held in Rangoon from 1954 to 1956 was, according to Jordt, “the most visible and renowned effort” of the government and ecclesiastical authorities to revitalize the sāsana in Myanmar and was “seen as marking off a new period in history in which the sāsana would be universalized.”223 The date of the synod was significant for it concluded in May 1956, which coincided with the 2500th anniversary of Sakyamuni Buddha’s parinibbāna and thus the halfway point of the 5000-year period thought to separate the historical Buddha from his successor Metteya. Similar to the councils held in the 15th century, the Sixth Council was embedded in millenarian thinking and Metteyanic expectations.224 Many weizzā devotees believed that the Liberation Era was to commence in 1956 at the end of the council. Foxeus identifies that the dual cycle of sāsana decline of two, 2500 year periods, was even brought up at the Sixth Buddhist Council but that the more normative theory of a gradual decline over the course of five periods of 1000 years was considered valid.225 Note that, at least by the 1990s and probably as early as the 1980s, most weizzā devotees no longer adhered to the “liberation era” theory. Among no informants nor in any of the sources I consulted from the 1990s, did I came across any reference to the cyclical schema of the sāsana’s decline that was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. It seemed as if most Buddhists (weizzā-affiliated and otherwise) had settled upon accepting the more traditional theory of decline put forth at the Sixth Buddhist Council. Many devotees believed that an era where weizzā ruled the country was about to arrive but that it still fit in with the general theory of the gradual, 5000 year decline of 223

Jordt 2010: 30.

224

Frasch 2013.

225

Foxeus 2011: 204. Pranke notes that subsequent publications by the Ministry of Religious Affairs that discuss the sāsana’s lifespan omit reference to the theory (2010: 466). 114

the sāsana.226

Lay Weizzā Associations U Kyaw Hein, an eighty-eight year old man who had spent most of his life as a member of a weizzā association made this clear to me when he told me that his association’s activities really “had very little to do with the British. Although we weren’t monks, we saw ourselves as taking part in guarding the sāsana, the way we saw monks carrying out this duty.” “But,” he continued, “our association leaders making it a priority to talk about ‘protecting the sāsana from the evil British’ was certainly effective in gaining members. That’s why me and my friends joined!”227 He went on to discuss that although most of their day-to-day activities and larger events were centered around engaging in activities to bolster the sāsana, he remembered one story that was often told by members of his weizzā association that he really enjoyed when he was younger because it provided proof of the awesome powers of the weizzā during colonial times and illustrated the potential power of his organization: In 1906, the weizzā saint, Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw, walked right into the British occupied Mandalay Palace wearing his tattered robes and immediately climbed to the top of the large watchtower. Thinking him to be mad, the Indian soldiers who were there under British command at the time, ordered Sayadaw to leave. When he refused, the soldiers began beating him with their batons, but the more they struck Sayadaw, the

226

Apart from the Sixth Council itself, the Buddha Jayanti celebrations during the mid-1950s inspired a host of other activities elsewhere in the Buddhist world, most notably in Sri Lanka where, as George Bond notes, “millennial expectations characterized the Buddhists’ interpretations of the Jayanti anniversary.” Bond, George Doherty. 1988. The Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka: religious tradition, reinterpretation, and response. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 77. Frasch (2013) points out that the Sixth Council in Myanmar provided an impetus for Buddhists in other parts of Asia to attempt to spread the dhamma across Asia, such as in India. 227

Interview UKH-88-M. 115

calmer he became and the angrier the soldiers got. Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw Sayadaw merely kept saying, ‘‘It does not hurt me, but it hurts you.” Suddenly, each time one soldier hit Sayadaw, a sharp pain was felt by all the soldiers! Asking for his forgiveness, the soldiers ceased hitting Sayadaw and bowed to him paying their respects. At seeing this, the British commanders became angry and sent a very big and nasty Indian soldier to deal with Sayadaw. He beat Sayadaw mercilessly, but Sayadaw only kept saying, ‘It does not hurt me, but it hurts you.’ Like the others, the Indian soldier put down his weapon in reverent awe. The British commanders then had Sayadaw arrested and placed in a jail cell. The British head minister of this regiment was a Mister Garand. He was amazed at Sayadaw’s abilities. In prison, he never saw Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw Sayadaw lie down, eat or drink, try to hurt or kill any insects, and never get skinny even though he never slept or ate. Eventually, even this British head minister felt such respect for Sayadaw that he too got down on his knees to pay homage to the sayadaw. As soon as Mister Garand finished bowing, Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw Sayadaw said, “Ok, my work here is done,” and suddenly disappeared from the jail cell.228 We see here, then, an example of how weizzā groups could imagine themselves engaging in Buddhist activities that might even, as Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw had done, convert, or at least gain the respect of, non-Buddhist colonizers through the power of the Buddha sāsana.229 Concurrently, we see in later parts of the 19th century and through the first half of the 20th, that with a new sense of participation, the weight of the responsibility for the sāsana shifted down the social hierarchy to the broad base of the Buddhist laity.230 As individual Buddhists became united by their participation in this collective body responsible for the sāsana they could take on 228

This story seems to be quite popular as I have since come across it several times in magazines and books about famous weizzā saints. My informant attributes Sayadaw’s invulnerability as ‘kaya siddhi’ --- a byproduct of his intense samatha (concentration meditation) practice that kept him from getting killed by clubs, knives, and guns. ‘This was definitely a power us younger members wanted to get,’ he said. 229

Such people who are unsympathetic to the sāsana are thought to hasten its decline (Carbine 2011: 170).

230

See especially, Jordt 2007, Turner 2009, and Braun 2013. For a discussion of the move from a hierarchical and segmented Buddhism to one “flattened” and based upon a doctrine for the masses, see Kirichenko 2009. 116

new duties and modes of preserving the teachings where, with the absence of a king, fell to the laity at large. And as elderly, U Kyaw Hein said above, no longer was it enough to support the livelihood of the monks so that they could learn the Buddha’s teachings, now the laity sought to preserve that knowledge themselves. It should be pointed out that weizzā associations were just a fraction of the hundreds of lay Buddhist associations that had been formed over the years, both during and after colonialism, to promote Buddhism and prevent the decline of the Buddhist sāsana in perceived decadent and changing times.231 Drawing upon longstanding projects to preserve the sāsana, “guardian associations” (B. gopaka ahpwe), or lay voluntary institutions, made up of members who had shared invested interests in “doing sāsana work” (B. thāthana aloke) developed throughout the country. Ingrid Jordt and Alicia Turner have showed that these associations proliferated during and after the colonial period as self-conscious efforts laypeople made to reverse a supposed decay in the sāsana. This concern created waves of Buddhist publishing, preaching and organizing, and led Buddhist lay people in towns across the country to found hundreds of associations. What separated weizzā associations from other Buddhist associations, however, was the strong emphasis they placed on not only saving the sāsana, but also in saving all human beings from around the world by exposing them to this sāsana. Because of the missionary zeal characteristic of so many of these weizzā associations, I have come to refer to them as “salvation armies.” Now what do I mean when I use the term, “salvation army,” to describe this, and similar, weizzā associations? Firstly, on an organizational level, like the Protestant Christian Church

231

I therefore agree with Niklas Foxeus (2011) that the weizzā associations were an outgrowth of such lay associations of the colonial period. 117

Salvation Army, these associations were made up of a hierarchical chain of command.232 Just short of using military titles (although they did employ royal terminology and some of the associations’ subcommittees referred to their members, such as those belonging to the Universal Monarch security forces, as "Buddha's soldiers" (B. hpaya sittha), many of these associations printed command hierarchy charts, complete with profile pictures, indicating a senior member’s station or rank, and inserted them into handbooks read by new recruits.233 Often these associations used the term, “army,” (B. tap) in their descriptions. However, these armies were not overtly militaristic in nature, but acted more as reserve groups who united to carry out, with war-like zeal, the task of defending and propagating the sāsana.234 “Burma and the rest of the world is going through a time of great unrest. Many people are suffering. Everyone is hoping for peace,” wrote the editor of Pathamam Taya Magazine in 1948 before going on to condemn the use of weapons and violence: “We have seen many people suffer from the dangers of weapons. While nowadays it is trendy to talk about rebelling against the establishment and to use weapons 232

See Foxeus (2011) for a thorough discussion of how the weizzā associations function in terms of money, leadership, strategic decisions, dissemination programs, etc. As far as I am aware, however, no study has been published on how weizzā leadership formed and functioned in social terms, especially when it comes to determining who these leaders were, their access to technology, and their ability to garner social assent. I thank Anne Blackburn for bringing these points to my attention.

233

Specific example of such charts can be found in the following manuals: Vijja-maha-iddhi Nanga-man Win Gaing; Buddha-raja Theruppatti; Mano-cittuppada Gaing Daw Gyi Micchapayoga-ku-htone-kyam hnin Twet-yat-pauk-lam-hnyun. 234

Foxeus, (2011, 250) glosses the term nicely as “volunteer corps.” He also points out that the idea of these “armies” were quite popular from the 1930-1960s and could be found in various groups all over the country. Some, indeed, endorsed and practiced actual physical para-military activities. Accordingly, they constituted an army seeking to conquer the entire world to bring it under the dominion of the world emperor and Buddhist norms and values. Some associations, such as the Pathamam Association, also allowed “project” or “auxiliary” groups made up of smaller congregations, devoted to the worship of nat, that were called upon to do their parts in safeguarding the sāsana. 118

to help usher in peace … this goes against Buddhism. One cannot be a Buddhist soldier using weapons for peace. Only through loving-kindness can we be free from dangers.”235 According to these critics, weizzā associations’ battles against perceived threats to the sāsana were fought to save Buddhism from a feared extinction. Such battles were “held on account of an on-going war between Buddhism and the evil, anti-Buddhist forces” --- a war, Foxeus reminds us, “was fought by members seated in a cross-legged position.”236 Like the Christian Salvation Army, these weizzā associations adapted Anglo-American temperance pledges reminiscent of those required by members of the Christian association. Identical to Protestant Salvation Army's opposition to alcohol and frequenting brothels, weizzā associations, like the Mano-citta-pada and Shwe-yin-kyaw Associations, required all members to take an oath to refrain from drinking alcohol and engaging in sexual misconduct. Some associations, like the Pathamam Association, included full-page pledges in their monthly magazines that one could tear out, sign, and send back to the association’s headquarters. As social and religious fraternal orders (like the Freemasons) expanded rapidly in Europe and North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so too did they take root in Myanmar as the number of colonial officials residing in the country grew.237 Many of these orders were strong proponents of promoting temperance and engaging in other kinds of moralist

235

PTM no.2, 1948. P. 5 “The Time for Aung Min Gaung to Support the Country Has Arrived.”

236

Foxeus 2011: 350.

237

For discussions of such orders developing in Europe and North America, see Bullock, Steven C.; Institute of Early American History and Culture (Williamsburg, Va.) (1996). Revolutionary brotherhood: Freemasonry and the transformation of the American social order, 1730–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. For Colonial Burma, see Turner, forthcoming: 62-63. 119

campaigns.238 With its establishment in Myanmar in 1915, the Salvation Army, as well as organizations like it, must have had at least nominal influence on Buddhist lay associations during this time.239 Lastly, I use the term, “salvation army” because such associations were hell-bent on defending and propagating the sāsana for the literal “collective salvation” of all humanity. These Burmese religious groups saw their duty to missionize the teaching of the Buddha as taught to them by the weizzā throughout the world. Manuals for associations like that of the Mano-mayaiddhi, as well as published books about the life and teachings of the weizzā Bo Min Gaung and Yakansin-taung Sayadaw, all contain language of providing salvation for fellow humans who come into contact with the sāsana. Common words used throughout include kay, as in saving someone from danger, and kay-tin, as in saving a person from succumbing to immoral acts. Drawing upon techniques and technologies employed by Buddhist and non-Buddhist lay associations, weizzā associations incorporated print media into their proselytizing missions.240 During this period, magazines, printed books, and other forms of print media were employed by weizzā associations because they enabled the diffusion of their messages across the country and offered a new way for members and non-members to have access to their teachings and practices 238

Turner (forthcoming: 67).

239

The association Foxeus studied even referred to themselves as “Freemasons.” Turner shows how European and indigenous social reformers’ attempts to regulate behavior were ‘part of the spirit of the age in Southeast Asia and around the Victorian colonial world’ (forthcoming: 67). 240

King Mindon had a printing press installed in the country as early as 1870 and print culture became important first in lower Burma, especially, as Braun notes, “under the relatively free market of print capitalism under colonialism” (Braun 2013: 68). With the annexation of upper Burma in 1885, and influenced by the intense Christian missionary use of print culture, individual Buddhists and larger associations began harnessing the power of print media for their own propagation goals. 120

centered around the protecting and propagating the sāsana propagation.241 Many of these publications were published on a monthly basis and could even be mailed to a member who purchased a subscription. This enabled the swift spread of ideas to many parts of the country where weizzā associations may not have had local chapters established. In addition to bringing in revenue to the associations’ operations and sāsana missionizing works, it helped to create a collective endeavor among weizzā devotees and “constructed a broad body of lay people as responsible for the sāsana”242 An excellent example of the use of print media for disseminating and recruiting members to such an association can be found in the journal, Pathamam Taya Magazin (Foremost Dhamma

241

Such publications were not patronized by the government, and after Ne Win took power, portrayals of weizzā and their supernatural powers were censored from written works and even films. Houtman noted how books on such topics were prohibited from being sold in bookshops during his years of fieldwork in the 1980s. During my years of fieldwork that lasted from 20052011, most weizzā-related publications were banned, although several magazines (like those referred to in this dissertation) were allowed to be published so long as stories of weizzā and their supernatural abilities were omitted. The 1990s, however, saw a very large number of weizzārelated articles printed in magazines, but by the late 1990s, the national censor board (Press Scrutiny Board), prohibited such stories to be published. When I asked the editors of one of these magazines about this, they told me that words such as “weizzā” and “bodaw” could not be printed. One of the rare instances I did find such words allowed to be put into print was in an article written by an author who was hostile to the weizzā path and who referred to me by name as a foreigner who had come to Myanmar to study such subjects (Myat-pan-ya-gone no.198, 2008). This has all changed with the recent political developments in Myanmar. Even months before the censor board was abolished in February 2013, publishers already began putting weizzā books back into circulation. Five new books on Bo Min Gaung were published in the last part of 2012. 242

In addition to print media and subscription lists, weizzā associations made members feel like part of a larger community in other ways. Bodaw Saw Hla, leader of the “Buddha Association,” or “Phaya Gaing,” issued membership cards as well as handing out small badges of silver with his face on it that members were expected to wear around their necks. Other associations, like the “Forest Sayadaw Cult,” issued medallions that members were asked to pin to their shirts as a way of pledging their loyalty to that association. Members of other associations, like those of the Shwe-yin-kyaw Association, wore rings with insignia that only other members could decipher. 121

Magazine).243 Published by a popular weizzā association of the time, known as the “Pathamam Gaing,” this journal, which began its brief publication run in 1948, was dedicated to the weizzā saint, Bo Min Gaung, and his sāsana missionary work.244 The editor, in the preface to the first issue, explains his association had decided to embark on publishing a monthly journal of this sort because “the Buddha’s sāsana, which nourishes followers with the medicine of the dhamma, has reached its half way point” and as such, needs protection at this crucial juncture.245 Those entrusted with “the protection and dissemination” of the sāsana include the “Weizzā and Master (B. weizzā-saya-gyi) Committee; “Buddha King Sāsana Propagation (Buddha-raja Sāsana-pyui) Committee; and the Bodaw Settya-min Committee.” Together, they form the “Ultimate Army” (B. Pathamam Tap Oo),” one of many “armies” of the period that I referred to above as “salvation armies.” Each of the association’s subcommittees was charged with carrying out certain tasks: The Weizzā-Saya committee was in charge of management, the Buddha-raja Sāsana-pyu committee’s role is that of propagation, while the Bodaw Settya-min committee is in charge of security.246 Together, they wrote up a set of “sāsana regulations” that are rules for this particular association’s success in disseminating its message and activities not only in Myanmar, 243

Pathamam here is the Pāli meaning “first”, but in this context can mean, “first/foremost” or even be a reference to an esoteric meaning of the word, ‘pathamam’, that is often used in weizzā discourse. 244

The Pāli word, “pathamam” (first), used here is often used to describe certain weizzā related persons or orgainzations, such as the weizzā, Pathamam Bo Bo Aung. With no clearly defineable definition, I have chosen to follow my informants who glossed it as “foremost”; “best”; etc. 245

PTM 1:1, p.2

246

Consider, for example, the “Tactical Encirclement Group.” Rozenberg studied this group in the early 2000s and learned that this group believed itself to act as the front line defense for Myanmar should any foreign power decide to invade. “If we had been around during colonial times,” the leader tells Rozenberg, “we would have repelled the British forces” (2010: 288). 122

but to the entire world. To this end, the association dedicated itself to carrying out its mission until a resurgence in the power of the Buddha sāsana and an overall interest in the weizzā path throughout the world occurs. The editor warned his readers that members of his salvation army would be on the frontline in the battle to carry out sāsana propagation works, and that to be “successful in our missions” members must be endowed with intelligence and kindness, as well as a strong resolve for doing sāsana work and gaining new members. Published monthly, the editor hoped his magazine would provide subscribers with the proper techniques and knowledge, as taught by the senior members of the association, for ensuring success in preserving and propagating the sāsana.

“Changing View of Sāsana-pyu” Up until now I have been speaking in general terms about weizzā channels engaging in sāsana work in order to defend or bolster the Buddha sāsana in Myanmar. What, exactly, did such activities entail, and how was it understood in sāsana discourse? Context-specific anxieties that arose among weizzā devotees in response to contemporary vicissitudes of the period they lived in influenced the ways they understood and made manifest “sāsana pyu.” Literally meaning, “to do religion,” sāsana pyu is understood to simultaneously encompass meanings of propagate, spread, develop, or missionize the sāsana and guard the Buddha’s teachings.247 Devotees in different time periods and places have laid more importance on one over the other, oscillating between the various denotations depending on the current circumstances. As discussed above, Buddhists were in such a panic over the potential threat to and loss of the 247

For Burmese Christians, this is a common Christian expression meaning 'evangelism,' or 'mission'. 123

sāsana in their country during and immediately following the colonial era, that a number of associations developed with the purpose of keeping the degenerative forces at bay and launching a spiritual offensive to strengthen and spread it throughout the country. In the decades following liberation, and especially during the military eras of the 1980s – 2000s, there was a general acceptance in the stability of the sāsana being established throughout large parts of the country, and Buddhists became less concerned with keeping the sāsana from disappearing and more with strengthening it within the country and spreading it to other parts of the world for the benefit of humanity’s salvation. It was around the 1980s when we begin to see a subtle change in the way the term “sāsana-pyu” was understood. In earlier decades, especially during and immediately after colonization, an emphasis was placed upon sāsana-pyu as referring to those activities that defended or rejuvenated a sāsana that had gone through a deleterious deterioration during the period of British rule. In the years following independence, when a large number of weizzā and non-weizzā lay Buddhist associations were active, emphasis was placed less upon defending and more on sustaining a sāsana that had begun to regain some of its initial splendor during the socalled Liberation Era. From the 1980s onwards, we saw (and continue to see) yet another change where, after the containment and rejuvenation of a once damaged sāsana had been accomplished, efforts were made to energetically push out, or propagate, the healthy sāsana into further reaches of the country and eventually the world.248 248

A strong impetus for this latter change can be attributed to the sangha reforms of the 1980s and the national monastic organizations that were formed as a result of the government’s interventions in attempting to legitimate its power after the 1988 anti-government uprising. This shift in state religious policy was, as Rozenberg points out, a direct result of the government’s “Buddhicization” scheme where the Buddhist population was “co-opted into the state enterprise in promoting the Buddhist polity in its vision of nation-building” (Rozenberg 2010: 130). There was always some unease, however, in the way my informants looked upon the current state of 124

Weizzā Executive Council Weizzā associations saw themselves as continuing to carry out the mission that the legendary original “weizzā association” began in 1888, the significance of which will be shown below. Referred to as the “First/Foremost Sāsana Propagation Committee” (B. pathamam thathana-pyu ahpwe) or the “Great Weizzā Committee on Sāsana Propagation” (B. Thathanapyu Weizzā-dho Ahpwe-gyi), the details of this association and reasons for its development were to be found in oral accounts spreading across the country during the colonial era along with various other stories and prophecies about supernatural figures helping to guard the sāsana while the country was under colonial rule. Perhaps the first written account of this weizzā association’s gathering is to be found in a 1952 hagiographic account of Bo Min Gaung written by U Paw Oo. This best-selling book about the life and times of the weizzā saint, entitled, The Chronicle of Weizzā Aung Min Gaung’s Liberation (Vijjādhara Aung Min Gaung’s twet-yat-pauk Rajavamsa) was widely circulated at the time and is still in print as of 2013.249 U Paw Oo writes that after the the sāsana in Myanmar. On one hand, they were happy to see that sāsana was now firmly established in the country and even in other nations thanks in large part to the government’s sāsana-pyu missionary activities that, if one were to look at the national newspapers of that time, seemed to be taking place at un unprecedented rate. On the other hand, Burmese Buddhists were uneasy that the government was the entity that seemed to have uplifted the sāsana to an earlier splendor not seen since the days before British rule. There was always skepticism that the government was doing this for other more nefarious means, such as validating their ill-gotten authority, or to try and overcome the negative collective karma created over the years. A wave of sāsana-pyu projects, such as building and refurbishing pagodas, undertaken by the military government throughout the 1990s was so widespread that the designs of such works came to be known, as Brac de la Pierre notes, “SLORC style,” following the acronym of the junta (SLORC is the widely used acronym for State Law and Order Restoration Council, the junta that ruled Burma from 1988 to 1997, only to be replaced by a similar organism, the SPDC (State Peace and Development Council). 249

U Paw Oo 1952. So-called experts of Bo Min Gaung would always refer me to this book. When I told them I had read it, they would say that there was nothing else, then, they could tell me about him that was not already mentioned in the book. 125

annexation of Upper Burma in 1885, Bo Min Gaung “became alarmed that the Buddha’s sāsana would vanish” and therefore, organized a “sāsana-pyu vijjādhara committee,” made up of the most powerful weizzā to devise a plan to keep the sāsana from disappearing under their watch.250 Their goal was to defend and propagate the Buddha sāsana without using violence against the British occupiers but instead through peaceful means in line with the Buddha’s teachings. This secret, high-level meeting of weizzā saints continues to play an influencing role in the minds of Burmese weizzā devotees in how they understand the sāsana to have fared in Myanmar over the past century and how they take part in maintaining it.251 One of the most popular ways of depicting this “historic” event has been through paintings and drawings that are laminated and sold at pagoda stalls or shops selling religious accouterments (see figure 1) or even appearing on the cover of popular religious magazines. When asked about this meeting or shown pictorial representations of its occurrence, many people involved in the weizzā path were able to tell me the basic elements of the event, although certain minor details differed.252 250

U Paw Oo specifies that the following weizzā were in attendance: “Shin Ma Htee, Sayadaw Long Hair U Konnanya, First Hermit of Pyi U Aung (Bo Bo Aung), Taungu Aung, Bhamo U Aung, etc.’’ Although Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw (U Obhasa), considered by many devotees to be hold the highest position in this vijjādhara hierarchy is not included in this list, U Paw Oo writes on the next page that he and Bo Min Gaung worked together as co-leaders of this weizzā association. More on these individuals will be discussed below.

251

See, for example, NYK no.109, 1995. Aye Mya Thanta writes that “in 1888, Aba Bo Min Gaung along with Shin Matee Sayadaw, San Shay Ko-daw U Konnanya, Pyiy Ya-they Aung, Taung Ngu Aung, Ban-maw Aung, and Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw all formed a vijjādhara association to protect the Buddha sāsana.” They selected hermit U Khanti to undertake the works of Sāsana-pyu. 252

One elderly gentlemen, for instance, told me that the nine weizzā from "Sāsanapyu Committee One" (figure 1) were given the task is to protect the following nine pagodas: 1. Shwedagon Pagoda 2. Maha Myat Muni 3. Kaung Hmu Daw 4. Shwe Zigon 126

Whenever I showed the pictures to people, weizzā devotees or not, almost all were able to tell me some version of this auspicious coming together of weizzā for the sake of the sāsana.253 Related to both the convening of this first weizzā association and to this particular genre of its representation, are pictures that, although not directly portraying the 1888 meeting, call to mind the event with its inclusion of the full pantheon of weizzā saints that belong to the “Supreme Weizzā Council.” Reminding me of elementary school graduating class photos, these pictures are often sold at popular pagodas or religious accouterment shops in laminated form that come in various sizes. Although somewhat difficult to come across during the late 1990s and early 2000s due to the abovementioned ban on weizzā-related publications, devotees who were able to obtain such pictures placed them upon weizzā altars or hung them on walls in shrine rooms. As early as the 1960s, additional members were added to the weizzā entourage.254 The structure of this committee most likely reflected the organizational structure of lay Buddhist associations of the early 1900s. These associations were organized in administrative ways similar

5. Shwe Settaw 6. Kyaik Hti Yoe 7. Mingalar Cedi 8. Shwe Mawdaw 9. Pa Htodaw Gyi Weizzā devotees refer to these nine famous pagodas as the "hpaya koe zu" (Nine Pagodas). 253

Personal corr. UKM-75 Three devotees were able to go into greater detail by recounting that on the “third waning day of the month of Nayone in the year 1250 BE [1888 CE],” a meeting of weizzā was held at night at a special place in the Himalayas to discuss matters relating to the protection and promotion of the Buddha's sāsana. 254

Space does not permit me to go into detail about each of these weizzā. For a complete list of the sixty-four weizzā saints, see Vala Hein Kyaw (2008). The central eight weizzā of this pantheon will be mentioned belowl 127

to the bureaucratic structure of colonial governmental and economic bodies of the time. Formal and rule-driven, these associations held frequent meetings and compiled detailed agendas.255

Figure 1: “Sāsana-pyu Committee One”

255

Turner (forthcoming: 79). 128

Figure 2: One of the more popular pictorial representations of the weizzā committee. The names of each of the members and where they are placed in the picture are noted above the picture.256

256

Included in these pictures are several late, revered vipassanā (insight) meditation masters who, I was told by their devotees when shown this picture, would be upset if they knew that their names and pictures were included in this group. For more on this, see Chapter Five. 129

Figure 3: Another representation of the weizzā group, hung in a picture frame on a wall of a weizzā compound in Mandalay.

130

Figure 4: A computer generated version that places the weizzā in accordance to their importance. For example, according to the text below the image, Hermit U Khanti, Bo Min Gaung, Bo Bo Aung, and Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw are in the front row. An alchemical “dhat-lone,” or “philosopher’s stone,” hovers in the foreground. A separate photo of Bo Min Gaung is added to the right side. Much less common, though no less remarkable, is the depiction of thirty-seven of the most prominent weizzā saints from the above pictures in statue form at a Bo Min Gaung compound in Amarapura that were constructed by the “Masters of Loving Kindness Committee” (B. metta-shin ahpwe).257 Bo Min Gaung devotees belonging to this association had each of the thirty-seven individuals from the pictures above made into statues about three feet high and installed them in a “dhat-khan” (power shrine) where they flank, on each side, a life-sized statue of Bo Min Gaung (see figure 5). 257

For an anthropological study of this compound, known as the “Aung Daw Mu 9 Pagoda Camp,” see Foxeus 2007. I thank Benjamin Baumann for pointing out that the number thirtyseven may be related to the thirty-seven nat. 131

Figure 5: A woman pays homage to an image of Bo Min Gaung flanked on each side by a total of thirty-seven statues of weizzā. The accounts of such “supreme weizzā councils” and the pictures that depict their members serve the specific function of making associations between individuals of different time periods and between persons that may never have even existed. Such groupings and legends create a new, imagined lineage where the various, often competing, weizzā associations can trace their own congregations back to. As Patrick Pranke points out, one of the strategies used by authors to establish their credibility and expertise in magic and healing practices was to trace their lineages through famous monks and other religious figures.258 And borrowing ideas from Anne Blackburn’s work on the vitalization of Buddhist space by linking it to Sakyamuni Buddha, we see weizzā congregations doing something similar by evoking their connections to religious virtuosi from various time periods and “imbuing new and restored environments with

258

Pranke, Patrick. 2008. “'Bodawpaya's Madness': Monastic Accounts of King Bodawpaya's Conflict with the Burmese Sangha, Part One.” Journal of Burma Studies. 12. 132

temporal depth and instinctive authority.”259 Such connections to idealized past models are crucial, especially as we see from the elaborate detail with which weizzā saints and their devotees attempt to recount their karmic connections with one another and even connect themselves with great kings, queens, and religious authorities of the past.260 While my informants may not have thought of these connections in such terms, if nothing else, these pictorial representations also help to portray a weizzā united front against any forces that pose a threat to the sāsana and the country and “share in one another’s prestige and partially create it, each for the others.”261 Devotees enjoy imagining this group acting as a kind of security council or league of indigenous superheroes watching over those in need and intervening whenever the sāsana, country, or devotees are in trouble. This “council of weizzā” as many of my informants expressed it, are “guiding Myanmar to transform it into a peaceful and prosperous land where the teachings of the Buddha will shine throughout the country,” one Bo Min Gaung devotee explained to me when he saw me observing such a laminated picture on his weizzā shrine.262 Another devotee of the weizzā saint, Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw told me that 259

Anne Blackburn. 2010 “Buddha Relics in the Lives of Southern Asian Polities.” Numen 57. 336. 260

When I suggested this to a friend and devotee of various weizzā --- whom he credits for saving him from a car crash years prior --- replied, “Well, I guess so. But weizzā are powerful and unlike humans. Sometimes they migrate from one time period to another. Bo Min Gaung, in particular, was thought to have been involved in guarding the sāsana in various time periods stretching back hundreds of years.” Person. Corr. MB-35-M. Bo Min Gaung would have been about eight years old at the time of this 1888 meeting. More on the life and powers of Bo Min Gaung will be discussed in the next chapter. 261

McDaniel (2011: 200). While I saw these weizzā grouped together as if assembled for a school yearbook photograph, McDaniel, with similar pictures of ensembled monks, noticed that “these monks never knew one another, came from different sects and from different regions, but they are grouped together in one poster like members of an all-star monastic football team.”

262

Personal corr. UKM-75-M. 133

“these members belong to what is called the ‘Supreme Council of Sāsana-pyu Weizzā’ who protect and promote the Buddha's teachings not only in Myanmar, but throughout the world.”263 Other devotees, such as the editors of the recently published journal, Weizzā Magazine, who wrote an op-ed article on this supreme council, maintain that there is a core group of eight weizzā who form the “executive committee” of the council. This group, known as “The Eight Great Powerful Ones,” (B. maha-iddhi shit-ba) are those weizzā saints who “guard the sāsana by keeping people who are part of the Buddha sāsana away from dangers.”264 The editors go on to write that other sāsana works done by this committee include “providing knowledge and wisdom to those meditators engaged in samatha and vipassana meditation so that they remain on the right track; making sure requisite donations arrive to those monks engaged in pariyatti work; and helping pagodas and monasteries to be built.”265

“He Came to Me Riding an Owl”: Individual Lay Defenders of the Sāsana 263

Interview USL-65-M.

264

There are eight central individuals who belong to this group, which are made up of six monks and two laypeople: 1. Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw Sayadaw-gyi U Obhassa 2. San-shay Sayadaw-gyi Ashin Konnanya 3. Sayadaw-gyi Shin Matee 4. Thet-daw-shay Sayadaw-gyi Ashin Nāyadadhamma 5. Yā-kyaw Sayadaw U Saddhammakitti 6. Phone-phaya-gyi U Pauk Sein (AKA) U Vijjādhara 7. Bo Min Gaung 8. Bo Bo Aung 265

Weizzā Magazine v.2, no.4 2009. p.188. U Paw Oo also wrote that the weizzā council convened a second meeting in 1907 to elect hermit U Khanti to head a rigorous sāsana-pyu campaign of erecting religious edifices at Mandalay Hill (1952: 7). Such narratives allow devotees to read the text backwards and insert their associations’ imagined interventions for slowing the decline of the sāsana. 134

Most of the weizzā associations had disbanded or were absorbed into non-weizzā organizations during the 1980s. Foxeus notes that as a consequence of Ne Win's purge of the religious landscape in the early 1980s, weizzā associations, especially those concerned with practices that could be interpreted as black-magic or sorcery, were more closely monitored, and most weizzā associations ceased from teaching and practicing such things.266 Foxeus goes on to observe that immediately following the independence in 1948, Burmese authorities were preoccupied with suppressing ethnic insurgencies and worrying about Communism invading the country and that by the late 1970s, when these issues were under control, Ne Win turned his attention to religion and undertook a mission to purge the sāsana from heterodox elements, he perceived as deviating from “normative” Buddhism. In a speech delivered in December of 1979, Ne Win likened these weizzā associations to the Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult and warned that such groups only seek to exploit their members for their own self-interests.267 A series of restrictions were then placed upon the weizzā associations, and those considered illegal, like the Shwe-yin-kyaw Association that was popular among soldiers and civil servants, were banned, while others, like the Mano-citta-pada Association, 268 were heavily monitored.269

266

Foxeus 2011: 176.

267

Foxeus 2011: 81.

268

I noticed over the course of 50 years of looking over religious literature that the term sāsanapyu “gaing” changed during the 1990s to sāsana-pyu “ahpwe.’ Both terms technically mean “association, congregations, etc.,” but the latter is more neutral in tone that carries less of the negative connotations indicated above. For example, the Manoseittupad Association, one of the more popular contemporary organizations in Myanmar, sparingly uses the term “gaing” in their documentation and instead prefers the word, “ahpwe.” Reasons for this change will be discussed in Chapter Five.

269

Tosa 1996: 241. 135

When the associations dissolved, weizzā devotees did not simply stop engaging in activities defending and bolstering the sāsana, however. A further trickledown effect seems to have occurred where, instead of being in the hands of larger groups of organized weizzā factions, sāsana responsibility fell to individual weizzā devotees. Where we saw above with the power and responsibility for the care of sāsana in the hands of organized lay associations, here we see it diffuse still further to a wider swath of individual Buddhists, both lay and monastic, who were sought out by the weizzā to carry out their sāsana propagation missions. Japanese scholar of weizzā associations, Keiko Tosa, discovered during her fieldwork in the late 1980s and early 1990s that, although weizzā beliefs and practices among individual devotees was still widely popular (and were becoming increasingly so in the years she was in Myanmar), no one was particularly interested in forming new associations or joining the few remaining associations. Instead, they were devoted to enter into personal, direct relationships with weizzā saints and carrying out sāsana propagation activities as directed to them by their patron weizzā saints.270 If the weizzā associations saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the first weizzā committee meeting of 1888, then individual weizzā devotees took as their model the sāsana related activities carried out by the so-called leader of this weizzā committee, Bo Min Gaung. Hagiographical accounts report that Bo Min Gaung set off after the 1888 meeting to travel around Asia (and even Russia) propagating the Buddha sāsana by converting people to Buddhism through the display of his supernormal powers and by establishing “power places” (B. dhat-pannet) in the towns he traveled through. After permanently settling in the village of Taungalat, located at the base of Mt. Popa, he is said to have sent out “those of his disciples who were capable of attaining nibbāna and requested that they set up dhat-pannet in each and every 270

Personal communication 2006. 136

place in Myanmar.”271 Most devotees from the 1990s to the present have looked to such individual weizzā and their early disciples for inspiration for how to carry out sāsana propagation work throughout the country and, as we will see in the final chapter, other parts of the world. Following on the success of earlier lay weizzā associations’ work in supporting the sāsana, these individual devotees found themselves in the position, less as supporters of the sāsana, and more as agents and participants. Devotees often develop a fervent desire to undertake sāsana propagation work after experiencing dreams of, or become possessed by, weizzā saints in ways we examined in the previous chapter. Devotees believe that the weizzā appear to them providing instructions on how and where to carry out their sāsana-pyu work. Almost always unexpected, and at times experienced by those Burmese who have little knowledge of, or faith in, the weizzā, these dreams contain instructions by the weizzā saint on how the devotee should proceed. When asked to explain how exactly devotees are drawn to the mission of preserving the sāsana, a well-known female weizzā hermitess, Daw Tin Tin, told me that “as it is the mission of the weizzā to be custodians of the sāsana, followers will be psychically pulled back to the weizzā through dreams, visions, or dhat-si, regardless of where they are in the world.”272 From a lived religions perspective, my ethnographic work has shown me how intensely invested lay weizzā devotees have become in the project of defining how their religious activities and practices operate in the protection and propagation of the sāsana. Such practices are often innovative, dynamic, and, as we will see in the next chapter, are incorporated into their daily lives in ways that might not otherwise be recognizable. Female hermit, Daw Khin Hla, clearly 271

NYK no.106, 1995. “Abha Aung Min Gaung’s Power Places” pp.31-32

272

Interview DTT-70-F. 137

remembers the dream she had back in 1984 that sparked her interest in engaging in sāsana-pyu activities for the remaining years of her life. In this dream, “great grandfather, Bo Bo Aung, came to me riding an owl,” she recounts in an interview that appeared in NYK. “He landed on the Buddha altar, and while paying my respects, I begged him: ‘Please don’t leave me. Stay here with me!’ But he simply smiled and gave me his [healing power] siddhi.”273 After having this dream, Daw Khin Hla decided to accompany a revered monk, Kalay-wa Sayadaw, well-known for his sāsana activities, around the country on a “sāsana-pyu trip” (B. thathana-pyu ka-yee).274 After seeing the sayadaw offer donations at a pagoda in Bago for the benefit of the sāsana, she decided to do her part by playing the lottery in order to win money to be used for further sāsana related activities on the trip. She won fifty-thousand kyats and donated it all for the building of a monastery.275 When asked to explain how exactly devotees are drawn to the mission of preserving the sāsana, a well-known female weizzā yogi, Daw Tin Tin, told me that “as it is the mission of the weizzā to be custodians of the sāsana, followers will be psychically pulled back to the weizzā through dreams, visions, or dhat-si [possession], regardless of where they are in the world.”276

273

She does not say what this siddhi consisted of, but one can deduce from reading the rest of the article that it had to do with the power of healing.

274

Kalaywa Sayadaw is considered by his devotees to be a weizzā, and many believe him to be the reincarnation of Bame Sayadaw, a monk popularly considered to be a patron saint of yantra. 275

DKH-50-F, NYK no.107, 1995 pp. 89-92. See also no.110, 1995. Such sāsana-pyu trips are similar to pilgrimages, except that there is more of a focus on donating money for specific activities. Modeled after the sāsana-pyu trips Bo Min Gaung was believed to have gone on in the years before his residency at Popa, individuals or associations travel to certain locales donating money or erecting or repairing pagodas. 276

Interview DTT-68-F. 138

Such experiences, which often recur for extended periods of a devotee’s life, often act as catalysts for one to engage in a life-changing act. An elderly female hermit named Daw Vimala recalls such a dream. Forty years old and working as a fish monger, she had a “dreamlike vision” where a “weizzā --- bearded with long sideburns, like an Indian --- as well as an old hermit, appeared and carried me off to hell. When I saw all the beings suffering in hell, I became very scared and asked [the two men] to bring me back home. They told me that if I continued to sell fish for a living that I would end up in hell after I died. Suddenly, a light atop a hill was calling out to me. When I followed it and arrived at the top of the hill, the pagodas and rest houses made me feel so peaceful. I knew I had arrived at Mt. Popa.” The dream had such a profound impact on her that very soon after, she ceased working as a fishmonger and became a member of a weizzā association where she learned various techniques and meditation methods for following the weizzā path. With the knowledge she learned from being a member of this association for so many years, she now teaches to others and “orders them to protect the Buddha sāsana” while any money she receives in donations is used for sāsana related works.277 Trying to account for the sudden increase in the number of individuals who have had these kinds of weizzā encounters since the 1950s, journalist and weizzā path practitioner, U Aung Kyaw, explained that with the arrival of the second half of the Buddha’s sāsana, the weizzā have also arrived to take responsibility for protecting the sāsana. At this time, the head weizzā saints, most notably, Yat-kan-sin Taung Sayadaw, Bo Bo Aung, and Bo Min Gaung, will become increasingly involved in such affairs. “It is evident in the number of people who believe in, have broad knowledge of, and place pictures and statues of them in their homes,” he writes. “And as more and more people enter into relationships with them, the more incidents of possession we 277

NYK no.116, 1996, pp. 34-37. 139

see occurring in throughout the country.”278 U Aung Kyaw goes on to provide a transcription of an interview he conducted with a twenty-two year old woman named Ma Khin Khin who, as with the young women we saw in the previous chapter, has the ability to dhat-si the weizzā, Bo Min Gaung. Ma Khin Khin seems to be possessed by the weizzā for the purpose of carrying out sāsana work. U Aung Kyaw had the opportunity to talk with Ma Khin Khin as she was possessed by Bo Min Gaung and provided a word-for-word transcription from the interview he conducted. When he arrived, the young woman (as Bo Min Gaung) asked in a dismissive voice, “Huh? Why have you come to see me, man?” U Aung Kyaw: “I am a writer. I have come because I write about weizzā who guard the sāsana and do propagation works, Revered Sir. There is still something I want to know from your lips, Sir.” Ma Khin Khin: “Eh?...Good, man, good! There are many evil people in this world who have converted to Buddhism. But they are still full of greed, hatred and delusion are more like ogres than humans. People lie, cheat, kill and because of that, they struggle in life. They work and have no time for giving attention to the Three Gems: Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha ... Yet, still in their minds, they know that they cannot do religious activities because of their [impure] state. It’s just like this, man. They are like fish that are stuck in a fish net. They cannot save themselves and just sink deeper and deeper. I have a request for you now. Do you know what it is? Please spread throughout the country and have others pass on what us weizzā have taught.” UAK: “Yes, I agree that we must do sāsana-pyu works throughout the country.” MKK: “Good, good. What else do you wish to know?” UAK: “Please tell me more about what business you weizzā have with entering into people.” MKK: “Ahh…The Buddha sāsana has reached the 2500 year halfway point. The time has come where we must accept the responsibility of the Setkya-min. According to this responsibility, we must work together to protect the Buddha sāsana. Therefore, we must make connections with people everywhere. I will dhat-si with five people, all of whom 278

NYK no.103, 1995 p20. 140

are young, single females. One in the town of Taungoo, one in Lek-pam-kun, one here, and two more in other places. All five will eventually assemble here. Since my granddaughter [Ma Khin Khin] is in the center [the third candidate], they will all come and assemble at this spot … I will dhat-si her for five years for the purpose of [training her to do] sāsana works. After five years have passed, I will leave, and she will travel around the country continuing to do sāsana works on her own.”279 The information gathered from this and other episodes of weizzā intervening in people’s lives for purposes of sāsana propagation provides us with further insight into how devotees understand the weizzā to be acting in the world. By providing guidance and teaching abilities through dreams, visions and possession for how to propagate the sāsana, the weizzā are devoted to their salvational mission of “rescuing sentient beings” (B. thattawa-kay) by “working towards both the spiritual development and the temporal felicity of all beings.”280 As Ma Khin Khin stressed while channelling Bo Min Gaung, humans are like fish caught in a net destined for death unless the weizzā intervene on their behalf to save them. Employing further the metaphor of the fish net, a commemorative pamphlet handed out to participants at the forty-fifth celebration of the passing away of Bo Min Gaung states that “Bo Min Gaung is like a fisherman who casts out his net to gain disciples so as to protect [and guide] them. His main message is to ‘observe precepts, offer donations, and meditate on love and compassion.’”281 Looking at how they went about preserving and propagating the sāsana, then, is how I would like to end this chapter for it is one of, if not the, central activity weizzā devotees desire to partake in. The primary way for how weizzā devotees to do sāsana-pyu is to erect pagodas, as directed by the weizzā, all over the country. Some of the earliest models of the kinds of pagodas 279

NYK no.103, 1995 p21-22.

280

Rozenberg (forthcoming, 2014).

281

February 16, 2001 Forty-Fifth Celebration of 45th “Pu-zaw kadaw Pwe” of Bo Min Gaung. 141

weizzā associations and individual devotees were directed to build can be found in the aforementioned magazine from the late 1940s entitled Pathamam Taya Magazine. Containing drawings and photographs of these pagodas, the editors of the magazine entreated their readers to take the design and replicate it throughout Myanmar as these were the types of pagodas that Bo Min Gaung and other weizzā had made known to their devotees through dreams, visions, and possession. The editors explained that such weizzā knew the way to bring peace and prosperity to the country through Buddhist means and that it was important to erect pagadas all over the country so that the weizzā’s power-energy, or dhat, could reach all people and influence them to live their lives in accord with the Buddha sāsana.282 Among the various duties weizzā devotees should carry out to bring everlasting peace to the country, they should erect pagodas and congregate at these “power places.”283 Included in these magazines, as well as in similar literature from this period up to the present time, were articles explaining why these sites were referred to as places of power. The special pagodas erected at these sites were designed so as to act like electrical conductors for the weizzā power-energy --- likened to electricity --- to run through. Similar to findings made by Rozenberg and Foxeus, my informants also explained these power places in terms of electricity. In the previous chapter we saw the weizzā’s power were likened to radio waves or cellular phone

282

During the 1940s, lay people of a Bo Min Gaung association erected over 128 pagodas throughout Myanmar (Jotipala 1952: 32-33). 283

PTM no. 2, 1948. The article, “Popa Hill Aung Min Gaung” said that the following must be done for everlasting peace to come to Myanmar: People should erect and gather at Aung Min Gaung pagodas and other holy sites associated with him. It seems that these Bo Min Gaung pagodas act as conduits for his spirit to work through. At times, the word, “dhat-tain” (electric post) or “dhat-kyo” (electric wires) are used when referring to these edifices. The fact that the word, “dhat”, is also used in alchemy (dhat-lone), buddha relics (dhat-daw) is not lost on the followers. 142

signals. This, however, usually only refers to messages received from weizzā via dreams, messages, and dhat-si. With pagodas, however, we are talking about physical structures that are built in various places throughout the country to act as conduits of a form of energy which can conveniently be described in terms of electricity --- an invisible, physical, fundamental form of energy --- spreading out across the land. Conversely, my informants have explained these structures to me as having magnetic properties of drawing people in like a whirlpool. “These pagodas harness the forces of the universe and of all the buddhas to create something like a vortex,” the elderly female devotee, Daw Tin Tin, explained. It’s kind of like setting up a power plant that radiates energy, in this case spiritual energy, while simultaneously attracting people karmically connected to one another and the weizzā to assemble at that spot.”284 I came across a slightly different explanation of the power of these pagodas when, during my research among hermit (B. ya-they) communities in lower Myanmar, I made a pilgrimage with two female hermits to Hermit Hill, a hilly area located quite near the famous pilgrimage spot, Kyaiktiyo. Climbing to the top of the hill, we were allowed an audience with the head monk who oversaw the pilgrimage area. “Where you are standing is the very center of the Buddha sāsana in Myanmar,” he told me while smacking his walking staff into the damp earth. “My master, the great Sāsana-pyu Hermit, Bo Vannasippalankāra, had a dream where a weizzā appeared and ordered him to erect a pagoda on each of the four hills surrounding this one, for this would surely help make the Buddha sāsana shine forth throughout the land.”285 As if

284 285

Pers. Corr. DTT-70-F. This conversation was conducted in English language.

This matches the information I found about this area in NYK no.154, 1999: “Ya-they Hill’s original ‘Sāsana-pyu Ya-they-gyi Bho Vannasippalankāra’ in 1918, had a dream where a white clad bodaw visited him and told him that the area near present day Kyaitkiyo, ‘is the center of the Buddha Sāsana in Myanmar. Erect pagodas on each of the four adjacent hills 143

anticipating my next question, the monk explained how erecting pagodas can accomplish this awesome feat. In typical, long-winded Burmese style, his explanation lasted the better part of an hour, but paraphrasing what he said: when a pagoda is erected, the awesome sacred power that it holds spreads out in every direction. Its radius is not unlimited, however, and cannot therefore spread continuously to cover the entire country, let alone the world. But wherever such a pagoda is built, it creates a forcefield or dome of sorts that protects the area from evil influences while also infusing the area with a power generated from the glory of the Buddha sāsana, thus fertilizing the surrounding area so that positive things occur.286 Like Bo Min Gaung above who charged his disciples to establish “power places” throughout the country, devotees, perhaps more than any other activity, dedicate extensive amounts of time, energy, and especially money for erecting pagodas in various parts of the country and, as the Burmese diasporic communities continue to grow, the world. “Bo Min Gaung usually appears to me in dreams, visions, and through mediums,” Daw May, a senior member of the Ministry of Health, admitted to me one afternoon after locking her office door.287 Wealthy and well-educated, Daw May said that she was never very interested in sāsana-pyu activities until one night she had a dream where she “saw a large man, who looked like Bo Min Gaung, (SA, DA, BA, VA Hills) in and enter into an adhithana … in order to help make the Buddha sāsana shine forth.’” 286

A monk who gave a sermon at a pagoda consecration ceremony I attended told of the spiritual power of a pagoda: “A young man was being chased by the army when at one point he collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. He couldn’t go on and knew he would be killed. When he looked around, his eyes fell upon a pagoda on a distant hill. At that moment, he was shot and died. But as a result of seeing the pagoda, the young man’s mind received parami and immediately after death, was reborn in a higher realm.” 287

DM-66-F 2009. 144

riding a horse on a cold, misty morning.” She couldn’t make out the details of the man’s appearance because of the fog, but the rider told her “that the next few years will be filled with natural and political catastrophes all around the world” and that she must erect a specific kind of pagoda in order to keep such catastrophes from taking place in Myanmar.288 She did not attach any importance to the dream until several years later when, in 1994, she had another dream of Bo Min Gaung while she was engaged in some work in Shan State along the Thai border. 289 “Bo Min Gaung told me to erect a pagoda in this area using donations from Shan and Thai people and make sure to invite them to the pagoda finial topping ceremony,” Daw May continued. “He even gave me a vision of what the pagoda should look like.” When she explained the pagoda to the abbot whom she wanted to invite to preside over the pagoda consecration ritual after it was completed, the abbot informed her that the pagoda in question was a “world-peace pagoda,” which was one of Bo Min Gaung’s trademark pagoda structures. This is when she knew she had a karmic connection to Bo Min Gaung, and although she “was a scientist who never believed in such superstitions,” as she put it, she could no longer ignore these dreams and took them as a sign that Bo Min Gaung had chosen her to carry out sāsana-pyu activities “for the sake of the country and to usher in a new era of political stability and freedom.” Using her considerable wealth and abundant social connections, both domestic and internationally, Daw May began her

288

Bo Min Gaung and other weizzā were thought to have instructed early devotees to set out across the country to specifically erect pagodas at sites that were often provided to them by the weizzā through dreams, visions, or during periods of possession. Because of this, Bo Min Gaung came to be known, among other things (as we will see in the next chapter), “Sāsana Pyu Bo Min Gaung.” NYK no.159, 1999. 289

Interview DM-66-F. There is a Bo Min Gaung Aung “power place” in the eastern Shan State town of Kyain-Tone. A monk by the name of U Javana had it built in 1948 after having a dream of a weizzā telling him to do this as part of his sāsana work (NYK no.167, 2000). 145

sāsana-pyu projects of erecting Bo Min Gaung related pagodas in earnest, mostly in remote areas of the country. The pagodas in question are quite unlike the more traditional ones found ubiquitously spread throughout Myanmar.290 As anyone who has spent time in the country or looked through picture books on pagodas knows that the typical pagoda style, like the Shwedagon, is one of an upside bell with only slight stylistic variations between pagodas of this kind. Pagodas that trace their provenance to directives provided by the weizzā, however, deviate substantially in that they exhibit variations in shapes and configurations seldom found in more traditional pagodas.291 One of the more widely recognizable styles is known as the “Konawin,” or “Nine Cubit,” pagoda.292 Almost always associated with the weizzā saint, Bo Min Gaung, this kind of pagoda was thought to be that which Bo Min Gaung directed his disciples to build while he was still alive and teaching at Mt. Popa.293 Roughly nine feet high, these pagodas look more like a modern day

290

Brac de la Pierre (2012: 159) writes of these pagodas: “Significantly, among the iconographic additions linked with the wave of pagodas refurbishing by the SLORC, new representations of weikza have an important place. Pavilions dedicated to weikza representations that can be found on the platforms of numerous pagodas are often dated from the 1990s or after. It could be interesting to investigate more closely these new iconographies and to see if they are linked to the involvement of weikza path practitioners in pagodas foundations and embellishments.” 291

Tosa (2012) refers to such weizzā inspired structures as “non-standard religious buildings.”

292

The term, ko-nawin, is one that encompasses a range of esoteric meanings. For example, it can also refer to the “magic power of nine” that takes into account the standard list of “Nine Qualities of the Buddha” found in the Itipiso gatha. It also refers to the seemingly magical quality of the number nine that displays what seem like magical mathematical properties. Auspicious days to travel, for example, are the 9th, 18th, and 27th of each month (1+8 and 2+7 are 9).

293

U Paw Oo’s 1952 biography of Bo Min Gaung states that Bo Min Gaung and Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw urged the public to build "nine cubit feet pagodas" throughout the whole 146

rocket ship or multi-tiered wedding cake than an upside down bell. Many a weizzā association’s goal was to erect a Konawin Pagoda in each city and town throughout Myanmar in order to, as a writer of the Pathamam Taya Magazine wrote, “keep the areas free from danger, increase the power of the Sāsana and its supporters…and prevent uprisings and revolts.”294 In an article called “Erecting Pagodas and The Weizzā Path,” the author, Sāsana-pyu Saya-gyi U Bha Hnit, wished to clear up any confusion the public may have about why the weizzā and their devotees are so occupied with building pagodas around the country. Following in the footsteps of a member of the “Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw Win Association” who, in 1900, had nine cubit pagodas erected all over the country “in an effort to cleanse the country and usher in a new era,” his association, with the help of Bo Bo Aung and Bo Min Gaung, also wished to “cleanse the world” through the power of the pagodas. Specifically, such pagodas functioned by protecting the country, strengthening the sāsana, bringing peace to the country by purifying it of nonBuddhist ideologies, and providing strength to those individuals following the weizzā path.295

country, to observe silas, and meditate (p.13). It is doubtful that such pagodas originated with Bo Min Gaung or his cult, however. In 1944 a weizzā monk by the name of Yarkyaw Sayadaw published a book called the Konawin Moe Lin hma thi that discussed the erecting of such pagodas to protect the country from various catastrophes. See NYK no.179, 2001 for more on this book and Bo Min Gaung’s connection with it. 294

PTM no.2, 1948: 14-16. I came across many of these konawin pagodas during my travels, but the majority had fallen into disrepair. Those that were still in daily use by weizzā practitioners were located in Yangon, Mandalay, Pyimina, and Mawlamyaing. The others were located in outlying areas, atop hills, and beside rivers, and most of the people from those areas were able to direct me to the “Konawin Pagoda” if asked. 295

PTM no.2, 1948 p.27 “Erecting Pagodas and the Weikza Path.” Although I have been unable to find it, I was told that a comic book about the weizzā was published in 1994 that told the story of how the weizzā banded together to have pagodas built that would, through their sacred powers, would repel non-Buddhist religion from entering the country as well as keeping other dangers from affecting the peace and prosperity of the country and sāsana. 147

A second pagoda style associated with the weizzā, most notable Bo Min Gaung, is the “Whole World Long Pillar of Success Pagoda” (B. kambha-lone Aung Tan-kwan-taing Zedi) with the distinctive style of a large globe with an obelisk or pillar jutting out from the top or “Whole World Pagoda” (B. kambha-lone zedi) with a statue or picture of Bo Min Gaung sitting atop (see figure 6).296 Many of these pagodas, built before the end of the colonial era, are thought to have hastened the departure of the British and were ordered by Bo Min to be erected so that the Burmese would be free from “colonial life.”297 First appearing in the 1940s this style of pagoda, as explained to me by a weizzā devotee who was part of my Bo Min Gaung pilgrimage group, “signifies that Bo Min Gaung had prophesized that the Buddha sāsana will eventually cover the entire world.”298 Related to these pagodas are the “World Peace Pagoda” (B. Kaba-nyein-kyan-aye Zedi), “Entire Country Peace Pagoda” (B. Pyi-lone Aye Zedi) (see figure 7), “Epoch Protection Pagoda” (B. Kap-Ka Zedi), “Power Pillar” (B. dhat-taing), and the curiously named “Gourd Pagoda that Overcomes the Three Catastrophes" (B. Kap-kyaw-Bhu zedi) styles.299 Reports from informants and popular religious magazines attribute such pagodas to Bo Min Gaung which, like the ones erected in Pyimina in 1947, were supposedly built by Bo Min Gaung himself or, like the several erected in southern Myanmar between 1948 and 1949, were created by his close disciples 296

The former is also sometimes referred to as a “World Power Place Pagoda” (B. kambha dhatpannet Zedi). 297

NYK no.218, 2004 pp. 17-21 “Two Places for Adhithana at Popa-Taungalat” By San Htun Tha. 298

Personal corres. KMZ-32-M while on a pilgrimage to attend the 56th anniversary of Bo Min Gaung’s exit from this world. 299

The three catastophies being famine, war and disease. 148

according to specifications provided by Bo Min Gaung.300 Serving the functions of protective devices whose powers would spread across the land guarding the country from calamities, and power conduits that housed and ejected the awesome powers of the weizzā to influence people to propagate the sāsana, they are also places of power that continue to attract weizzā devotees to them for purposes of advancing along their own paths to enlightenment or weizzā-hood. They are still important sites for those wishing to do sāsana-pyu because they believe that the power of the weizzā resides within and can be obtained if one enters into prolonged periods of meditation practice. Pagodas like these that have been built by weizzā devotees are visited by supplicants. Large numbers of people believe that the supernatural power of the pagoda is boosted by association with these prominent figures. Embodied in the space of the pagoda, it can be said that weizzā knowledge and practice are also presented to laypersons.

300

NYK no.153, 1999 P.46; NYK no.174, 2001, p.255; NYK no.120, 1996 pp.335-337. 149

Figure 6

150

Figure 7

Conclusion Weizzā associations and individual weizzā devotees understood themselves to be principle vanguards of the sāsana in a time when its vitality is under threat. Such efforts were not the work of royalty or monastic authorities, but of Buddhists from all walks of life who took seriously their responsibility to ensure that the sāsana would be protected for future generations despite the inevitability that the sāsana would eventually disappear completely from this world. While other associations and individual Buddhists may have focused on promoting the longevity of the sāsana through scriptural study, meditation, reforming the sangha, or revering the Buddha’s relics, weizzā devotees focused on sustaining the sāsana through pagoda building projects, 151

obtaining prowess in particular meditation techniques, and by engaging in forms of missionary work of conversion, preaching and healing. For such devotees, the actions of their weizzā saints offered models for how they should live and how the world should be governed. Authors of magazine articles and religious tracts often pointed out the many great weizzā, Buddhists of the past who lived their lives in accordance with the sāsana, who helped usher in long periods of peace and prosperity. Such stories inspired twentieth century weizzā devotees to take up the charge to protect the sāsana in dynamic and multivalent ways to carry on the mission that the weizzā began. The next chapter will look more closely at the life of one of these great weizzā to examine how devotees understand him to be working in their lives for purposes of health and fortune.

152

Chapter Four: Grandchildren of the Wizard King Passing out from a 105-degree fever, I collapsed onto the floor of my tutor’s home after a late dinner. What happened thereafter was mostly a blur, but I was eventually able to piece together the following series of events. Fearful that the local authorities would learn that a foreigner was illegally spending the night at his home and unable to find a doctor at such a late hour, my tutor propped me up in the back of his motor scooter and drove me to his parents’ home nearby. “You’ll be safe there,” I remember him saying. “My father has developed a severe case of paranoia and has turned his home into a walled fortress in fear of imaginary robbers.” When we arrived, his parents were sleeping, and my tutor, a 45 year old man, was absolutely terrified to wake them. He eventually got them awake, and sitting there on their sofa in agonizing pain, I heard the parents refuse me refuge because they feared I was a CIA agent who was drugged by an enemy. The father was very sure of it as he “saw it in American movies many times.” After much negotiation, he finally relented and said I could stay, so long as it was outside the main house. When I awoke, it was 4:00am, my fever had broke, and I was feeling well enough to get up and walk around. I had a vague idea where I was, but I desperately wanted to get back to my apartment. I tried to open the door, but to my surprise, I found it was locked from the outside! It was still dark, and no one in the compound was awake yet. I managed to work my hand through a crack in the window and unbolt the lock. Exiting the room, I was shocked to see that they had put me in a storage closet and laid me down on a mattress placed atop sacks of rice. As I crept out the door, one of the servants heard me and began shouting to my tutor’s father that I was leaving. The father appeared in his robe and told me to stay put until his son arrived to pick me up. I thanked him for letting me sleep in his storage closet but that I really 153

needed to get home. With a snarl he went back into his dark room and reluctantly reappeared with the key. He unlocked the gate, and I scampered away into the night. Because it was so early in the morning, there was no public transportation up and running to bring me back to my home some thirty miles away. The only place for me to go was a monastic compound adjacent to the house. There was already a large group of people gathered at the compound to do their morning rituals of chanting, meditating, and offering food to monks. Exhausted and ill, I felt helpless, alone, and on the verge of tears. Shuffling over to a quiet corner, I sat down in meditation posture, closed my eyes and fell asleep sitting up. I awoke a couple of hours later covered in sweat from the heat of the morning sun. Disoriented and thirsty, I looked around me and noticed that, while I was sleeping, someone had placed a small laminated photo of an old man on my bag. I remembered seeing images of this grumpy looking gentleman throughout my travels in the country. I soon learned that this fellow was none other than the great weizzā, Bo Min Gaung --- a saint who would capture my imagination for the remaining years of my fieldwork.

This dissertation is principally a study of reception, interpretation, and propagation of weizzā phenomena amongst a wide swath of weizzā devotees as they experience it in the everyday circumstances of their lives. Thus far the focus has been on the devout away from any consideration of any particular weizzā saint as an historical entity. I have specifically waited to introduce the character and life of Bo Min Gaung until now because I wanted the focus of the first half of this dissertation to be on the people who pay homage to, revere, and enter into relationships with the weizzā saints, regardless of the saints’ particulars. I am choosing to bring our attention to a specific weizzā saint at this point in the dissertation for several reasons. Bo Min 154

Gaung is arguably the most popular and revered weizzā saint in contemporary Myanmar despite, as we will see below, a modest degree of controversy that surrounds him. We already witnessed his continual appearance in the lives of men and women in early chapters that dealt with periods of possession and dream states, as well as in his role in protecting and propagating the sāsana. To devote an entire dissertation to the weizzā phenomenon as it manifests in the lives of Burmese Buddhists without exploring the life and times of Bo Min Gaung and the ways in which devotees interact with him, would be a disservice to the study of lived religion in Myanmar. As most of this dissertation takes a horizontal approach in looking at the ways a wide range of devotees engage with a spectrum of weizzā phenomena and saints, choosing to concentrate our attention on one saint in particular offers us something of a vertical case study that provides us with a deep exploration of how the themes raised in earlier chapters appear in peoples’ relationships with a single weizzā saint. In this chapter I attempt to understand what it was (and still is) about this figure that inspired such faith and devotion among everyday Burmese, irrespective of socio-economic and religious background. Drawing on hagiographies, both written and oral, and iconography, I analyze how this old man could have risen to the rank of “Chief Weizzā” and second only to Buddha in such short period of time. Looking especially at hagiography and iconography, I will do a number of things in this chapter. Firstly, I will discuss the biographic process through which the figure of Bo Min Gaung has been created for devotees in publicly circulating media and word of mouth. Next, I will introduce the idea that Bo Min Gaung's devotees expand his biography through their own experiences of him (adding new threads) and in doing so, transform his biography into something very personalized with an expansiveness of the past, present, and future as linked to their understanding of their own experiences, karmic biography, aspirations. 155

Finally, I will explain how the selective appropriation of visual images of Bo Min Gaung and physical engagement with these visual images reveals another dimension of this personalized relationship to the saint, as well as revealing how Bo Min Gaung-as-icon becomes a powerful focus for personalized affect.301

Bo Min Gaung: “Chief of the Weizzā”302 Over the past decade, I noticed what appeared to be an increase in the popularity of Bo Min Gaung and people who claimed to be devotees of him. I say, “appeared to be,” because I was unsure if what I observed in terms of the number of books, lithographs, drawings, and stories of Bo Min Gaung growing was indeed true or if it had to do more with me being increasingly aware of things related to Bo Min Gaung as he had recently become the focus of my dissertation. But as I made a conscious effort to be mindful of the cult of Bo Min Gaung over the remaining three years of my fieldwork, I learned that my initial suspicions were correct. Attending two annual Bo Min Gaung anniversary celebrations at Mount Popa and witnessing the number of attendees increase significantly in just one year, for instance, I knew that his cult was on the rise. My assumptions were supported by longtime anthropologist of Burmese religions, Brac de la Perriere’s observations when she recently noted that it is not that “weikza related practices are new, but that devotion to the leaders of weikza cults has known an increasing favour 301

I am indebted to Anne Blackburn for her thoughtful comments regarding the introduction to this chapter. 302

This appellation is not universal, however. The devout of other popular weizzā, like Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw and Bo Bo Aung, for example, consider their saints to be foremost of weizzā.

156

among the overall public. The weikza phenomenon has gained in visibility through the significant increase of weikza representations everywhere in Burma. At Mount Popa, it has resulted in the displacement of the December (natdaw) spirit festival with the September (tawthalin) weikza celebration and the explosion of Bo Min Gaung’s iconography.”303 Starting in 1993, one of the most popular magazines in the country, NYK, began carrying stories of Bo Min Gaung and his devotees. This did much to increase the popularity of Bo Min Gaung in the public’s imagination.304 Surprisingly very little is known about Bo Min Gaung.305 We know that he was a layman born in northern Myanmar around 1885 and spent the last years of his life in the small town of Kyaukpadaung located about thirty miles southeast from Pagan before passing away in 1952. Small cults already began to develop around Bo Min Gaung during his lifetime, and by the 1950s the degree to which he rose in prominence is reflected in Emanuel Sarkisyanz’s ethnographic research where he learned that Bo Min Gaung “ranked second only to Lord Buddha himself”306 and that caused Michael Mendelson to proclaim that his death was a “watershed for the formation of gaing.”307 This is still true today, and as scholar of religion, Per-Arne Berglie, recently pointed out from his fieldwork in upper Myanmar, “the importance of Bo Min Gaung

303

Brac de la Perriere (2012: 156).

304

Anonymous 2009 and 2010 interviews with NYK writers and editors.

305

For accounts of Bo Min Gaung’s life written in English, see Foxeus (2011, 67-73) and Mendelson (1963a). 306 Sarkisyanz (1968, 34). Bo Min Gaung figures prominently in the work of Michael Mendelson (1961b, 1963a) as well as in parts of Melford Spiro (1982). We saw in the last chapter one association, Pathamam Taya Gaing, whose focus was to propogate the life of Bo Min Gaung throughout the country in the late 1940s. 307

Mendelson 1963: 782. 157

for Burmese contemporary popular religiosity cannot be overestimated.”308 If one were to enter any Buddhist holy site, for example, there would most likely be a statue or image of Bo Min Gaung somewhere on the premises, usually off to the side of the main Buddha altar or placed in an area specifically reserved for weizzā devotional activities. Images of him can be purchased at most Buddhist shrines throughout the country and can now be found in the religious accouterments section of supermarkets and department stores.309
In spite of his popularity and ubiquity, most devotees know little, if anything, about the circumstances of Bo Min Gaung’s life. For them, the most important aspect of his life revolves around his attainment of weizzā-hood in 1952. This is the date when he “exited dead” (B. atheytwet), and his spirit left his body to dwell with a retinue of other weizzā in another realm. It is from this abode, and with his spirit that, as we saw in previous chapters, Bo Min Gaung enters into this world to interact with his devotees. As I traveled the country collecting stories and anecdotes about Bo Min Gaung, the more I learned about Bo Min Gaung, the more I found it difficult to understand how Bo Min Gaung could be an especially good figure for this kind of

308

Berglie, Per-Arn. 2005 Per-Arn. “Shamanic Buddhism in Burma.” Shaman Volume 13 Numbers 1 & 2, p. 51. 309

Commercial aspects of religion are currently being rehabilitated as subjects worthy of study, especially when examining the daily religious lives of people. Colleen McDannell’s Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America is an excellent study that researches commercial religion and religious material culture. Here she argues that “if we immediately assume that whenever money is exchanged religion is debased, then we will miss the subtle ways that people create and maintain spiritual ideals through the exchange of goods and the construction of spaces” (1995: 6). I agree with McDannell that material religious practices and objects have often been ignored by many scholars of religion because they are considered “less spiritual or authentic” (1996: 8). The negative connotations of kitsch, particularly in a religious context, remain and this may be partly responsible for the fact that devotional art deemed to be ‘kitsch’ has been largely ignored by academics since the publication of McDannell’s book, which provides many possibilities for further study. 158

imaginative intervention. Mentally and emotionally unstable, he was prone to violent outbursts and periods of moody isolation. Based on interviews with people who knew Bo Min Gaung when he was alive, for example, we learn that Bo Min Gaung barely spoke, and if he did, it was often in gibberish or unclear statements that were later interpreted by his disciples.310 Soon upon his arrival at Mount Popa, “many people came to see him,” one lifelong resident of Mount Popa recounted. “I did not like him. He did not behave well. Completely shameless, he did not care about anybody else as he urinated holding his anatomy before the people. He was also found cursing rudely to some people.”311 He often “sat carelessly exposing his genitals” even to women who came to pay him reverence, reported another man who knew Bo Min Gaung when alive.312 Others remember Bo Min Gaung “flinging his own feces at those who came to visit him.”313 From these few, yet detailed interviews, we encounter a man who appeared to suffer from significant psychological disorders. And yet in spite of his actions, the number of people who came, even as far away as Shan State, to pay respects to him grew steadily from about 1947 until his death in 1952. Some have attributed his fame to his handlers, a husband and wife with whom he lived, who were cunning in the ways they created a cult around a man who had severe mental problems.314 310

See, for example, the Aung Min Gaung Guidance Journal. It is a compilation of teachings given by Bo Min Gaung but interpreted by Saya U Si Lyek for the protection and proper guidance of all the people of the world. 311

Interview UBT-85-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).

312

Interview UBN-70-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).

313

Foxeus (2011: 69).

314

Interview UBN-70-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997). Interview UBT-85-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997). 159

In his incarnation as a modern Burmese saint, Bo Min Gaung first became well known during World War II, a time of great upheavals and changes for a country that had already known much chaos. As his initial devotees were marked by the time, so was he, as many of the stories that are connected with his living years are related to WWII in some way or another. During the Allied Forces’ bomb raids in the Mount Popa area, for example, Bo Min Gaung was remembered for fearlessly remaining atop Mount Popa while the rest of the villagers scrambled into the jungle for cover.315 He was even thought to possess the uncanny ability to foresee the bombings before they occurred. “When Bo Min Gaung stood atop a rock and flapped his arms, we all knew to hide. For soon, the bombs would fall,” remembers one man.316 When the war was over and communist rebels took control of the area, stories about Bo Min Gaung’s defiance in the face of oppressive forces once again began circulating. A communist rebel stationed at Mount Popa in the early 1950s, who was ordered by his superiors to interrogate Bo Min Gaung, later said in an interview that Bo Min Gaung’s fame increased even among the non-believers when an unsympathetic member of the interrogation group fired five rifle shots at Bo Min Gaung and missed him entirely. This young communist knew right away that Bo Min Gaung was no ordinary crazy, old man.317

315

Interview UBT-85-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).

316

For more on the ways Bo Min Gaung was viewed during this time by the villagers of the area, see NYK no.108 1995 pp.66-69 “Bo Min Gaung Connection.” 317

Interview UHM-67-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997). Stories of other weizzā saints being interrogated or shot at by Communist and Japanese soldiers is quite common among weizzā devotees. Dhammacariya U Aung Kyaw Moe’s account of weizzā Abha Pyu and Bodaw Pyu surviving drowning and assassination attempts by Japanese soldiers is one such example. ("Ko Yaung Ko Wa Lu-weizzā." Weizzā Magazine v.1, no. 6, 2008, pp.43-47). 160

With Japanese, Allied and Communist forces wreaking havoc throughout the country, it is not difficult to imagine how heroic Bo Min Gaung appeared to the Burmese, especially when stories circulated throughout the country about his disrespectful and astonishing actions towards such forces. Bo Min Gaung most likely resembled other WWII era heroes, real and imaginary.318 The hope that help would come from a hidden, unexpected source was shared in various different quarters at the time of Bo Min Gaung’s cult’s founding. For many, the chaos that had descended upon the country and affected so many of their lives must have been foreseen or put into motion by hidden forces working from an other-worldly realm. For such devotees, the suffering was too great for the weizzā not to intervene unless, as many believed, these series of events were predestined and allowed to take place by the weizzā as a result of the negative collective karma of the Burmese people.319 The many heroic accounts in written and oral forms that were produced in the years immediately preceding and following Bo Min Gaung’s death did much to inspire people to become devout followers. As he was not widely known, however, the life, activities, and teachings of Bo Min Gaung were, in a sense, a blank slate to be filled by the imaginations of the new devotees. By looking at the kinds of stories his devotees chose to include in hagiographical 318

Foxeus points out that this period (from late 1940s onward) was a tumultuous one characterized by ethnic separatist insurgencies, Communist rebellions, and communal tensions between Buddhists and Muslims, and sees it as “a breeding ground” for weizzā cults to develop (2012: 214). 319 Such views are widespread amongst Burmese weizzā devotees today. Informants agree that the past several decades of suffering are a result of some form of negative collective karma on behalf of the people of Myanmar. One popular belief is that those weizzā belonging to the “Great Weizzā Committee” (Mahā-Vijjā-Nayaka), during one of their meetings atop Nagama Hill, decided to influence the current state of political and economic affairs in order to manifest the negative collective karma as quickly as possible. The positive changes that are currently taking place in Myanmar are viewed by weizzā devotees that the weizzā are now working “behind the scenes,” so to speak, in ushering in a new era of prosperity as a result of the dwindling collective karma. 161

accounts, we can see how Bo Min Gaung was a saint of his time whose miracles were reflections of that period. The most popular miracle he was thought to have accomplished, for example, was starting up and driving a broken down car that had been neglected for years on the side of the road. An elderly man living in Mount Popa Village at this time recalls that “the most wonderful [miracle Bo Min Gaung performed] involved the old car with a busted engine. He started it up all by himself and drove it down the road. It was really amazing!”320 If asked to recount just one miracle of Bo Min Gaung, devotees will almost always tell this one and is that which is given much attention to in written hagiographies. Although devotees find nothing unusual about this miracle, it always struck me as odd that this is the miracle, in addition to his other well-known miracle of magically placing a derailed train back on its tracks, which is most associated with he who is considered “King of the Weizzā.” Upon further reflection, however, and following historian of religion Sophia Depoik’s idea that saints can be seen as “hazy mirrors of their surrounding society” where the saint is “invested with a range of social ideals by their devotees, and thus providing a reflection of the societies that venerate them,”321 I wonder if these miracles reflect fascinations early devotees had with technological advancements that were making inroads to upper Myanmar around this time. In the previous chapters we saw how around this time period it became popular for devotees to equate weizzā power with electricity, radio waves and power lines, and how special pagodas were erected that acted as antennae for intercepting the wavelengths of the weizzā. Historians of technology have recently shown how, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the success of urbanization in Southeast Asian countries and the 320

Interview UKS-88-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).

321

Depoik 2011 p.44 quoting Nancy Caciola, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: Recent Work on Sanctity and Society. A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38, 2 (April, 1996), p. 301. 162

pace with which technology made its way into the everyday lives of people, had a significant impact on the “inner histories and local narratives of these regions.”322 Bo Min Gaung was a saint of modern times --- able to foretell when bombs would fall, restart broken down mechanical equipment, protect virtuous people from car accidents, and even protect Myanmar from catastrophic events.323 He was (and continues to be) a modern day superhero. Like some of the Catholic saints of 1950s America who were often seen as a Lone Ranger type heroes,324 Bo Min Gaung, while being a distinctly Burmese Buddhist champion, was nonetheless also equated with the popular American superhero, Superman. “As a boy I was fascinated by the movie ‘Superman,’” writes Kyaw Myaing, a Bo Min Gaung devotee who runs a series of popular weizzā related websites and chat groups. “One day my father told me, ‘do you know, my son, we also have superman in our culture and tradition? …Bo Min Gaung is an extraordinary man.”325 Another devotee alive during Bo Min Gaung’s time remembers that “one day while we were sipping tea together, a communist fired his gun pointing at Bo Min Gaung. It failed. Then another fire failed again. Before the third was fired,” like a superhero impervious to 322

Arnold and DeWald (2012). The entire issue of Modern Asian Studies 46, 1 (2012) provides insight into this phenomenon. Rozenberg (2010) also points out the focus his weizzā devotee informants placed on modern technology when relating the miraculous feats of their saint. For example, many of the devotees possessed photographs of one of their weizzā standing on the hood of a jeep. Other devotees relished in telling stories about how the weizzā could out-walk a car going at full speed or that a person’s camera would fail to take a photo of a weizzā if permission was not first obtained. Rozenberg’s interpretation is that it constitutes a “literal representation” of the weizzā over such technology (p.108) and that science had “been put in the service of the weikza and its power domesticated” (p.106). 323

We saw in the last chapter, for example, the building of Bo Min Gaung related “catastrophe pagodas” meant to protect the surrounding areas from war, famine, and natural disasters. 324

Orsi (1996: 101).

325

UKM-?-M http://weizzārlan.blogspot.com/ last accessed 4/23/12. 163

bullets, Bo Min Gaung said to the rebel, "You cannot kill me. Only I can kill myself.”326 And although the cult of Bo Min Gaung began during his lifetime, the apotheosis of Bo Min Gaung began immediately after his death when admiring disciples expressed their adoration in writings and oral stories of the virtues and miraculous feats of their master. Such stories, like those shared above, became legend in that they centered on a real personality from an actual geographical location. Unlike fairy tales made up of fictional people and places, there is a certain veracity to the legend of Bo Min Gaung, at least to the degree to which it deals with real facts. These facts, however, are embedded within a great deal of fabrication. Regardless, such accounts do more than merely entertain by exaggeration; they make serious arguments as well. It is these legends that define a good part of what people understand to be the content of their devotional lives, specifically, and religious traditions, more generally.

Hagiography According to historian of religion, Frank Reynolds, Buddhist biographies can be separated into two categories: “sacred biography” and “hagiography.”327 Sacred biographies are those accounts written by followers of the founder of a religious tradition or movement and are primarily meant to “depict a distinctively new religious image or ideal” while hagiographies “present their subject as one who has realized, perhaps in a distinctive way, an image, ideal or attainment already recognized by his religious community.”328 Scholar of Burmese Studies, 326

Interview UKS-88-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).

327

“The Many Lives of Buddha: A Study of Sacred Biography and Theravāda Tradition,” in The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religion, eds. Frank Reynolds and Donald Capps, 1976. 328

Ibid., 3-4. 164

Gustaaf Houtman, applying these categories to Burmese Buddhist biographies, points out that many, if not most, religiously centered biographies fall somewhere in between a sacred biography and hagiography.329 One such biography he examines in detail is that of a famous twentieth-century meditation master. It is considered a sacred biography in that it shows how this master appropriated and adapted teachings passed down to him by his teacher and went on to create his own institutions and lineage. At the same time, this piece is also a hagiography because it extols the ways this master implemented the Buddha’s teachings.330 I came to the similar conclusion when confronted with accounts of Bo Min Gaung’s life events that were told to me by devotees and gleaned from examining books, magazine articles, songs, and, as I will discuss in more detail below, images pertaining to Bo Min Gaung. One sees how his religious biographies fit with established patterns of biographical writing in Myanmar that Houtman discussed when examining the hagiographies of famous meditation masters. Burmese religious biographies, Houtman points out, are less concerned with presenting a chronologically accurate rendering of the subject’s life than with paying special attention to the subject’s supernatural attainments.331 Bo Min Gaung’s biographies are an excellent example of

329

In their studies of Burmese biographical literature, historians U Than Htut and U Thaw Kaung have pointed out that the years during, and immediately following, World War II saw an increase in the amount of biographies, memoires, and diaries being published in Myanmar. In fact, the period of Japanese Occupation saw the largest number of such literature published than in any other period of the twentieth century. "Myanmar Biographical Writings in the Twentieth Century," paper read at Views and Visions in the Library Heritage of Southeast Asia International Conference, Yangon, 18-20th December 2000. 330

Houtman. 1997. “Beyond the cradle and past the grave: the biography of Burmese meditation master U Ba Khin.” In Juliane Schober (ed.), Buddhist sacred biography in South and Southeast Asia., p. 320. See also “Appendix F: Monk Hagiography in Burmese biographical literature” in Houtman’s Buddhist Traditions of Practice in Burma for a thorough discussion of the distinction between biography and hagiography as understood by Burmese writers. 331 Houtman 1997: 322. 165

this. Making sure to emphasize the miraculous events that manifested in the life of Bo Min Gaung, his biographers move freely forward and backwards through decades and even centuries connecting Bo Min Gaung to events and people that help to highlight his status as a Buddhist saint. The episodes are “chronologically disjointed” in that saint migrates from one time period to another.332 Bo Min Gaung is thought to have been involved in carrying out Buddhist activities during periods stretching back five hundred years and is believed to do so continually into the future. An ongoing concern of biographers has been the writing of biographies of Bo Min Gaung dealing with successive rebirths.333 There is a preoccupation to trace his spiritual lineage back to several high profile individuals who bear the same, or similar, name. The purpose of tracing this relationship between the current Bo Min Gaung and his antecedents is to firmly establish the genuine nature of his saintliness and royal prestige. Regarding Bo Min Gaung’s supposed regal past, biographers trace his extended biography to such kings as Minpyauk (r. 1352 - 1364), King Min Gaung (r. 1401 - 1422), Dhammazedi Min Gaung (r. 14601491), King Min Gaung II (r. 1481-1502). Next, such biographies often “spiritualize” their subjects by purging any references of human weakness that may detract from their saintliness.334 With biographies of Bo Min Gaung we find nothing, for example, of his emotions and thoughts and are presented with a person who is exalted in ways typical of Buddhist saints in general. He is called the “master of loving

332

Houtman 1997: 322.

333

This successive rebirth motif is a longstanding one for major Buddhist figures found in all Buddhist traditions. The Jatakas (genre of literature chronicling the previous lives of the Buddha) are the most well-known and revered throughout the Buddhist world. 334

Reynolds 1976: 3. 166

kindness” (B. metta-shin), “master of perfection” (B. siddhi-shin), and “master of virtue” (B. parami-shin).335 He is said to have lived as a hermit in the jungle practicing meditation and, as discussed in the previous chapter, traveled the country erecting pagodas in non-Buddhist areas, converting Christians to Buddhism, and teaching villagers to observe precepts, offer donations and develop compassion. The hagiographical tradition associated with Bo Min Gaung consists of the stories his contemporaries began telling about him and continue with the retelling of these, and newer, stories in various places by devotees whose imaginations are captured by this ambiguous and passionate holy figure. Already during his lifetime, and certainly in the years immediately following his death, his biographers were recasting Bo Min Gaung from a man who may very well have suffered from mental disorders, into a semi-enlightened being whose madness was merely a guise for imparting esoteric teachings that would bring about spiritual realization in those he encountered, testing the faithfulness of his disciples, and for keeping unwelcome authority figures from bothering him.336 One day while sitting in a teashop at the base of Mount Popa a homeless man, clearly dealing with some kind of mental afflictions, was shouting at and harassing people in front of the shop. When I asked the shopkeeper if he did not find this man annoying, he said that he did but that “no one can tell for sure if he is Bo Min

335

As noted above, stories and incidents were shared with me about Bo Min Gaung’s crude and cruel behavior to those who came to visit him, but these were provided by individuals who were not devotees of Bo Min Gaung. 336

One devotee who was familiar with Tibetan Buddhist masters told me that Bo Min Gaung was exhibiting “crazy wisdom.” See The Divine Madman (trans. Keith Dowman) for a classic example of a Tibetan holy madman. Interestingly, the second most revered weizzā saint in Myanmar today, Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw, was also thought to be “mad.” He is remembered for offering food to a large group of stray dogs as if they were monks on alms round. U Aung Kyantha was another weizzā thought to be slightly crazy. See NYK no.110 1995. 167

Gaung or not. He may be pretending to be crazy.”337 An elderly man who witnessed some of Bo Min Gaung’s erratic behavior while he was alive argued that it was not to be taken at face value, and instead, needed to be interpreted for it “offered secret information,” sometimes about “impending danger.” Providing an example, he recalled that “when six bombers emptied all their bombs over Mount Popa, we remembered Bo Min Gaung’s behavior prior to this: he went out between the rocks, opened a packet of food and swallowed it all down. So next time we saw him do this, we all hid in bomb shelters. And, sure enough, the bombers came as expected and showered bullets and bombs.”338 A third characteristic of Burmese religious biographies is that they omit any mention of “relationships and episodes in the subject’s life insofar as these could possibly shed doubt on his sanctity.”339 Besides brief mention of the names of his parents and siblings, the relationship he had with one of his closest disciples, and the name of his “adopted” son, one finds accounts of Bo Min Gaung’s life focused solely on the latter part of his life when he was thought to have already begun his Buddhist propagation work.340 Bo Min Gaung is always portrayed as a quiet,

337

Similar ideas can be found among pilgrims at China’s Wu Tai Shan where it is thought that the bodhisattva, Manjushri, takes the form of homeless people, madmen, and the like. For more on this, see Kieschnick, John. 1997.The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press. 338

Interview with AKS-88-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).

339

Houtman 1997: 321.

340

This close disciple is known as U Johnny, or by his monastic name, U Kumara. He was an Anglo-Burmese man who, at the urging of Bo Min Gaung, broke off his relationship with his fiancé in England and ordained as a monk. He attempted to carry out Bo Min Gaung’s sāsana propagation agenda by erecting pagodas and religious edifices around Mt. Popa and in other areas of the country. Mendelson had the chance to meet him in 1959 and described him as “tall, good looking, somewhere in his thirties” who engaged in “large building programmes with money [donated to him] from his sermons” (1963: 795). 168

often brooding, individual whose mind was so preoccupied with the Buddha’s teachings that he would only speak or share teachings with devotees when he deemed it necessary. There is a fourth characteristic that often goes unnoticed perhaps because it is so obvious, and that is the role of the biographer. For our purposes, I am not so much concerned with the biographer whose personal reasons for writing accounts of Bo Min Gaung we cannot clearly discern as I am for the biographical extension that I witness in the lives of weizzā devotees. This is particularly pertinent to our present study on the religious lives of weizzā devotees because examining how and why the biographer’s process of creating the religious biography of Bo Min Gaung, whether it be a formal publication, a story shared among other devotees, or, as we will see below, the acquisition of an iconographic representation of Bo Min Gaung, allows us to see stages in the deepening of a devotee’s engagement with the saint. Traditionally defined as stories about saints, in the case of Bo Min Gaung, religious biographies become stories both about the saint and about the circumstances the devotees telling the stories had found themselves in over the course of their relationships with him. The telling of their stories about Bo Min Gaung is a narrative practice that first describes the personal problems of the biographer before describing how the saint intervened to help. We see, then, that the focus of the biography turns from that of the person and activities of Bo Min Gaung during his lifetime to that of the person and activities of Bo Min Gaung at definable moments in their lives in which Bo Min Gaung has intervened and will potentially intervene in the future. Most devotees do not particularly know or care a great deal about the life of Bo Min Gaung during the years before he “exited.” For instance, most As for his “adopted” son, this would be U San Pe, the man whose parents were the caretakers, or as we saw above from interviews with people who knew Bo Min Gaung while he was alive, a crafty couple who exploited Bo Min Gaung for their own monetary aims. U San Pe was a child at the time of Bo Min Gaung’s passing but has remained at Popa where he maintains a small museum of Bo Min Gaung’s personal belongings. 169

know little, if anything, outside of the year of his death and several well-known anecdotes about his life. “I think you are more of an expert on Bo Min Gaung’s life than me,” the owner and caretaker of a Bo Min Gaung shrine in Mandalay told me during one of our initial discussions about the saint. “I only decided to build this shrine only after Bo Min Gaung appeared to me in a dream,” he continued.341 Such became the common refrain from most of my informants when talking with them about the life of Bo Min Gaung, even from mediums of Bo Min Gaung whom I questioned about the life of Bo Min Gaung during those moments when they were channeling the saint. Instead of focusing on the particulars of his life as a historical person, devotees delighted in regaling me with stories of Bo Min Gaung’s supernatural interventions in their worlds. They would end their often long-winded accounts with a personal story of how Bo Min Gaung interceded in their lives or in the lives of friends and family, thereby adding a new thread to the hagiographical corpus of Bo Min Gaung.342 What matters most for them is that Bo Min Gaung appeared to them or intervened at an important point in their life --- a point where, as Orsi beautifully phrases, “the transcendent broke into time.”343 Orsi continues: A saint’s story was not exhausted by the details of his or her life on earth, just as stories about family members do not stop being told when they die. Hagiography is best understood as a creative process that goes on and on in the circumstances of everyday life, as people add their own experiences of a saint to his or her vita and contemporaries

341

UL-70?-M.

342

When first meeting someone who is a devotee of Bo Min Gaung, they often asked me, “What kind of experiences did you have of him?” or “How did you encounter him?” Even when corresponding with devotees by email or letters, they would first ask me about any possible encounter I may have had with Bo Min Gaung, and then would excitedly relate their experiences. 343

Orsi (2005: 62). 170

get woven into the lives of the saints. Such storytelling was one of the ways the communion of the saints became real in people’s experiences and memories.344 While the devout understand Bo Min Gaung to be an entirely autonomous being with his own will, his actions are nonetheless intimately related to the circumstances of devotees’ own lives. They describe him as an active presence and frequently recount stories about his mystical activities, integrating their personal experiences with themes drawn from a larger mythical corpus. In addition to acting as an interpretive lens that orders and imparts coherence to the world, these stories also are employed to, as we saw with the female weizzā mediums, re-imagine events over which their narrators have little control, disclosing a world of alternative possibilities and meanings. Let us explore this theme further in what follows with particular emphasis on devotees’ visual and physical engagements with Bo Min Gaung.

Dynamic Visuality Making contact with Bo Min Gaung and maintaining one’s close relationship with him are central concerns of his devotees. Even those individuals blessed with the ability to experience the more visceral encounters with the weizzā through possession or dreams, still use material objects, most often in the form of images, to commune with their “grandpa,” as they often refer to him as.345 Devotional images of this sort are, in what Orsi calls, “media of presence”346 and not simply copies of the original but rather an ontological closeness with the original. Such media, which in the case of Bo Min Gaung, include holy cards, photographs, statues and images, 344 345

Orsi (2005: 113). “Abha” being an affectionate form of address devotees use towards Bo Min Gaung.

346

Orsi. 2013. “Holy Cards.” In Reverberations: New Directions in the Study of Prayer. April 8, 2013. http://forums.ssrc.org/ndsp/2013/04/08/holy-cards/#more-2590 Last accessed May 29, 2013. 171

prayer beads, pieces of cloth, and a variety of other objects, are thought to hold the power of the weizzā saint and to make it, and him, present. This iconography is “thoroughly ‘interested,’ ‘engaged,’ functional and extrinsically purposive.’ Media of presence are efficacious and they serve as points of encounter --- between … humans and sacred figures.”347 Religious images are an essential part of Burmese Buddhism, and an important aspect of the practice of popular devotions is engagement with their visual representations. People engage Bo Min Gaung emotionally and imaginatively, bringing him into their lives for themselves, and in the process of this exchange, Bo Min Gaung acquires another set of meanings, qualities, and associations than those presented in published biographies. Such is the process of improvisation by which Bo Min Gaung is imagined into being. We see this clearly in the case of iconographic representations of Bo Min Gaung that devotees engage with on a daily basis. The devout have strong opinions on what images are more “correct” than others, and it has little to nothing to do with oral or textual biographical accounts of Bo Min Gaung. Direct experiences that devotees, or a close friend or relative, have had with Bo Min Gaung are highly influencing factors that contribute to one’s preferred image. Usually, a devotee would determine to acquire a statue or a two-dimensional picture of Bo Min Gaung for themselves only after having some direct experience of him.348 347

Orsi (2007, 49). These representations can be purchased for moderate fees at most of the larger pagoda complexes or at specific places of pilgrimage associated with Bo Min Gaung and other weizzā. Outside of public shrines, the most common place for encountering two and three-dimensional images of Bo Min Gaung include: installed in home altars or shrine rooms alongside images of the Buddha; inside vehicles, wallets and purses; and on walls of shops and restaurants. Just as Bo Min Gaung can potentially be everywhere, so, too is his power accessible to ordinary people in their everyday lives. For the many devotees who maintain shrines in their homes, for instance, the images installed within are used for meditation, chanting, and homage, often several times a day. Images of weizzā are always placed on an area that is lower than the Buddha statues for, as I was often reminded, weizzā are not arahants and should not be placed equal to that of the 172 348

During one of my daily trips to a pagoda in Yangon associated with the weizzā, I got to talking with one of the caretakers there about statues of Bo Min Gaung and indicated to him that I wished to buy one for myself. There were some small shops near the pagoda that sold statues of Bo Min Gaung, and when I showed him some of the ones I was thinking of purchasing (Bo Min Gaung sitting cross-legged, sporting short hair, and holding a tea cup), he told me to hold off and return tomorrow when he would present me with a statue that truly represented the true nature of Bo Min Gaung. Returning the next day, he gave me a statue of Bo Min Gaung similar to the others I was thinking of buying except that this statue’s Bo Min Gaung had long hair and a hand extended looking as if he was holding a cigarette. When I showed him actual photographs of Bo Min Gaung that were reproduced and published in several biographies and asked him why the image he gave me was better than any of those from the books, he simply replied that “this is an image based on my aunt’s vision of him who appeared to her in a dream.”349 Asking other devotees why they chose the particular image they did to acquire despite it bearing little resemblance to any iconographic representation of the Bo Min Gaung as he looked in photographs and drawings from the 1940s and 50s, I was told that their chosen images were “beautiful,” “lovely,” “awe-inspiring,” or that they were similar to images they had of Bo Min Gaung in dreams or visions. “One day while repeatedly chanting “araham iddhi; iddhi araham” in front of Bo Min Gaung statue, I had a vision of Bo Min Gaung,” one devotee writes in a

Buddha for it would be disrespectful. Many devout even place statues and images of weizzā saints on a separate altar altogether, albeit immediately alongside the statues of the Buddha and his disciples. In spite of Bo Min Gaung reporting to have said that, “Forget about my body. I will not use my body. I will use my nāma,” people all over Myanmar continue to create and interact with images of him (U Kyee Shein. 2005: 6). 349




Interview AK-41-M. 173

weizzā devotional tract. “He looked mostly how he does in photos except that there were some differences in his clothing…I tried hard to stare at his face, but it was blurry. Suddenly, he closed his eyes, and the Itipiso gāthā came out of his mouth. When finished chanting, he opened his eyes and disappeared. From this time onwards, I’ve been searching for any photographic evidence of Bo Min Gaung looking like the image I saw in my vision.”350 I came to understand that the devout had their own, more personal, criteria for recognizing Bo Min Gaung. Before they determined to obtain a representation of him, they would already have had some direct experience of him; the acquisition of an image was a gesture of gratitude, which is generally undertaken after some significant life event had occurred or was in the process of taking place. Such an acquisition could also be a gesture of anticipation; creating a connection with the saint and thus opening a channel for meaningful things to occur. There is a longing to have the saint who had acted for them at a crucial moment near them in visible ways. When they describe how they imagine Bo Min Gaung to look, his devotees emphasize his face or bodily comportment, and when they pay homage to, or request something from him, they search to see him, either in the statues, photographs, or paintings before them or in their imaginations. Here we see devotees, as we encountered above with regard to oral and written accounts, creating new biographical material to the life of Bo Min Gaung (decades after his death) with each new iconographic representation that is either created out of an event related to their relationship with Bo Min Gaung or through a miraculous event that occurred in relation to a particular image. Circulating biographical accounts, both written and oral, as well as personal encounters with Bo Min Gaung before he “exited” in 1952, are quite important for informing


“Foreign

Country and Bo Min Gaung” in Extraordinarily Powerful Persons’ Amazing and Strange Occurrences (1994, 45).
174

people’s perceptions and relations with the saint. But looking at the stages of engagement a devotee has with Bo Min Gaung across various points throughout the devotee’s life, we find that, while written and oral biographies can create certain conditions of expectation, it is individuals' experiences that are understood by them as the transformative shift in relation to the saint. This is evident in the case of an elderly woman I spoke with in Yangon regarding her previous experiences with the saint. This woman had the chance to meet Bo Min Gaung in 1950 and told me that “he didn’t say anything. He just sat there staring blankly and mumbling nonsense.”351 Needless to say she was not impressed and left not believing him to possess special powers. But when she and her husband led me into their shrine room that contained over ten Bo Min Gaung statues, I was shocked. Seeing the confusion on my face, the husband told me that only after Bo Min Gaung passed away did they begin to believe in his powers. When they faced obstacles in their life with regards to health and finances, Bo Min Gaung appeared to them to help set things right. Since then, they have been devout followers of Bo Min Gaung and make the pilgrimage to Mt. Popa every September to take part in the annual celebration of Bo Min Gaung’s passing. Deciding to purchase a representation of Bo Min Gaung and bringing it into one’s life, such as placing it on a home altar or car dashboard, is a public gesture that carries with it certain significance, for it is an external sign that one is, at some basic level, aligning oneself with the weizzā path. One woman told me that she was by no means a staunch follower of Bo Min Gaung, but after having a dream where he appeared to her and gave her solace with regards to a family matter she worried about, she believed in his power and was compelled to install his statue in her home (see figure 1). Once the saint becomes present by means of the object in one’s surroundings, in the hand of a loved one, or left on a distraught, sleeping foreigner’s book bag, 351

SL-85-F. 175

circumstances change. For such devotees the point of many of the practices associated with the material world of the devotion --- the statues of various sizes sold at pagodas, its holy cards, amulets, dashboard stickers, and so on --- has been to focus Bo Min Gaung’s stern, yet caring, and protective presence. The devout site Bo Min Gaung, arranging their images of him at home and work, in vehicles, and on their person so they might exchange consoling, encouraging glances and words as they go about their daily tasks.

Figure 1: A devotee’s home altar dedicated to Bo Min Gaung.

Despite the disparity in peoples’ opinions of what constituted a more authentic Bo Min Gaung than others, such images hardly ever vary by more than four different iconographic representations of him, thus leading one to believe that there is an accepted set of iconographic blueprints for how Bo Min Gaung should be portrayed (see figure 2). There are no associations or textual sources that indicate to the public what are and are not acceptable images of Bo Min 176

Gaung.352 Rather, it is the devotees themselves who consider some images to be more acceptable than others, and unlike the iconographic imagery of the Catholic saints, Thérèse of Lisieux and Francesca Cabrini, for example, whose photographs are thought to be the most suitable mediums of accurate representation,353 the ways in which devotees interact with the images of Bo Min Gaung, can be innovated in a freer manner. Although an image maker may engage is some experimental creativity, he will generally undertake the project keeping in line with previous versions of Bo Min Gaung, all the while refining his creation in accordance with any personal experiences he or his customer may have of Bo Min Gaung. Instead of focusing on unearthing any “authentic” image of Bo Min Gaung, if we examine the ways devotees modify images of Bo Min Gaung, both in the figurative sense and in terms of the retouching, cropping, and graphically editing, offers us valuable insight into how the devout understand their relationship with Bo Min Gaung to be. Because Bo Min Gaung lived fairly recently and because he was considered important enough by his devotees to have his picture taken at a time when photography was still quite rare in the country, we do have access to about eight photographs of him. These photographs portray an elderly and frail Bo Min Gaung and often appear in published biographies and magazine articles. The images that devotees engage with, however, are usually doctored representations of a healthier, more robust Bo Min Gaung image (see figure 3). His stern disposition and rugged, muscular appearance in such images are important for how his devotees interact with him and are indications of his virile supernatural powers.

352

None of the biographies I have consulted stress details of visual representation.

353

Deboick (2011, 38). 177

Figure 2: Bo Min Gaung seated in three common poses. The hanging poster of him in the rearcenter seated on a chair is a fourth common representation.354

354

Similar poses can also be found among a couple of Thai Buddhist saints, thus causing many Bo Min Gaung devotees who have seen such images to believe that Bo Min Gaung’s spirit had entered into these Thai monks and hermits to make them act in a similar manner. I was given several of these Thai images by Bo Min Gaung devotees in 2009. 178

Figure 3: Doctored Image on the left.

Unlike the saints of other religious traditions, however, the devout do not necessarily believe that images of Bo Min Gaung are alive, and unlike images of the Buddha, are not ritually charged. Bo Min Gaung has shed his physical body and does his work through his nāma by having it to enter into the body/minds of others. This leaves open the possibility that his nāma can enter into two and three-dimensional images to enact miracles before moving on to another image, thus leaving behind an image that is ontologically more potent than before he had entered into it. Weizzā images display no outward signs of their potency. Statues of Bo Min Gaung do not cry blood or oil, for example, and the power of an image is left to the discretion of the 179

devotee. Oftentimes a devotee will feel a strong affinity to a specific image, regardless of its provenance. One man’s faith in Bo Min Gaung increased significantly after a statue of Bo Min Gaung helped heal his daughter’s skin condition. “My wife and I were distraught at how severe our daughter’s eczema had become. It never got this bad before, and no doctor could help. I have several statues of Bo Min Gaung in my Buddha room, and one day while paying homage to him, my eyes fell upon one statue in particular,” Nyaing Win told me. His eyes began to water as he went on with the story. “I felt drawn to this statue and thought that perhaps Bo Min Gaung had come to visit me through this statue. I begged him to help cure my daughter. Suddenly, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and a feeling of great coolness covered my body. I smiled knowing that something special had happened. The next day we were amazed that my daughter’s eczema was almost completely gone!” There was nothing extraordinary about the provenance of this particular image (he told me it had been purchased at a roadside shrine while on pilgrimage several years prior), but because of the intensity of the moment, an instantaneous bond formed between this man and that particular statue, which has only grown stronger over the years as evidenced by the preferential treatment this devotee has shown to this particular statue. “I offer green tea and incense to Grandfather every morning,” he told me, “and ever since that one day, my daughter’s eczema has never gotten so bad as before.”355 Over time, however, a common set of signs has become accepted by devotees as proof that Bo Min Gaung is acting through a particular image in some way. While the abatement of a skin ailment was a personal sign to Nyaing Win that Bo Min Gaung had acted through a particular image, other, externally identifiable signs are also sought out for proof of an image’s potency. Magazines, devotional literature, and even online chat-rooms and community groups 355

UNW-38-M. 180

are venues where the devout can share stories and even post images of the ways they believe Bo Min Gaung to be interacting with them through their two and three-dimensional images. For example, photographs of cigarettes offered upright in which the burnt ash remains intact (figure 4) is just one example of external signs of the presence of Bo Min Gaung’s power.356

Figure 4: A devotee’s photograph that he posted on an online weizzā forum to illustrate that Bo Min Gaung is working through his image.

356

Foxeus encountered similar instances during his fieldwork with weizzā associations in upper Myanmar: “Sometimes, I was told, Bo Min Ghaung's spirit enters this statue and dwells there. When the statue was cast a miracle occurred at the workshop, of which there is a photograph on the wall. It shows a table with a couple of small statuettes of Bo Min Ghaung and a kadaw-pwe offering, from which two streaks of smoke are rising. That was a manifestation of Bo Min Ghaung, who, as a bodiless weizzā, was demonstrating his mystical power with his mental factors” (2007: 10). 181

Such occurrences are catalysts for devotees to develop strong bonds with, not only Bo Min Gaung, but also, with the image. While it is much rarer for Bo Min Gaung to work through photographs and paintings, there are reports where he was thought to enter into two-dimensional images of himself. This is evidenced in an account provided by a photographer who took one of the few iconic photographs of Bo Min Gaung shortly before he died. The photographer begins by saying that he had never experienced anything supernatural in all his life, but on the evening of December 25, 1993 at about ten o’clock in the evening, he experienced something very strange. While processing a role of black and white film, he took one picture and placed it into some unboiled water. After a short time he saw that the water where he had placed the developing pictures began to bubble. “Like the sound of a scarab beetle, the water made a ‘tichit, tichit’ sound,” he recounted. While looking in the water for the cause of this, he and his wife saw three Bo Min Gaung photos in there amongst the other photographs he was developing. “I immediately took out the three Bo Min Gaung pictures and the water went back to normal. When I placed one of the Bo Min Gaung pictures back into the water, it began to bubble again and make that sound. The sound became especially loud when my wife placed all three Bo Min Gaung photographs back under the remaining photographs. After taking the Bo Min Gaung photographs back out, the water went back to being calm.”357 Amazed, he and his wife took it as a sign of something wonderful. He remembers taking this picture of Bo Min Gaung in the early 1950s only after Bo Min Gaung gave permission and was therefore convinced that this Bo Min Gaung photo was, indeed, a “siddhi-win” picture (a picture wherein supernatural power has entered). He went on to make nine thousand copies and distributed them to whomever wanted a copy. Some of Bo Min Gaung’s disciples drew lots to 357

NYK no.93, 1004 p.156.
182

receive those photographs from an original set of twenty. As for the original photograph, however, the photographer pays homage to it daily, and “it still retains the power it exhibited on the first day.” When the photographer had malaria and was in the hospital, he placed the picture on the wall next to his bed and gazed upon it until he became better. The ways people personalize their images tells us much about the religious lives of weizzā devotees. Their practices are not static, but evolving, mercurial and sometimes contradicting amalgams of rituals, practices, and beliefs. The visual dimension of weizzā practice, with its scope for interpretive adaptation by individual practitioners, is an arena for personalized affective focus, and for practitioners to independently confirm and authorize the powers of their weizzā saint.358 Like saints found in other religious traditions, Bo Min Gaung, echoing Kelly Hayes words, “takes on the breath of life --- that is, he exists and is meaningful --only at the permeable interface between an external, social environment and an internal world of personal experience.”359 As we will now see, stories of, and ways of engaging with, Bo Min Gaung and other weizzā saints must also address issues or conflicts particular to the devotee him/herself in order to be considered potent.

Presently Powerful “Grandfather cured my heart condition over twenty years ago at this very spot,” a middleaged man told me at a weizzā shrine in Mandalay while holding the hand of a statue of Bo Min Gaung. His hand never left the statue as he went on with his story of how he was born with a congenital heart disease and endured a childhood of illnesses. During those parts of his life story 358

I thank Anne Blackburn for making this important point.

359

Hayes 2011: 8. 183

that were particularly emotional, he would tenderly stroke the arm and caress the hand of his grandfather. In fact, it was this laying on of hands upon the statue that he attributes his direct healing to. Beaming with happiness, he confided that he does “not forget Grandpa, and Grandpa does not forget me.”360 The acquisition of an image often occurred after the devotee had had some experience with Bo Min Gaung. Tremendously powerful, Bo Min Gaung is not one to trifle with. Harsh, rude, and domineering on the outside, there is a tender side that his devout see in him. Affectionately referred to as “Abha” or “Grandpa” his close devotees imagine him to be a gentle, yet stern and protective, grandfatherly figure. He could, and would, (although seldom) express acts of kindness to his most faithful. However, the appellation given to him of grandfather only began to be used within the past thirty years or so. During his lifetime and for years after, he was referred to as “bodaw” (religious mendicant) or other, lofty sounding names, like “Mahagandhari Vijjādhara Bodaw Aung Min Gaung.”361 thus illustrating the way his early devotees viewed him: religious master and powerful teacher who possessed wisdom of the secrets of attaining perfection. As time went on, like a child who tends to remember the better qualities of a slightly abusive or distant elderly relative, the more touching appelations of “grandfather” and more commonly, “grandpa,” began to be used to express the tender relationships that developed

360

Interview UTS-48-M.

361

Vijjādhara, of course, being the Pāli for the Burmese, “weizzā-dho” [bearer of wisdom]. Mahagandhari refers to the highest class of weizzā, Maha-gandhari weizzā: one who has achieved a state of “twet-ya” (exiting) and will “twet-ya-pauk” (exit) thus either, a) allowing his nāma to part from his rūpa upon the death of his physical body, or b) allowing both his nāma and rūpa to “exit” in tact. 184

between him and the devout.362 More importantly, the way people began to interact with him after his bodily departure, that is, the tone of their relationships, took on a softer, gentler character. The Bo Min Gaung that began appearing to them in aural and visual visions was also much milder, speaking to them in soft words that were easily understandable instead of the incomprehensible blabber that he spoke when alive. Although still retaining some sternness that was a mark of his power, and which invoked great reverence, he became a saint that was more easily accessible, relatable, and thus more widespread and encompassing than he was when he was alive. And like a grandfather who mellows out in his twighlight years, Bo Min Gaung went from being remembered as a mad saint throwing fecal matter at those who came seeking his counsel to a protector saint who looked benevolently over his grandchildren. This widespread appeal helped his fame and influence to grow beyond the boundaries of the cults and become a patron saint that transgressed social, geographic, institutional, and even religious boundaries.363 Not only do they see themselves as familial related, they also see themselves as karmically related to Bo Min Gaung. Regardless of the differences various devotees see in Bo Min Gaung, how they see themselves related to him is the same and is predicated on a karmic bond spanning lifetimes that links Bo Min Gaung with the devotee. Known as pathan-set (literally “connected by karmic rebirths”), this bond between the devotee and Bo Min Gaung has

362

I have never heard of him described as a “friend,” however.

363

Brac de la Perriere notes the steady increase in the number of devotees, and by extension the “numerous new representations of Bo Min Gaung flourishing everywhere [at Mt. Popa],” commissioned and donated particularly by Muslims and Kokan “who come from Mandalay and reinvest in religious donations part of the benefits they have made after taking vow in front of the weikza” (2012: 156). 185

its genesis in a previous life encounter.364 This pathan-set is the belief that the devotee and Bo Min Gaung have a strong bond that has spanned many lifetimes. Because of this, devotees consider themselves karmically bonded with Bo Min Gaung and therefore do not necessarily see that they have much of a choice in whether or not they wish to be part of this relationship for the time period Bo Min Gaung wishes to engage the devotee. “Grandfather’s voice is always in my head nudging me to do this or that,” one devotee, a goldsmith, told me. “He’s always right. When I don’t do what he says, he doesn’t punish me. The bad results of my actions are punishment enough!” he smiles as he goes on to tell me of a business deal that went sour when his partner, whom Bo Min Gaung had indicated untrustworthy, left town with all his money.365 Another devotee, who is currently living in Australia and who offers advice to people through Google Chat whenever he finds himself under the partial possession of Bo Min Gaung, told me that he has a “permanent connection” with Bo Min Gaung because he was “Bo Min Gaung’s son for many lifetimes.” He sounded rather frustrated when he went on to say that he “has no choice, really” and “doesn’t want to be in this role” but after witnessing how everything “Abha” says comes true, he has become a firm believer in both Bo Min Gaung’s power and in his own power as a weizzā medium.366

364

See Foxeus 2011: 170 for a detailed, philological explanation of this term. Jordt glosses it nicely when she explains that pathan-set “demonstrates the donors cosmic affinity” to an individual “thought to be evidence of prior kammic affiliation and therefore a shared path in spiritual striving" (2010: 103). 365 Interview UTW-41-M. 366 Interview SKM-3?-M. Foxeus came across one informant who said that “those who do not put their trust in and believe in Bo Min Gaung will face their destiny in accordance with their habit. Those who do believe in Bo Min Gaung, i.e. his adherents who have the particular patthan-hsek relation with him, will be protected and ‘saved’ by him.” According to Foxeus, “the belief in Bo Min Gaung could, according to this informant, be a way of counteracting the effects 186

Pathan-set with Bo Min Gaung is not restricted to adult devotees. Children too are known to possess strong karmic bonds with Bo Min Gaung, and some, under the direction of their parents, go on to be revered individuals in their small communities. One such child, an eight-year-old boy named Ye Kyaw Min, was thought to be the reincarnation of Bo Min Gaung who had returned to this world in 1987 to help sentient beings and propagate the sāsana.367 Exhibiting behavior similar to Bo Min Gaung from an early age, his parents began dressing him like the saint and within months, people from all around the area, including monks from Mount Popa, began coming to visit and pay respects to this young Bo Min Gaung. During his fieldwork, Foxeus also came across a similar case of a young novice monk of about six years old who had the ability to channel the spirit of Bo Min Gaung. Like the boy, Ye Kyaw Min, this boy also exhibited adultlike behavior reminiscent of Bo Min Gaung and even possessed the power to predict winning lottery numbers.368 Whether Bo Min Gaung came in a moment of crisis or moment of ordinariness, the moment is charged and never forgotten. As we saw in previous chapters, and in my personal anecdote that began this chapter, one often experiences Bo Min Gaung coming into their lives when they least expect it. There are no chance encounters with Bo Min Gaung. While they are almost always unexpected, there is certainly nothing random about these encounters. They occur exactly when and how they are supposed to as a result of one’s karmic bond with him. A weizzā who visits a devotee in physical form, through a medium, or in a dream and meditative vision, is,

of accumulated unwholesome kamma, a way of bypassing the otherwise rigid law of coconditioned genesis” (2011: 170). 367 NYK no. 98, 1994 pp.18-29 “The Strange Child from Middle Myanmar” Aung Khain Lin. 368

Foxeus 2011: 116. 187

as we saw in the previous chapters, the result of one’s developed pāramī (acquired virtue).369 In a sense, the devotee is elected or chosen by Bo Min Gaung, whether the person wishes him to or not. Confident in being chosen by Bo Min Gaung after having some kind of experience with the saint that confirms for them the idea of pathan-set, men and women devotees remain faithful to this relationship for years and devote much time, energy, and resources to care for and upkeep this relationship with their grandpa. Even for those devotees who never asked to be elected by Bo Min Gaung, after the initial shock of experiencing Bo Min Gaung come into their lives, they accept that to be selected is a great honor. Devotees say that they “are very lucky” to have Bo Min Gaung in their lives whom they can “go to for help,” “rely upon, and “be protected by.” 370 And as one devotee writes, “Bo Min Gaung gives me sound advice whenever I need help with something.”371

Physical Affect I have discussed above that the images of Bo Min Gaung are selectively chosen, and I have discussed this in the context of devotees' individually interpreting and authorizing their experiences and place in Bo Min Gaung's biography, a process that also includes discussing experiences, getting warrant for experiences, and interpreting experiences in terms of karmic

369

Interviewees who knew Bo Min Gaung during his lifetime commented that Bo Min Gaung would sometimes make comments about people being related to him: “To one he liked most, he would offer a cup of tea. No one else could touch the teacup except the one he offered it to. If somebody touched it, he growled at him saying ‘Are you related to me?’" Interview UKS-88-M conducted by U Khin Maung Than (1997).
370 Interviews TPN-34-M; DP-42-F; DS-38-F; SG-84-F  
NYK




no.108 1995 pp.66-69 “Bo Min Gaung Connection.” 188

history. In this section, I am going to focus on physical affective engagement with Bo Min Gaung images. Statues and images are the preferred gateways for the devout to interact with Bo Min Gaung and to ask for his assistance. By touching, valuable qualities or powers are thought to pass from the image to a subject. The person making physical contact with the image intends, or more often, hopes, to receive something: protection, health, good fortune, etc. And while it is not necessary to bring a body part into contact with the image to receive such beneficence, I came to see that such action works to seal the request made by the petitioner. As anthropologist of religion, Anthony Wallace, points out, it is as if “mere contact permitted its flow....The fundamental principle is the universal law of power: to acquire a power, touch an object that contains that power.”372 Devotees engaging in tactile interactions (stroking, caressing, and touching ) with images of Bo Min Gaung in the privacy of their home and car, or publicly at temple complexes or religious festivals, is common enough to warrant an examination of this practice. Touching his image, stroking it almost sensually, and whispering to it, the devout physically engage Bo Min Gaung. These kinds of interactions would be unthinkable with a statue or image of the Buddha, however. When I asked several devotees why they do not employ similar practices with statues of the Buddha, one told me that a statue of the Buddha is more like a monument that is erected to remember the deceased: “One pays homage to it, but since the Buddha attained enlightenment, he cannot help in this world any longer.”373 Another devotee admitted that a Buddha statue is 372

Wallace, Anthony. 1966. Religion: An Anthropological View. New York: Random House. (61). Quoted in Saint-Jean, Denise. 1990. Paying Vows to the Virgin: A Ethnography of Popular Religion in Northern Chile. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cornell University. 106. 373

Interview, UL-58-M. 189

alive and potent in the sense that it is infused with power after a monk instills it with power, but that “I don’t know, I just can’t talk to it the way I can speak with Grandpa.” Concerned that I might think he was being disrespectful to the Buddha, he quickly added, “Know that the Buddha is all powerful (he chanted a portion of a Buddhist text that illustrates this) and can do what he wishes. But Grandpa is physically nearby, and I feel intimate with him.”374 The difference in how the devout interact with representations of the Buddha and Bo Min Gaung further clarified this point. One rainy afternoon in Yangon while sitting in the corner of a shrine room dedicated to Bo Min Gaung located at a popular pagoda, I witnessed the tender affection the devout showed to Bo Min Gaung. One man, a taxi driver in his mid-thirties, after bowing to both the Buddha and Bo Min Gaung and offering incense to each, knelt down in front of a statue of Bo Min Gaung, lit a cigarette, and placed it in one of Bo Min Gaung’s hands. He proceeded to stroke the statue beginning with the head and working his way down to the feet, eventually resting his hands upon Bo Min Gaung’s knees (see Figure 5). In hushed tones, the man asked Bo Min Gaung to bestow some of his power to help him with his adhiṭṭhāna (religious vow). He then spent ten minutes speaking to Bo Min Gaung in a reverent, yet friendly, manner telling “grandpa” about family problems and economic hardships he was facing. Initially, it was rather jarring to witness such intimacy being directed at such a revered figure, but the shock quickly turned to admiration as I continued to watch the warm and friendly bond that this devotee understood to have developed with the saint.

374

Interview, ULY-55-M. 190

Figure 5

For the devout, the Buddha is someone whom they inherit. He and his representations are more static and less dynamic because there are prescribed ways to interact with the Buddha that are learned from multiple sources and inculcated from a young age. 375 Although Buddhists may have a preference for a particular image of the Buddha and direct his/her devotions to that image, there is an approved way for how one should interact with the Buddha that leaves little room for reinterpretation and divergence. With Bo Min Gaung, however, the devout, in one way or 375

McDaniel, borrowing from David Morgan, talks about “protocols” that develop between devotee and object. Such protocols are “not orthodox prescriptions but certain expectations that the devotee understands regarding the proper body posture, the appropriate range of gifts, and the murmured and deferential voicing of both formal incantations and informal intentions” (2012: 188). 191

another, appropriate him for themselves, in their own idioms and styles, in their own spaces, and in response to their most pressing needs and experiences. Weizzā-related media mentioned earlier do not create an orthopraxy but rather offer tools for personalized engagement with Bo Min Gaung. People engaged Bo Min Gaung emotionally and imaginatively, bringing him into their lives for themselves, and in the process of this exchange, Bo Min Gaung acquired another set of meanings, qualities, and associations. This is a process of improvisation by which Bo Min Gaung is imagined into being and illustrates the religious lives of the devout in their forms of expression that are never static, but vibrant, and continuously transforming as individuals receive and adapt traditional knowledge, practices, etc. to specific circumstances. The saint to whom these devout directed their wishes was an in-between figure, made by the weizzā tradition’s portrayal of him as the guardian of the sāsana and a wizard, par excellence, but made as well from the intimate needs of the Burmese calling on him, and thus a private figure. I returned to the same spot many times throughout my fieldwork to observe the various ways in which the devout interacted with the statues of Bo Min Gaung. On one occasion, I witnessed a man in his forties bring lunch and share it with Bo Min Gaung. Laying out dishes of meat, vegetables and rice, the man lit a cigarette, “These are Grandpa’s favorite cigarettes,” the man looked over and said to me with a wink, as he placed them in one of Bo Min Gaung’s hands. He proceeded to sit in cross-legged position using his prayer beads to chant “araham” for almost forty-five minutes while periodically lightly touching the knee of Bo Min Gaung or placing another lit cigarette in Bo Min Gaung’s hand. When he had completed his adhiṭṭhāna in front of the statue, the man was covered in sweat and black flies had begun feasting on the offerings of food. He gently swished them away with a hand-held fan and invited me over to share in his meal. I politely declined saying I was too hot to eat, but went on to strike up a conversation with 192

him about his relationship with Bo Min Gaung. When I asked him if these actions were part of a larger body of practices to help him along the weizzā path, he laughed heartily and said, “You certainly think highly of me! While I am indeed interested in weizzā related matters, I am here today to ask Grandpa’s help in passing an exam at my job as an income tax official. I will get promoted if I do well on it.” He later pointed at a woman at the other side of the shrine room. “See that woman? She comes everyday asking Grandpa to help her daughter pass an upcoming matriculation exam.” As we were about to leave the shrine room, he guided me to the back of the room and pointed out a life-sized statue of Bo Min Gaung surrounded by a metal fence covered with dozens of sheets of notebook paper and official looking documents. “These are all requests people made to Grandpa.” As this was the time of the year when high school students take their final exams, most of these notes were from high school students asking Bo Min Gaung for help in doing well on their exams. The rest dealt mostly with matters involving health, love and money (see figure 6). 376 “Dear Grandfather,” one note read. “Please cure my arthritis. The medicine the doctors gave me doesn’t help.” “Grandfather, I really love this girl. I want to marry her. Let her also love me so we can marry and be happy,” read another. My guide suggested I write a note to Bo Min Gaung as well. “Dear Grandpa, Please help me complete my dissertation quickly!”

376

Interview USW-44-M. I have since learned that practice of asking for help through written notes is also popular amongst devotees of another weizzā saint, Bo Pauk Sein Sayadaw. Visiting his monastic compound in Yangon, I was told my some devotees that this practice originally began with written requests to their saint, Bo Pauk Sein Sayadaw. 193

Figure 6: A sample of the many notes strewn around the statue of Bo Min Gaung.

Regardless of the gravity of a request, a devotee never forgets that Bo Min Gaung is a figure of power and must, therefore, be approached with a special kind of “devotional tact or courtesy that bespeaks an underlying reticence, or even caution.”377 Of course this is not to say that the devout believed that Bo Min Gaung was going to act at once or give them that which they desired. As he was when he was alive, Bo Min Gaung is unpredictable and uncontrollable. While devout certainly hope that the weizzā saints will act on their behalf in making their petitions come to fruition, a devotee knows well that the result depends to a large part on his/her thoughts and deeds. Bo Min Gaung has provided various meditation techniques, prayer bead practices, mantra and yantra, and precepts to follow for one’s wishes to have a better chance of coming true. Entering into adhiṭṭhāna (vow; resolution), for instance, before, after, or while 377

Orsi (1996, 113). 194

petitioning Bo Min Gaung is thought to greatly increases one’s chance of having a request come to fruition. When a wish does not come about as one had hoped, a devotee only has him/herself to blame for not having done the practices correctly, from wavering from their vows, or failing to keep a required set of moral precepts. There is seldom any blame placed upon the saints. There are those devotees, however, who eventually become exasperated or lose faith in the saints if their requests are not manifested. Such people seldom hold back in expressing their frustration with their chosen weizzā saint. One man, for instance, annoyed that Bo Min Gaung repeatedly failed to make happen a series of requests, took all of his two-dimensional images of the weizzā and used them to wrap foodstuffs in his pantry.378 In another instance, I accompanied a friend’s father one afternoon to visit a Bo Min Gaung shrine located about thirty minutes outside Yangon. He told me that he wanted to pay homage to a particularly “potent” Bo Min Gaung figure in the hopes that he could get the U.S. visa he so desperately wanted. Bowing to a standing figure of Bo Min Gaung, he proceeded to offer water and flowers and place lit cigarettes in Bo Min Gaung’s hand, stroked his legs and entreated Bo Min Gaung to make it possible for him to obtain the visa. I learned a week later that he did not get the visa; shortly afterwards he gave away all of his weizzā related paraphernalia to me. Houtman encountered individuals who enacted “drowning festivals” whereby dissatisfied devotees placed statues and images of their weizzā

378

Others engage in a de-instensification of involvement with a saint, often after getting what they wished for, or if moving on to a new religious practice, like vipassanā (insight) meditation. One married couple told me they had outgrown belief in such saints after they had achieved a certain level of wealth that they had requested in their earlier years as devotees. They still have statues of Bo Min Gaung on their altar at home and continue to make offerings of water, incense, and flowers to him “just in case” for “we can’t turn away from him completely.” Interview DMO-45-F and UHT-46-M. 195

saints onto a raft and sent it down the river.379 Such “break-up” rituals and actions reflect the strong bonds and intimate relations devotees have with their weizzā. The offerings of food, incense, candles, flowers, cigarettes, etc. made to Bo Min Gaung are indeed meant as gifts, but also as part of a bargain made with him. The relationship, then, is a contingent, contractual association dependent, in no small part, on the whims of the saint or how well a devotee supplicates the weizzā. There is certainly fear that one may fall out of favor with Bo Min Gaung if they cease paying respect to him. Nonetheless, devotees consider it a gift that Bo Min Gaung chose them to enter into a relationship --- one that they cherish and continue to cultivate for years, if not for the rest of their lives. Given the profound social and psychological etiology of Bo Min Gaung’s presence, he is not always a benign figure. Dealing with Bo Min Gaung may cause the most primitive fears in his devout to surface, such as dread of abandonment or rejection. Bo Min Gaung’s “grandchildren” bring their most persevering needs to him, and there is always the threat that he will refuse or ignore them, or that his grandchildren may fail to upkeep their side of the bargain. When a devotee believes that his/her well-being hinges on how, when, and even if, Bo Min Gaung will intercede, it is no wonder that those places and moments of interaction with an image of Bo Min Gaung become emotional, psychological and spiritual arenas where the most intimate of needs and fears are put into play.

Conclusion In addition to taking into account my informants’ claims that the material objects of Bo Min Gaung has inherent power or that their efficacy is bestowed by some form of weizzā related 379

Houtman 1981: 176. 196

consecration, we can also see their agency as relational. They are tokens of a connection, reminders of an adored grandfatherly figure whose presence was experienced in them. This is what governed how the devout used and interacted with these images, and this is why things could be done with them --- because the weizzā so present is an enlightened being charged with propagating the sāsana and protecting those in need. Just as Bo Min Gaung was animated by peoples’ needs, desires, fantasies, so were these indications of his presence. But what is presence? What accounts for Bo Min Gaung’s “thereness”? One answer, of course, is that presence is a psychological effect. Bo Min Gaung exists in relationships: in the relationships of men, women, and even children with him, and in his involvement in complicated relational networks stretching between the weizzā realm and earth—between husbands and wives, for example, or parents and children, among members of Buddhist weizzā associations, between monastics and laity, between believers and nonbelievers. Bo Min Gaung is called upon to cure illnesses, to bring success in worldly and religious endeavors, and to listen to the most intimate sorrows and fears of his grandchildren. This is the interpersonal ground on which Bo Min Gaung arises, and this is what makes his presence real and emotionally resonant. In individuals' and communities' experiences of him, the weizzā saint draws deeply on the history of relationships, living and dead, present and absent. He borrows from and contributes to memories, needs, fantasies, hopes, and fears. With regards to images of Bo Min Gaung, they are not simply copies of the original. As Swearer eloquently put it, such representations are “in ontological communion with the original. Cognitively … presence may be expressed in ontological terms, but at the affective level it is simply felt. It is felt in our hearts and sinews as well as grasped by our minds.”380 380

Swearer (2004, 11-12). 197

We see, then, that the efficaciousness of Bo Min Gaung images, and by extension weizzā images, develops as a result of an “affective cognition of the ontological communion between sign and signified.”381 The stories shared by devotees about the supernatural attributes ascribed to certain two and three-dimensional representations of Bo Min Gaung help to solidify the perceived potency of these images. Therefore, several factors must be present for an image to be considered effective: the devotee interacting with an image believes it to be both a representative of the original entity and an object that can have a positive impact on the devotee’s life. Its power derives from the bond formed between the devotee and his/her chosen image of supplication. The next, and final, chapter will continue with an examination of weizzā presence. We will look at it, however, from the point of view of those who do not associate themselves with the weizzā phenomenon and who, although acknowledging that such saints exist, virulently attack the perceived benefits of weizzā supplication, as well as its place within Burmese Buddhism.

381

Swearer (2004, 12). 198

Conclusion: The Ethnographer and the Charlatan “Anthropological fieldwork is often described as participant observation. But it might better be described as walking a fine line between making assumptions and questioning them. In coming to an understanding of an observed culture, the challenge is to find a judicious balance between rendering a given world exotic and banal, distinctively different and recognizably human, describing for new readers both what they could not have already known, and what they and I could not have not already known (about our common humanity). In sum, the challenge is to recognize the ordinary.”382 “Fieldwork forces an acknowledgement of and engagement with something messier than the controlled marshalling of letters on a page, something less predictable, and demands a different kind of attentiveness. The world of the text is really not the world.”383 Throughout the entirety of my fieldwork on the weizzā and their devotees, Burmese Buddhists would often entreat me to include a final chapter in my dissertation where I make a disclaimer to my foreign readers that the Buddhism I portrayed in these chapters is not, in fact, Buddhist, and does not fall within the parameters of what they constituted to be “authentic Buddhism” (B. buddha ba-tha asit). I did not take such statements all that seriously during the first couple of times I heard them, but as I began to encounter them with increasingly regularity I started to do some additional inquiries into what exactly my interlocutors meant by this. Nonweizzā devotees would reply by saying things like, “What you are writing your dissertation on is not found in the Buddhist scriptures”; “These are practices of black-magic groups”; “The people you study are charlatans out to dupe people of their money.” I was counseled instead to turn my attentions to such topics as vipassanā (insight) meditation, monastic lineages, famous monks, or sacred pagodas. My interlocutors considered these topics to be part of an authentic and pure Buddhism, whose lineages could be traced back to the Buddha himself and were thus worthy of 382

Lambeck, Michael. 2013. “Exotic Ordinary: On Understanding Spirit Mediums in Madagascar.” Harvard Divinity Bulletin. 41:1-2, 61-68; 61. 383

Orsi, 2000:164. 199

serious study. These interlocutors’ associations with weizzā saints, activities, and practices contained within themselves a cluster of related notions: duplicity, corruption, the cultivation of supernatural powers for selfish and destructive purposes, an engagement with dark forces and malevolent entities, and most commonly, charlatanism. Such accusations of illegitimacy have at times been so prevailing that weizzā associations and individual devotees were subject to various forms of social control intended to censor, police, and eliminate the alleged deviance that made such beliefs and practices “not Buddhist.” When deciding to concentrate my research on the weizzā and their various channels, I unwittingly found myself on the underside of a rift that, while unclear to me, seemed obviously apparent to many of my Burmese colleagues and friends. Our discussions over the legitimacy of the weizzā could get quite passionate, especially when I would point out parts of the Buddhist scriptures that acknowledged the beliefs and practices held true by weizzā devotees, or when I asked them why they should appoint themselves arbiters of what constituted “true” Buddhism. Usually, in order to keep some decorum and maintain our friendships, we would “agree to disagree,” and I would promise them that I would take their concerns into account when writing my dissertation. You could imagine my surprise, then, when weizzā devotees, themselves, began asking me to downplay the prominence of the weizzā phenomenon in contemporary Myanmar in favor of other representations of religion and Buddhism in the country. At first, weizzā devotees had problems with the terminology I used. Observing that weizzā-related written sources from the 1940s-1970s that I read before doing fieldwork frequently used terms like, “gaing” when referring to associations, “bodaw” when discussing revered and powerful religious figures, and “weizzā” to describe those saintly figures who have figured so prominently in this dissertation, I 200

too incorporated these terms into my daily conversations with my interlocutors. At first, such terms were met with uncomfortable laughter from weizzā devotees or eye-rolling and dismissal from non-weizzā followers. As my research intensified, however, my interlocutors involved in the weizzā path politely, patiently, and subtly suggested that the terms, “ahpwe,” “yogi,” and “twet-yap-pauk puggo” be used in place of “gaing,” “bodaw,” and “weizzā,” respectively.384 Although I did not fully comprehend it at the time, the older terms that I was using in the current twenty-first century context mustered up a whole host of imaginative associations in the mind of many Burmese: a world of clandestine rituals, meditation practices that could have damaging effects on one’s mental health, black magic sorcery, and anti-government ideologies. The terminology that has come to replace these and other problematic words carries with it an air of respectability. They are words that, like “twet-yap-pauk puggo,” (individual who has “exited”) invoke the image of a dignified saintly figure, similar to that of an arahant (fully awakened individual) as opposed to a madcap holy figure (even if they do refer to the same individual.)385 Moreover, words like “ahpwe” and “yogi” are widely used terms in contemporary Myanmar to refer to Buddhist organizations (ahpwe) and vipassanā meditators (yogi). More often, however, was the case that my weizzā interlocutors were afraid that my portrayal of Burmese Buddhism that takes into account weizzā beliefs and practices might give foreign readers an impression that the Buddhism of Myanmar is more concerned with 384

See Chapters One and Two for a discussion of the term, “twet-yap-pauk puggo.” See Chapter Three for an explanation of why words like “gaing” and “bodaw” were found problematic enough to be censored from publications by government officials. 385

I have chosen to continue using the word, “weizzā,” in this dissertation because my interlocutors and I agreed that this term is more identifiable and accessible both to foreign and Burmese audiences, as it has a history of use stretching back to (as we saw in the first chapter) Buddhist scriptural sources, as well as in Euro-American academic works done on the subject published from the 1950s to the present. 201

superstitious activities involving placating supernatural beings instead of striving for nibbāna. “While weizzā are popular here in Myanmar, please also tell your readers that Buddhists here mostly study the abhidhamma and do vipassanā meditation,” a weizzā devotee requested me.386 When I pressed him, and others, to explain more about why they wanted me to emphasize this, or why they felt uncomfortable with me providing a non-Burmese audience with a sustained examination of the weizzā phenomenon, most assured me that weizzā-related beliefs and practices are “in accordance with” (B. taik-hsain) Buddhism or was “genuine Buddhism” (B. buddha-batha asit), but they were concerned that my readers might think less of them and their country, embarrassed by the idea that the practices they engage in might clash with more refined notions of Buddhism most foreigners carry with them when visiting Myanmar.387 What is it about the weizzā path that causes so much unease amongst my interlocutors, even among those who subscribe to the beliefs and practices of the path? Or, as Kate Crosby asks, “Why the embarrassment, why the silence?”388 I have found that a number of intersecting factors are at play here. Firstly, there have been longstanding, and at times, bitter discourses involving practices of samatha (concentration) meditation (favoured by weizzā path practitioners and devotees) and vipassanā (insight) meditation. For example, there is a fear on the part of governmental and ecclesiastical authorities over the power of samatha meditation as a threat to 386

USL-45-M.

387

Rozenberg (2010) notes that his weizzā interlocutors also worried that foreigners might come away with an unfavorable view of Buddhism in Myanmar from reading his work and go on to show a lack of respect for Buddhism. 388

Crosby, Kate. “Introduction: The Other Burmese Buddhism.” In Champions of Buddhism. Weikza Cults in Contemporary Burma. NUS Press, forthcoming. I would like to alert the reader that I refer to ideas raised in Crosby’s forthcoming article only as supporting evidence for ideas that I had already independently developed at least two years before Crosby’s article was to be published. 202

their power, as well as widespread suspicion of organizations dedicated to the practice and propagation of weizzā beliefs and activities and samatha meditation for engaging in nefarious activities. Secondly, many of the practices that weizzā path practitioners engage in, such as alchemy and the manipulation sacred diagrams, do not constitute Theravāda Buddhism. A third factor is that most leaders of weizzā organizations, as well as independent weizzā healers, mediums, and practitioners, are viewed by large segments of the Burmese population to be charlatans.

Samatha Cults and Black Magic Practitioners Samatha has been historically used, or at least viewed by authorities in power, as a mechanism for generating spiritual power that could be harnessed for rebellions, revolutions or conquests.389 Discourse surrounding samatha highlights the quest for supernatural powers and “is implicated in vernacular concepts of law, medicine, alchemy and magic [as well as] … revolutionary and anti-colonial discourse.”390 Such controversial figures as Saya San, leader of the 1930 peasant rebellion, Thakhin Kodaw Hmaing, grandfather of Burmese nationalism, and even Prime Minister U Nu, were committed practitioners of samatha meditation techniques.391 Such views have led governmental authorities over the past several decades to greatly discourage the widespread practice of samatha meditation for fear that, should people develop supernatural abilities that are byproducts

389

Houtman 1999: 331.

390

Houtman. 1997. “Burma or Myanmar?: The Cucumber and the Circle” IIAS Newsletter, 12, Spring. 391

Houtman 1999: 332. 203

of samatha meditation, that they could use this power against those in control.392 Even the famous proponent of vipassanā meditation, Ledi Sayadaw, expressed as much when he wrote in 1910 that because samatha meditation allows for the development of supernatural powers, that “rulers prohibit these occult practices, fearing lest they might give rise to violent commotions in the country.”393 Vipassanā, on the other hand, eschews supernatural powers and places strong emphasis on realizing the impermanent nature of all phenomenon. Patronized by King Mindon (1853-78), and practiced by such luminaries as UN General Secretary U Thant, Prime Minister U Nu (after shunning samatha meditation), and Aung San Suu Kyi, the vipassanā meditation tradition had, even before independence in 1948, become “thoroughly institutionalized and integrated into the orthodox Theravāda

392

Vipassanā, on the other, has been actively promoted and supported by government authorities because it espouses the development of magical powers while also inculcating in the practitioner the idea that nothing can be done to change the current state of affairs, for it is all part of the rise and fall of impermanent phenomenon. This no doubt appeals to the government in that it fosters a sense of apathy on the part of the populace. During my time as a monk in 1999, I shared a dormitory with several monks who were disciples of Pa-auk Sayadaw, a famous meditation monk who specializes in samatha meditation techniques. They believed that the Sayadaw and his activities were under government surveillance because the government feared that should large numbers of his disciples gain supernatural powers, that they could use these powers against the government. I have been unable to confirm their views, but Jordt notes that, during her visit to Pa-Auk Sayadaw’s monastery in 1995, five of his books on meditation were still awaiting approval for publication from the Government Scrutiny Board because it was feared that his claims to spiritual attainment included in these books might count as a breach to monastic rules (Jordt 2007, 228). Houtman points out that, although some high ranking government officials supported Pa-Auk Sayadaw, The Ministry of Religious Affairs refused to allow publication of his books because they feared that his views on meditation might cause discord within the sangha as they were quite out-of-line with the more popular meditation methods of the time (Houtman 1999, 273). 393

Ledi Sayadaw. 1965. Manuals of Buddhism. Rangoon: Union Buddha Sāsana Council, 62. Pranke points out that modern critics of weizzā path practice have used this historical information to link the weikza-lam to a sect of allegedly heretical monks at ancient Pagan known as the Ari, who are reviled in Burmese chronicles for their moral corruption and addiction to magic and spirit worship. 204

establishment.”394 The vipassanā movement swept through Myanmar and into neighboring countries

where thousands of vipassanā meditation centers were established that continue to thrive today. “By all measures,” Pranke writes, “the popularization of vipassanā was one of the most significant transformations in Burmese Buddhism in the modern era.”395 So much was this the case that vipassanā has been Myanmar’s greatest export service industry internationally over the past six decades.396

But perhaps more problematic than the practice of samatha meditation and its stress on developing supernatural powers was the organizational structure and perceived secrecy of groups espousing samatha-related practices. Unlike the popular vipassanā movement that was accessible to anyone wishing to engage in this practice at any one of the hundreds of vipassanā meditation centers throughout the country, samatha practitioners often assembled themselves into semi-secretive, hierarchical and initiatory groups or sects (again using the Burmese term, “gaing”) who engaged in samatha meditation techniques related to the weizzā path.397 Such groups were not averse to giving off an air of esotericism, and it was this exclusivity and secrecy that quickly made such samatha groups the targets of criticism from the government and general population at large. In Chapter Three we saw how Ne Win likened such groups to the Jim Jones Cult and even went so far as to launch a

394

Pranke 2012: 454. Braun (forthcoming, 2013).

395

Pranke 2012: 454.

396

Crosby points out that vipassanā has become one of Burma’s major tourist attractions as well, but “not so weikza. While vipassanā had moved centre-ground, weikza has been left quietly to one side, in the marginalia” (Crosby, forthcoming). This is supported by Houtman (1997) who writes: “Apart from people entering the country in the capacity of government diplomats, or aid officials, only [vipassanā] allows foreigners to get into Burma for a period of more than the one week standard tourist visa. Indeed, I was allowed to visit any [vipassanā meditation] centre I chose, but not to visit areas famous for the practice of unorthodox concentration.” 397

Houtman 1988. 205

campaign to ban any media that portrayed supernatural powers resulting from samatha meditation.398 While Ne Win tolerated, and subsequent military regimes promulgated, vipassanā meditation, government attitudes towards samatha sects were harsh. Subjected to surveillance, many of these groups disbanded, went under ground, or, as we will see below, attempted to rebrand their image.399 Many laypeople and monastics belonging to these groups were arrested or were accused of embezzling funds and/or sexually abusing female members.400 In addition to worries over threats to their power, government authorities became increasingly concerned about the large sums of money pouring into these associations. As noted in Chapter Three, many of these associations’ members were composed of people from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, but that those associations led by charismatic religious figures 398

Tarling 1999: 217.

399

On the last page of a weizzā tract, Wonders of Mebegon Village, for example, the author makes it clear that the goal of their weizzā cult is propagation of sāsana and not for criticizing the government. 400

“How the Ariya Weizzā group (known as the White Head Missionary Group), led by a bogus monk, Nai Maung Hla, recruited prostitutes as infiltrators.” The New Light of Myanmar Volume IX, No. 3, March 1995. Another weizzā association leader, Maung Aye, was arrested sometime in the 1960s for engaging in unlawful sexual relations with female members of his group (see Ferguson and Mendelson 1983 and Foxeus 2011 for more on this incident). Schober notes that although such events were supposed to be “interpreted as a warning for charismatic virtuosos and their communities to keep a low profile. However, most weikzainflected practices merely receded from public visibility and were not silenced altogether” (2012: 291). Pranke found that, since the military coup of 1962, the public profession of millenarian ideology has been banned with no weizzā associations or individuals openly making such claims out of fear of reprisal. Pranke’s interlocutors indicated that General Ne Win allegedly banned military personnel from joining weizzā associations on the grounds that such membership undermined the chain-of-command (2012: 469). On the other hand, members of the Mano-CittaUpada Gaing told me that one of the main reasons why their association has continued to flourish unscathed by the government crackdowns has been because Ne Win was a high ranking member of their group (although he purchased his way into that position instead of working through it as was expected of others). 206

claiming supernatural powers contained a disproportionate number of rich, urban clients, and even those from government power structures. The increased popularity of these associations, and the large donations being made to the charismatic religious mendicants who often led these groups, did much to, in the words of Burmese scholar, Tin Maung Maung Than, “reinforce the sense of

foreboding among the conservative clergy as well as the state authorities who probably viewed the increase of cult leaders as a challenge to state power and the maintenance of regime stability.”401 Religious reforms that were enacted in the 1970s and 80s were no doubt an attempt by the government and ecclesiastical authorities to neutralize these groups and their leaders as mediating structures or brokers of potent worldly magic in order to gain control over the influx of financial support and redirect it to government sanctioned religious avenues.402

Although the Burmese government monitored the activities of weizzā associations and were swift in denouncing those groups and individuals (both monastic and lay) they deemed as straying from their notions of what constitute orthodox Theravāda Buddhism, this did not stop the same government officials from supporting those very segments of the Buddhist population they tried hard to condemn and censor. Ne Win, for example, the mastermind behind the suppression of weizzā associations in the 1970s and 80s was widely thought to be an adherent to such ideologies and even publicly attributed his recovery from illness while in a Singapore

401

Tin Maung Maung Than. 1993. “Sangha reforms and renewal of sāsana in myanmar” In Buddhist trends in southeast asia, 18. 402

Schober 2012 and Tin Maung Maung Than 1993. During his fieldwork during the 1980s, Houtman noted that the religious reforms of the 1980s involved the arrest of many samatha meditators which, it was feared, if taken up by the populace at large might lead to revolts. 207

hospital to the intervention of a bodaw (religious mendicant associated with the weizzā path) who was at the time in Myanmar.403 And in the 1980s, Ne Win, under the advice of another bodaw, changed the currency denominations that were divisible by the magic number 9, for example 45 kyat and 90 kyat notes. Many times during my years of fieldwork I witnessed government officials of high military rank appear at weizzā related ceremonies. At a ceremony for the installation of a new Bo Min Gaung statue at a shrine outside of Mandalay, the son of one of the government officials who had donated money to have the statue made told me that, “My dad is donating a gold statue of Aba Bo Min Gaung to help protect the country. He’s a big believer in Aba and has statues of him all over his Buddha altar at home.”404 Again, at a pagoda consecration ceremony at a weizzā association compound outside of Bago, the aunt of another government official shared with me that her nephew, “donated much money for this so-called weizzā to build this pagoda.”405 We see, then, that Buddhists are quite capable of claiming orthodoxy while, as McDaniels nicely states, “directly contradicting orthodoxy by their actions and statements.”406 While members of the regime’s elite were turning to samatha related practices and teachers for their own worldly gains of power and money,407 members of the armed

403

“Ne Win’s family claims ‘bodaws’ were used to help plan coup plot.” Myanmar Times 2002. By Kyaw Zaw Oo. U Ne Win had suddenly recovered after Kyaw Ne Win had telephoned Yangon and asked his friends to entreat a bodaw to intervene on his grandfather’s behalf. The author of the article does not indicate the year in which this incident occurred. 404

KTL-19-M.

405

DSS-65?-F.

406

McDaniels 2011: 227.

407

Houtman 1990: 332. 208

forces were believed to have carried, or even inserted under their skin, protective amulets associated with samatha related practices.408 In an ironic twist of fate (my interlocutors would say karmic retribution or even weizzā intervention) General Ne Win’s son-in-law and three of his grandsons were arrested in 2002 on suspicion that they were actively trying to stage a coup by enlisting the power of a bodaw who was an expert in samatha and black magic.409

“Real” Buddhism (Buddha batha asit) Criticism and wariness over weizzā associations and their samatha related activities are not only relegated to governmental and ecclesiastical authorities. Members from all strata of the Burmese population are just as critical, but for different reasons. Their concerns revolve around issues that the teachings and practices put forth by members of these groups are not in accord with what they consider to be pure, Theravāda Buddhism (B. therawada buddha ba-tha asit) or part of the sāsana path (B. thāthana line). Large segments of the general population, especially lay practitioners of vipassanā meditation, charge that the weizzā path is not really Buddhism or, at best, a form of Buddhism influenced by Mahayana doctrines.410 Devotees’ beliefs in saints who have prolonged their lives

408

Schober 2012.

409

“Coup plot thwarted.” Myanmar Times 6: 107, 2004. The bodaw’s name was Myo Myint Aung, alias Setkya Aung Pwint Khaung, alias Saya Lay. Khin Nyunt’s chief astrologer, Bodaw Than Hla, was imprisoned after the former Prime Minister and Military Intelligence chief was arrested in 2004. http://www.myanmar.gov.mm/myanmartimes/no107/myanmartimes6-107/New/1.htm accessed January 2010. 410

See the book, Shin Yahula Pitaka la seit-dago hnin akya-amyin, for example, where the author, Sayadaw Ashin Rahula, criticizes the weizzā phenomenon by asserting that it must be Mahayana elements, for it certainly cannot be Theravāda Buddhism for a) such elements do not 209

through various alchemical and meditation techniques deviate from the Buddha’s teachings on impermanence and not-self, they argue. Accused of being selfish and deluded, adherents to the weizzā path are thought to only be preoccupied with goals that improve their current lot in life, such as gaining near immortality, supernatural powers, riches, or love. As a result, critics refer to the weizzā path pejoratively as a “worldy” (P. lokiya) one in contrast to an “other-worldly” (P. lokuttara) path that, in their eyes, is most in line with the Buddha’s teachings because it aims at attaining enlightenment and getting out of the rounds of rebirth. Weizzā devotees’ attitudes towards their critics, and especially to the modern vipassanā movement, range from angry defense to, as Pranke has pointed out, “polite reservation.”411 Important to note is that weizzā path practitioners readily concede that the development of supernatural powers and engaging in samatha related practices do not lead to enlightenment and that only vipassanā meditation can achieve that. But they are also quick to point out that their path offers an alternative method of salvation (albeit a more circuitous, and possibly longer, one) that still falls within the boundaries of Theravāda orthodoxy. Freely admitting that vipassanā is a more direct and quicker route for attaining nibbāna, weizzā practitioners maintain that it is a matter of personal preference for their choice in devoting their energies to samatha meditation. Sayadaw U Uttamasara (died 1995), considered by many to be a modern day weizzā, when asked why he preferred samatha meditation, wrote: “I have heard some criticize [samatha’s] value contemptuously. The Buddhas-to-be have all fulfilled the ten kinds of Parami (perfections) by means of practicing Samatha meditation in their past lives. Passing through the earth and flying in space,

appear in the Pāli Canon, and b) after Anawhrata King imposed Theravāda on the land, such elements were supposedly purged but remained due to people’s childish longing for protection. 411

Pranke 2012: 475. 210

and some different kinds of miraculous powers are the outcomes of practicing Samatha meditation. Therefore, you should regard it as a vitally important one, and should not look down upon it."412 Indeed, in the case of hermitess, Daw Tin Tin, the weizzā path can also be referred to as the “samatha-weizzā” path whose saints are known as “samatha weizzā.” “I had never attempted to

practice Samatha in this life time. In fact, I was fully involved in Vipassanā,” Daw Tin Tin writes. “A whole new world opened up and the Weizzā or Maha-iddhi Path was revealed to me … and the incredible mission of the Samatha Weiza Masters.”413 As other scholars on this subject have rightly observed, weizzā practitioners themselves,

when providing information on their practices and doctrines, attempt to couch them within the borders of normative Theravāda Buddhism.414 The most common way for doing this is to reference the first chapter of the late 19th century Vijjāmaggadīpanī (Manual on the Path of Wisdom [weizzā]) written by the famous vipassanā meditation master, Ledi Sayadaw. In the first nine pages of the book, Ledi Sayadaw lays out in detail the various kinds of weizzā knowledge and paths popular within Myanmar at the time. And although Ledi Sayadaw goes on in the remainder of the book to show how these “weizzā” are inferior to the foremost “weizzā,” namely the “ariya weizzā,” (referring here to the path that leads to full enlightenment, or arahant weizzā) it has nonetheless provided generations of weizzā path apologists with “an authoritative

412

Sayadaw U Uttamasara. 1989. Buddhist Way of Life.

413

Personal correspondence, DTT-70-F.

414

Pranke 1995; Rozenberg 2007; Foxeus 2011. 211

vocabulary and theoretical structure with which to articulate their system and defend it against criticism.”415 Another reference (although not as common as that of Ledi Sayadaw’s book) is made to the classical Buddhist text, Visuddhimagga (composed approximately 430 CE), and its descriptions of weizzā and their supernatural powers: That beginning with travelling through the air, as in the case of weizzā, is power through the (secret) sciences, according as it is said: “What is power through the sciences? Weizzā, having uttered their magic spells, travel through the air, and they show an elephant in space, in the air; a horse in space, in the air; a chariot in space, in the air; a soldier in space, in the air; a manifold military infantry.416 Weizzā practitioners maintain that such a prestigious and respected text as the Visuddhimagga in no way disparages these powers nor the weizzā who wield them and, as such, that they must be considered central to the Buddhist path if included in such a foundational text as this. Likewise, weizzā advocates specifically like to point out how two of the most revered Buddhist monks in contemporary Myanmar, the modern day doyen of vipassanā meditation, Mahasi Sayadaw, and the Buddhist savant who memorized the entire Tipiṭaka, Mingun Sayadaw, both make positive references to weizzā and their supernatural powers in their writings. Mahasi Sayadaw, in his Burmese translation of the Visuddhimagga, offers copious commentarial notes throughout his translation, and in the section just quoted above, as well as throughout the text when referencing supernatural power, he provides the reader with a detailed description of the kinds of weizzā 415

Pranke 2010: 480. This, despite the fact that, as many weizzā path practitioners have admitted to me, most apologists have not read past these first nine pages. 416

Visuddhimagga 378. Vijjādharādīnaṃ vehāsagamanādikā pana vijjāmayā iddhi. Yathāha: " katamā vijjāmayā iddhi? Vijjādharā vijjaṃ parijapitvā vehāsaṃ gacchanti, ākāse antaḷikkhe hatthimpipa dassenti, assampi dasseti, rathampi dasseti, pattimpi dasseti, vividhampi senābyuhaṃ dassentī"ti. 212

found in the Burmese religious landscape known at the time.417 Mingun Sayadaw, in his commentary of the Buddhavamsātthakathā, explains how the weizzā is superior to the common man because, due to his supernatural powers, enjoys a happier existence and that only men of intelligence will realize this.418 Recalling an instance in the first chapter where we saw that, as early as 1761, King Lekwaynawyata asked one of his religious advisors what weizzā are and whether they are Buddhist or not, his religious advisor responded by citing an instance in the commentary to the Dhammapada where a weizzā appears, thus supporting the claim that weizzā and their practices are indeed in line with the Buddha sāsana.419 Weizzā practitioners are quick to point out that the practices they engage in are also inline with those found in the Buddhist scriptures and advocated by ecclesiastical authorities. Similar to the argument made by Uttamasara Sayadaw above about the centrality of samatha based meditation practices to the Buddha’s own path to enlightenment, weizzā practitioners stress that practices, such as the repetitive chanting of central Buddhist verses (like the popular 417

Mahasi Sayadaw. 1997. Vissudhimagga. V.3, p.33. Two weizzā devotees have told me that, in a commentarial notation on a section of the book dealing with supernatural powers, Mahasi Sayadaw highlights the supernatural powers of the early twentieth century weizzā saint, Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw, and how he made use of these powers only for noble purposes. I have been unable to locate this reference, however.

418

Mingun Sayadaw, Great Chronicles of the Buddhas. The commentary is on the following reference to weizzā: Khuddakānikaya: Buddhavaṁsātthakathā. Atthakathā Series 34 First published in 2008 by Ministry of Religious Affairs Yangon, Myanmar, p.41-42. https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/jrblack/web/BU/CSP/Attha/34KhuA15.pdf 419

Scholar monks, who have no interest in the weizzā phenomenon, have on many occasions also pointed out to me instances of weizzā appearing in the Tipitaka and have taken this as proof that weizzā are very much an accepted part of Theravāda Buddhism. Examples include: Taylor, Arnold C. 1979. Paṭisambhidāmagga. London: Pāli Text Society, p.194; The Jātaka: together with its commentary being tales of the anterior births of Gotama Buddha. London: Luzac, v.4, p.496; v.5, p.382; The Apadāna of the Khuddakānikaya. Edited by Mary E. Lilley. London: Published for the Pāli Text Society by Oxford University Press, pp. 19, 61, 287, 441, 511. 213

Itipiso Gāthā) in various configurations and for extended periods of time, visualizing pagodas or the Buddha while doing breath meditation, practicing loving-kindness meditation, sharing the results of one’s good deeds with all sentient beings, and/or practicing any one of the forty samatha meditation objects prescribed by the Buddha, are all considered methods sanctioned by the Buddha, scriptures, and eminent monks.420 Weizzā practitioners assert that they ultimately strive for nibbāna but are not averse to taking a less direct route to get there. In fact, many would say that their method might even stand a greater chance of achieving that goal than by means offered by vipassanā methods. Adhering to the Buddhist temporal scheme that Buddha Metteyya will arrive in this world in the far distant future, many weizzā practitioners are convinced that if they can prolong their lives through samatha-based techniques in order to be around when Metteyya appears, they will be able to gain enlightenment under his guidance.421 For them, engaging in lifetimes of vipassanā meditation is too risky, especially as they may miss the opportunity to be reborn at the exact period of time when Metteyya will be here on Earth.422 Moreover, as we saw in previous chapters, a central 420

Crosby points out that other soteriological systems similar to those found among weizzā practitioners (sacred diagrams, chanting of mantras, alchemy, longevity practices, etc.) within the Theravāda world came to be marginalized in the 19th-20th centuries due to their perceived unorthodoxy (forthcoming 2014).

421

Some association members, especially those belonging to the Mano-seito-pad Association, wish to prolong their lifespans in order to hear Gotama Buddha’s final sermon at the moment of the re-gathering together of his relics at the end of this current sāsana. See Strong (2004: 223) and Pranke (1995) for more on this. 422

MZU tells the amusing story that can be found in the great vipassanā meditation monk, Mogoke Sayadaw’s, biography of when Mogoke Sayadaw was visited by a weizzā monk. Sayadaw told the weizzā that the weizzā’s path is long and winding and does not lead to liberation. The weizzā replied, “Yes, you are right. But I follow this path because I like it.” This is very much a reason why I see many people following this path. They simply enjoy it and are attracted to it for many reasons: worldly ends, supernatural powers, life longevity, prestige, chance to meet a future living Buddha and powerful saints, and, as one practitioner told me, “if 214

duty of weizzā practitioners is to defend the Buddha sāsana and protect Buddhists from threatening forces. Such a mission, advocates maintain, is inherently meritorious because they use their knowledge and supernatural powers to protect and propagate the sāsana. What complicates peoples’ perceptions of the weizzā phenomenon even more is that people and groups whose aims are more nefarious (those participating in black magic, putting curses on people, etc.), and who do not associate themselves with the weizzā path, engage in similar practices of alchemy, samatha meditation, and sacred diagram construction and manipulation as those prescribed by those traversing the weizzā path. Such individulas and groups may even associate themselves with a particular weizzā association or saint. As a result, critics of the weizzā often conflate these two groups and make sweeping generalizations about the nature of the weizzā path despite being ill-informed about what exactly it is that weizzā path practitioners do. Secondly, weizzā related healers are often looked upon with suspicion and perceived as ambiguous figures because they deal with occult forces and use mundane and esoteric techniques of a neutral nature; these techniques become beneficial or harmful according to the intention of the user and the beings he invokes. Indeed, the masters of the non-weizzā lower path (B. auk-lam) are said to use the same techniques as the masters of the weizzā centered upper path (B. ahtet-lam).423 For example, one reason one of my interloctors gave for the weizzā nibbāna is impossible in this current era, and I have to wait until the future Buddha, Matteyya, why not devote my time and energy to the weizzā path that will ensure me a greater chance to being around when that Buddha comes!” 423

A seminal text for the Manomaya Gaing has at its beginning a disclaimer saying that the association is not involved in black magic sorcery, but rather involved in allowing one to achieve nibbāna. Keiko Tosa explains this situation in terms of intersecting axes: “The weikza beliefs and the practices are diverse. To find some form in this diversity it is useful to imagine two axes. One axis would be the acquisition and practice of weikza arts, comprising alchemy, astrology, folk medicine, esoteric drawing, and mantra. The second axis is aligned along Buddhist practices, such as strictly maintaining moral precepts and engaging in insight (wipathana, P. 215

path being looked down upon is, again, linked to samatha practice: Many non-weizzā healers and black magicians often pick a specific samatha meditation technique or object and work with it until they have developed some supernatural power. In addition to acquiring this newfound power, they also believe that the samatha practice increases the potency of their spells, curses, remedies, etc.424 Once they achieve this power, the person can use this power for good or evil ends. “This scares the people,” he said for people who do vipassanā are thought to be “safer” because advancement along the vipassanā path is contingent on the purity of one’s morals.425 In spite of all that has been just discussed above, weizzā devotees are still somewhat cautious to disclose their associations with the weizzā path and its saints. I often asked the weizzā followers if they were embarrassed by their beliefs, and their responses can be summed up best by what U Maung told me: “Of course not! But even we have to admit that these things aren’t easily believed by even people here in Myanmar. Those who are interested will learn a lot from your dissertation and can explore more if they wish. But we want your readers to know that Myanmar is a developed country with people who don’t live their lives according to superstition, which they may mistake our beliefs as.”426 This brings us full circle to what I introduced at the beginning of this chapter, namely, that many of my Burmese interlocutors advised me that the weizzā path was not a worthy subject of study. They repeatedly tried to convince me that the only vipassanā) or concentration (thamahta, P. samatha) meditation. Although weikza arts are classified as this-worldly knowledge (lawki pyinnya) within the Buddhist dichotomy of thisworldly (lawki) and other-worldly (lawkoktara), most congregation members or individual weikza path practitioners insist that becoming a weikza ultimately depends on religious (lawkoktara, P. lokuttara) practice” (2012: 318). 424

Houtman encountered similar views (1999).

425

ZMU-33-M.

426

UMM-43-M. 216

authentic form of religious practice was the Buddhism found in monasteries and vipassanā centers. This is what I should focus my research on, I was told. When talking with weizzā path practitioners, however, I often asked them if weizzā cults can be seen as remaining within the orthodox Theravāda fold and if attempting to demarcate layers or levels of orthodoxy only distorts our data by conceptualizing them as layers, especially if these layers are indistinguishable to the practitioner. When offering their replies, my informants sometimes became agitated at trying to figure out what I was trying to get at, or they gave me an answer they thought I was looking for. Many who engage in weizzā activities far different from what goes on in the sterile environments of meditation centers where many, including myself, foreign scholars of Buddhism retreat to during their work in Myanmar, admitted to me that they do not see their weizzā beliefs and practices as being in disharmony with Theravāda Buddhism. But upon first meeting me they expressed otherwise since they were afraid that I would think less of them, embarrassed by the idea that the practices they engage in might clash with more refined notions of Buddhism most foreigners carry with them when visiting Myanmar.427 This self-consciousness can be traced back, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, to the central role vipassanā meditation has played in Myanmar since the beginning of the 20th century. Erik Braun has shown how attempts were made by religious leaders, most notabley Ledi Sayadaw, to propagate vipassanā style meditation to Europeans as early as 1917.428 Since then, as the vipassanā phenomenon increased in popularity throughout the world, was pursued by non427

The times I was adamantly told that such beliefs and practices were not really part of “true” Buddhism, were almost always from the more educated members of the community I was working with, and while it may be tempting to privilege such sources from educated individuals, we should be wary of promoting the views of so-called “sophisticated people” for it is certainly not the same thing as “sophisticated teaching.” 428

Braun, 2013: 80-81. 217

Buddhists and convert Buddhists, and psychologized and incorporated into Western medical science,429 it continued to be a source of national pride while the weizzā phenomenom, as Crosby writes, “is still ‘not for export,’ an embarrassment to the Buddhism promulgated as a scientifici method superior to everything and open to all.”430 Much of these concerns, as we have seen above and throughout this dissertation, is bound up with issues of power. Practices of the weizzā phenomenon subvert the cautiously circumscribed and contained notions of Theravāda Buddhism (created, in large part, by the government and ecclesiastical authorities via diverse channels that include laws, religious literature, sermons, and popular media, as well as by discourses with non-Burmese proponents of vipassanā), and are even seen as harmful by many Burmese to the embedded reputation of Myanmar as a stronghold of a pure form of Theravāda Buddhism centered around vipassanā meditation and Buddhist philosophy.431 As we saw above and in Chapter Three with their reasons for monitoring, suppressing, and outright banning weizzā associations and the media produced by such organizations, the government has had invested interest in making such delineations. In May 1980, for instance, the government established a Committee of the Great Assembly of Monks (Sangha Mahanayaka Ahpwe) made up of a body of the highest-ranking monks in the

429

Braun, 2013: 165-68.

430

Crosby, forthcoming, 2014.

431

Everyone was well aware of the vipassanā export to the world and Burmese from all over were proud of this. Echoing the days of the 1950s, there is still a sense that Myanmar is the bastion of pure Theravāda and especially Abhidhamma. Even weizzā practitioners wish not to tarnish this reputation. For more on the development of abhidhamma influence in Myanmar, see Braun, 2013. 218

country to oversee and regulate all monastic activities in Myanmar.432 During the four-day meeting, the committee refused to recognize the weizzā saints, their devotees and practices, or their associations as government and ecclesiastical sanctioned avenues of religious activity and devotion, which only further solidified the public perception that such channels were outside the parameters of what was considered normative Buddhism.433 Many Burmese Buddhists from outside the various weizzā congregations do not identify what they see or hear as be longing to the Buddhist tradition and take it upon themselves to delineate what beliefs and practices can be sanctioned as “Buddhist,” thus creating standards against which one can measure authenticity and decide who is and who is not allowed affiliation with their essentialized notions of Burmese Buddhism. They stipulate what the majority of Burmese Buddhists are willing to tolerate and not tolerate as Buddhists, which activities are socially acceptable and which are offensive, and so on. Religious idioms like those associated with the weizzā saints have been designated ‘superstitious’, overly materialistic, and manipulative.

The Ethnographer and the Charlatan Although I have given primacy to my interloctors’ voices and views throughout this dissertation, I would like to reserve the remaining pages of this dissertation’s conclusion to offer some of my own views on the issue of Buddhist authenticity with reference to the weizzā phenomenon and discuss another main critique of the weizzā phenomenon (i.e. that it is nothing 432

Seekins, Donald M. 2006. Historical dictionary of Burma (Myanmar). Scarecrow Press. pp. 152–153. 433

Schober (2012) posits that this refusal may have been due to the fact that many military commanders at the time participated in some aspect of these practices. 219

but charlatanism and quackery) by raising methodological questions and reflecting upon my informants’ discourse and my role as an ethnographer. Firstly, with reference to Buddhist “authenticity,” for example, I propose that any Buddhist community or individual that self identifies as “Buddhist” would “count” to the same degree as any other. It is not the job of scholars of Buddhism to police the borders of various religious communities and to “create standards against which one can measure authenticity and allow (or disallow) membership.”434 Rather, what exactly “Buddhism” is should be left up to Buddhists (speaking as Buddhists) to determine. Even on a daily basis, scholars of Buddhism and Buddhists themselves are challenged to re-assess previously held notions of such seemingly uncomplicated things as “Buddhism” and what it means to be “Buddhist.” I have come to value the process of understanding another culture and writing often about my fieldwork experiences, which has naturally helped me develop an appreciation for greater self-reflexivity in my analysis of other cultures (which of course helps to understand my own). Rather than giving special credibility to certain types of explanations and dismissing others in order to justify my theoretical positions, I now consider local contexts of my field sites and give legitimacy to explanation by the people of these locations. The beliefs and activities examined in this dissertation are not those of, or found in, the periphery. They are popular and permeate all levels of Burmese society: weizzā are paid homage to and their techniques are employed by the wealthy, middle class, and poor, of all levels of education, and of different genders and sexual orientation. Both the powerful and powerless turn to the weizzā path to find answers to their problems. So, rather than give in to some interlocutors’ wishes and condemn weizzā saints and the devotees who revere them, or undermine the 434

Satlow 2006: 847. 220

importance of the phenomenon for Burmese Buddhists, my goal has been to situate beliefs and practices related to these entities within the broader context of contemporary social dynamics in twentieth and twenty-first centuries Myanmar. I have attempted to do so from a “lived religions” approach, a method that examines “the practices people use to remember, share, enact, adapt, create, and combine the stories out of which they live. And it comes into being through the oftenmundane practices people use to transform these meaningful interpretations into everyday action.”435 From this perspective, we see that rather than a single object, Burmese Buddhism is actually a composite of varied, multifaceted, and continually shifting assortment of practices, beliefs, experiences, and relationships. In the truest sense of the Buddhist word, it is empty of inherent existence. This dissertation has hopefully made this clear by providing the reader with many instances of how weizzā devotees' religions-as-lived are not static, unitary, or even readily intelligible. I have attempted to show how Buddhism in Myanmar is the process of the imagining and reimaginings in relation to, bound up with, and reacting against the conditions and circumstances in which weizzā devotees find themselves living. This is important because the fractures that seemed to divide the Burmese Buddhist field into various factions and the ways weizzā and non-weizzā Buddhists create and re-create such distinctions seemed to fade at the level of practice. There were, however, things I found disturbing and difficult to make sense of during my research that did not simply dissolve away at the level of practice. Reflecting on such disturbances, and how employing a lived religions approach to them helped me deal with such difficulties to produce a more refined examination to weizzā phenomenon, is how I would like to conclude this dissertation. Let me now share what it was that I encountered during my research 435

McGuire (2008: 111). 221

that invoked such feelings of unease. It was not the time when a member of a weizzā association threatened to assassinate me if he found out I wrote negative things about his cult, or even the bizarre instance when I walked in on a monk (believed by his disciples to be a low level weizzā) being massaged all over his body by two female devotees.436 Rather, it was the instances I believed to involve charlatanism and swindling that I found the most difficult to tolerate. One early, November morning in 2008, I decided to visit a small village on the outskirts of Mandalay where I heard claims of a medium’s ability to dhāt-si (channel) a weizzā. It would have been one of the first mediums I would visit during my research, and I was eager to see such a thing for myself. When I arrived, there were already about fifty people mulling around in front of the house, and when I peeked in through a window at the side of the house, I saw a young woman, about twenty years of age, dressed in white robes applying water to another woman’s legs while chanting something in Burmese and Pāli. “Her name is Ma Yee Yee. She channels Bo Min Gaung,” a middle-aged man standing nearby told me. “When I first heard the news, I didn’t believe it. Along with the other villagers, I went over to her house and taunted her by shouting, ‘Hey, Bo Min Gaung! Bo Min Gaung! If you really are him give us some [winning] lottery numbers!’” he laughed. He went on to say that she replied to them saying, “I am not the Bo Min Gaung who gives out lottery numbers. I am the Bo Min Gaung who heals people of their diseases.” Throughout the course of my fieldwork, hardly anyone I spoke with doubted that such a thing of channeling weizzā was possible, but, rather, they worried that a medium and her/his

436

It was not unlike the incident in the following video where female devotees kiss and massage a “bodaw” monk with the hopes that they will receive some of his spiritual power: “Myanmar News Now 8 20 12 Myanmar News Now” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtdZahYfOiA Last Accessed January 30, 2013. 222

family might have nefarious reasons for making such claims. Swindling people out of their money was the top complaint I encountered from interlocutors (both believers and unbelievers of the weizzā) and that I gleaned from literature, as to why people may doubt the integrity of a medium’s message. Words like “charlatan” (B. hsaya-yaun) and “faker” (B. lu-lein) appeared repeatedly in reference to those individuals who were supposedly possessed by weizzā. A popular saying that I encountered from interlocutors and in print media was that “for every one authentic [person], there are a thousand imitators and ten-thousand impostors”437 Brac de la Pierre put it well when she noted that “in a context in which civilians are the target of all sorts of predations, bodaw play on the over-sensitivity about the potential greediness of all kinds of ritual specialists. They make an advantage of their avoidance of ritual procedures such as interactions involving monetary exchange in the ceremonies ... They particularly insist on the fact that they do not trade protection against monetary offerings...”438 The famous cartoonist and social critic, U Ba Gyan, illustrated this predatory fear amusingly with the following 1940s cartoon.

437

“atu tit taung, ayaung tit thein, asit tit yauk” a

 1 
 a
 1 
 a

 1 
§

438

Brac de la Pierre 2012: 162. 223

Two sham ascetics tell their guests that they are the teachers of the famous weizzā Bo Bo Aung and Bo Min Gaung and that their association is much greater than other associations. When the donation that one of the guests left for the two ascetics goes missing, the bald ascetic immediately accuses his hermit companion of taking it. Cursing at him and grabbing his throat, the bald ascetic causes the 100 kyat note to pop out of the hermit’s mouth where he had it hidden. When a female devotee rushes over to see what the scuffle is about, the bald ascetic 224

quickly tells her that whenever you wring his hermit friend’s neck, money will pop out of his mouth. The female devotee tells her friend that the hermit is “very powerful for whenever one chokes him, a 100 kyat note will appear from his mouth!”439 As I continued to observe Ma Yee Yee and the events taking place before me over the course of several hours, I found myself growing increasingly agitated. I saw a destitute family offer what must have been a large amount of money for them to buy a bottle of murky water they believed to have been blessed by the medium. An elderly woman with severe glaucoma cried out in joy that her eyes were healed after the medium touched them with her hands. A teenager with a crippled leg hobbled out of the house after being told by the medium that he no longer needed his crutches. And all the while, the medium’s parents were in the other room, in full view of those who had come to be healed, counting the thousands of kyats that were pouring in. Images of Christian televangelists and so-called faith healers from my country that are often accused of bilking money out of their believers began to flood my mind. Seeing me at the window, Ma Yee Yee eventually motioned for me to come inside. Respectfully taking my seat in front of her, and looking around, I saw a handful of monks at the side of the room; some chatting, smoking and drinking tea; others chanting paritta while fingering their rosary beads. Behind Ma Yee Yee was a large altar with a hodge-podge collection of religious accouterments. Surrounding me were about forty laypeople all sitting quietly fanning themselves to keep cool inside the stuffy room. “Is there anything you want to ask? Speak!” she said to me in the gruff voice of Bo Min Gaung. Pride welling up inside me, I decided I wanted to test Ma Yee Yee to see if she really was possessed. I thought to myself (in a tone, looking back

439

I thank Bo Bo Lansin for pointing out that “ratn\sk˚ø refers to a 100 kyat note, the highest denomination printed during this period. 225

on, I am quite ashamed of), “I will expose her for the charlatan she is.” I immediately began to pepper her with questions about Bo Min Gaung and his life that I had read about in his biographies. Surely, if Bo Min Gaung had entered this young woman’s body/mind, he would be able to easily tell me facts about his own life. Question after question, Ma Yee Yee either refused to answer or got wrong. I was feeling quite full of myself at this point and looking around, completely expecting the audience to be overjoyed for exposing their so-called healer as a fraud, my eyes were met with only icy, angry stares. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” a woman directed at me as she exited the room in disgust. I frantically looked around hoping to catch a sympathetic face, but I only saw looks of disappointment. I was drenched in sweat at this point and the smoke from the incense stung my eyes and nostrils and made me nauseous. It became clear what I had done. Not only had I disrespected Bo Min Gaung, I disrespected a revered healer --- someone whom the community had already tested and determined was legitimate. As an outsider, thinking that I knew what was good for them, I embarrassed the healer and those who rely on her for their physical and mental well-being. I also embarrassed myself in the process. I stammered to find the words in Burmese to express my apologies as I shuffled my way to the exit. Ma Yee Yee, speaking as Bo Min Gaung, told the assembled audience to not be angry with me for I was “a foreigner who was not familiar with ‘dhat-si’ or Bo Min Gaung. It was good that he tested Abha [referring to herself as Bo Min Gaung] for it was an opportunity for everyone to listen to what I am about to speak of.” Ma Yee Yee went on to recount the day when even members of that very community doubted her power and taunted her. And “remember the newspaper reporter from Yangon,” she continued, “who challenged me on issues of money and what my granddaughter [referring to Ma Yee Yee] does with all the money donated to her.” She finished her brief sermon by stressing that she only cares about the wellbeing of the sāsana and 226

her patients. “Lots of people come to me for healing, but I do not want their money. You know I never charge money for my work. I only want their good will. Money I receive it used for sāsana-pyu. Indeed, money is worthless and can’t be used to reach nibbāna. The only thing I ask in return is that they practice metta for that will be one’s support for attaining nibbāna, will it not?” With that, Ma Yee Yee stood up and walked into a backroom. The mood of the audience immediately changed for the better, and people began offering me tea and snacks and laughing as I again tried offering my apologies. I was told to return whenever I wanted for it was pathan-hset (karmic connection --- see Chapter Four) that had brought me there that day. I took them up on their offer and returned several more times but always retained my doubt of Ma Yee Yee’s powers and continued to feel uneasy about people exchanging money for healing. I kept such thoughts to myself and applied the lessons I learned to the many other instances when I was overwhelmed with feelings of skepticism. Throughout my research, I continued to be bothered by what I figured to be deviousness of some of the mediums and healers who preyed upon the desperate and ignorant, as well as the gullibility of the devout who seemed to be all too quick to part with their money. At several points of my research, I almost turned away in disgust at the venality of the mediums and gullibility of the devout to pursue other, more palatable forms of religious behavior in Myanmar. What kept me from doing so, however, was the realization I came to before embarking on my fieldwork: there are many religious worlds, and, therefore, many different ways of making and inhabiting reality. Now that I was confronted with these worlds, I needed to develop a strategy for making sense of the experiences I was observing, both among my interlocutors and within myself. 227

I like to think that I accomplished this by allowing myself to become vulnerable to encounters and experiences that were destabilizing and unfamiliar. For the most part, I was able to deal with such instances in a disciplined way by suspending the need to guard myself against those aspects of my study that I found problematic. There were aspects of my interlocutors’ religious lives that did not match my preferred ideas steeped in modern, liberal Protestantism and human equality --- aspects that made me wonder if perhaps my interlocutors who warned me to stay away from the weizzā path were correct in their negative views of the weizzā path. The rare instances I encountered abuse, manipulation, and treachery among weizzā communities and devotees were sometimes enough to make me want to recoil in disgust and provide an unflattering analysis of weizzā activity in my dissertation. I of course did neither, and in the end I decided that: a) the instances of such behavior were so few and irregular as to not warrant inclusion in this study, and b) I found my views transformed by the end of my fieldwork in that I became more empathetic to a phenomenon and its people whose beliefs and practices I did not believe in and of whose efficacy I was doubtful of from the start.440 I accomplished the latter transformation by reminding myself constantly that I was placing myself in an intermediary position located at the boundary of my reality and the reality of my interlocutors. Such an in-between location required that I discipline my “mind and heart to stay in this in-between place, in a posture of disciplined attentiveness, especially to difference.”441 I used the distress induced in me by instances of difference as a point of reflection. Instead of guarding myself against what I perceived to be morally reprehensible 440

This is not to say that I would not have included such instances if they were pertinent enough to the study at hand. I would certainly not omit cases of abuse just because I became more sympathetic to the subjects of my study. 441

Orsi 2005: 198. 228

practices and then going on to condemn the acts, I used it as an opportunity to reflect upon the roots of my interlocutors’ actions and the roots of my discomfort.442 The rewards from such an undertaking were well worth the effort. With regards to my initial anxiety over the monetary transactions of religious healing taking place, for example, I came to observe over many months of research, that there was no open coercion by the mediumhealer or her/his entourage to give money. Money was expected to be given for services rendered, but it was in the form of donations, no different from what would be offered to a monk or nun. The way these donations were provided for the healers’ services are even done in a similar manner: With a reverent attitude, the patient prostrates to the healer, or if the healer is busy or not present, a photograph of the healer and/or the weizzā being channeled. Money, usually a modest amount, and within the financial means of the donator, is placed in a bowl or box watched over by members of the healer’s family or disciples. During the many times I have witnessed such healings, I have never once seen someone not give something, whether in the form of money, food, or goods. Why did I think that these healers, their healing facilities and their services and payments should be any different from that which is expected upon receiving services at a doctor’s office or health clinic? Money is anticipated for services rendered, and although the services rendered here are of a supernatural nature, they are no less worthy of monetary payments. The difference here, however, is that the healing power that was granted to these healers are by beings whose job it is to guard and propagate the Buddha sāsana. Because of this, it is in the best interest of the 442

Although I argue for the necessity to provide self-reflexive assessment of my cultural context and prejudices, and that complete objectivity is not to be found, I do not argue for a relativistic stance on an object of study. Some interpretations are better than others and what makes this so is that the more self-reflexive examination of the context of the object of study and the more prejudices of the interpreter provided, the better the interpretation. 229

healer to use this money for such purposes, either through erecting pagodas, making offerings to monks and nuns, or sponsoring ordination ceremonies. Many of these “clinics” also provide free meals and lodging to patients and their families. In 2009 it cost another such healer in Mandalay over fifty thousand kyat (approximately US$50) per day to run her healing clinic, which would be difficult for most Burmese families to handle without some significant source of revenue. From my prolonged interactions with these mediums and their families, I witnessed that large portions of the monetary donations they received were invested back into the community for purposes of building pagodas, schools, and monastic buildings, throwing religious celebrations, and erecting shrines dedicated to Bo Bo Aung and Bo Min Gaung. A rather well-known healer, whom I read about and had the chance to meet in the early 2000’s, used the donations she received from healing people (“I never charge fees for my work,” she emphasized) for the building of water tanks, schools, and monastic buildings.443 At the very least, such an approach may also help us (and those hostile to the weizzā phenomenon, should they ever read this dissertation) to suspend our moral judgments about beliefs and practices that revolt us and disturb our most valued mores, instead of those that inspire us. It opens up the possibility to study Buddhist beliefs and practices that very well may contain elements that we find unsettling, dangerous, and morally corrupt and take such elements seriously in order to present as full as possible an account of the religious tradition under study.444

443

See NYK no.107 1995 pp.164-167 Yankin taung may-daw-gyi daw sandathiyi for an interview with this remarkable woman. 444

A prime example would be the current anti-Islamic and nationalist rhetoric and activities being promulgated by Buddhists in present day Myanmar. 230

Most importantly, it allows us to examine aspects of Burmese religious life from the perspectives of those whose experiences are often misrepresented or ignored entirely, not only in western academic works on religion, but also in Burmese historical monographs and other written sources. In addition to increasing our understanding of the lived religious experiences and practices of the weizzā devotees, this approach to religious studies also enriches our investigation of the complex interrelationship between these experiences and practices and the wider social world in which they are enacted.

231

Bibliography Abbreviations NYK PTM VM WM

Nakkhatta Ron Khrann Maggajan Pathamam Tara Maggajan Veda Maggajan Vijjā Con’ Maggajan

Burmese Language Magazines and Journals Nakkhatta Ron Khrann Maggajan Gambhīrā Maggajaṅʻʺ. Ranʻ kunʻ : Ū ̋Sanʻ ̋Ū,̋. Lyhui ́vhakʻ Chanʻ ̋krayʻ Maggajaṅʻʺ. Ranʻ kunʻ : Ū ̋Khyacʻ Kyoʻ Kyoʻ (kha) Ū ̋Kyoʻ Kyoʻ Chve,. Pāramī Maggajaṅʻʺ. Ranʻ kunʻ : Pāramī Dhamma maggajaṅʻ ̋tuikʻ,. Veda Maggajan`´´. Ran`: kun` : Cha r¯a Mruin`.

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