U Nu

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

U Nu (1907–1995) was Burma's first prime minister after independence (1948–1958, 1960–1962) and the twentieth century's most influential exponent of Buddhist socialism. A leading figure of the university-educated thakin nationalist generation, he combined a Marxist-derived economic radicalism, absorbed partly through the Nagani ("Red Dragon") Book Club he helped found in the 1930s, with a lifelong immersion in Theravada Buddhist doctrine and practice. As prime minister, he pursued a program of democratic socialism intertwined with large-scale state sponsorship of Buddhism, including the Sixth Buddhist Council (1954–56) and the mass promotion of vipassana meditation, presenting both as complementary paths toward what he called an "earthly nirvana" (lokka nibban). After publicly repudiating Marxism in a landmark 1958 speech, he moved toward an increasingly explicit Buddhist nationalism, culminating in the controversial 1961 constitutional amendment establishing Buddhism as the state religion, a move widely blamed for hardening ethnic and religious tensions and contributing to the military coup that ended his career in 1962. He remained, for the rest of his life, a symbol of nonviolent, Buddhist-inflected opposition to military rule.

Biography

U Nu (born Maung Nu) was born on 25 May 1907 in the Irrawaddy Delta town of Wakema, in British Burma, the son of a small trader, U San Htun, and his wife, Daw Saw Khin. He was educated at a "national school" in Wakema, founded in the wake of the 1920–21 anticolonial boycott of government schools and housed in a Buddhist monastery, before proceeding to Rangoon, where he completed his B.A. at the University of Rangoon in 1929 and returned in the mid-1930s to read law. As president of the Rangoon University Students' Union, Nu joined Aung San in leading the landmark 1936 student strike, sparked by their expulsion for refusing to name the author of an article critical of a university official; the strike, one of the first major confrontations between young Burmese nationalists and the colonial administration, brought both men to national prominence.

Nu subsequently joined the Dobama Asiayone ("We Burmans Association"), adopting the nationalist honorific thakin ("master"), and in December 1937 helped found the Nagani ("Red Dragon") Book Club, which translated and distributed Marxist and other left-wing literature to a Burmese readership; Nu himself contributed translations and a tract on Marxism to the Club's output. Arrested by the British for sedition in 1940, he was released after the 1942 Japanese invasion and served in Dr. Ba Maw's Japanese-sponsored wartime administration, first as foreign minister and later as minister of information.

After the war, Nu, who had briefly retired to Moulmeingyun to write and meditate, was drawn back into politics at the urging of both Aung San and the Communist leadership, and joined the Anti-Fascist People's Freedom League (AFPFL) as vice president. Following the assassination of Aung San and most of his cabinet on 19 July 1947, Nu became AFPFL president and, upon independence on 4 January 1948, Burma's first prime minister. He led the country through fourteen turbulent years marked by ethnic and communist insurgencies, economic reconstruction, and a foreign policy of nonalignment, while also sponsoring a major restoration of Buddhist institutions: he established a Buddha Sasana Council, hosted the Sixth Buddhist Council (Chattha Sangayana) at Rangoon in 1954–56 to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's parinibbana, and patronized the mass lay vipassana meditation movement associated with the monk Mahasi Sayadaw.

Nu voluntarily relinquished the premiership to his deputy, U Ba Swe, for nine months in 1956–57 in order to concentrate on party reorganization, then resumed office. Ideological and personal tensions with his Socialist Party colleagues Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein came to a head in mid-1958, when the ruling AFPFL split into Nu's "Clean AFPFL" and the rival "Stable AFPFL" led by Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein; unable to survive a subsequent no-confidence vote without the parliamentary support of the left-wing National United Front, Nu invited the army Chief of Staff, General Ne Win, to head a "caretaker government" later that year. Returned to power after his Union Party's landslide victory in the February 1960 election, Nu pushed through a controversial 1961 constitutional amendment establishing Buddhism as Burma's state religion, over the objections of Christian, Muslim, and animist minorities concentrated in the country's ethnic states; the resulting instability was cited by General Ne Win in justifying the coup of 2 March 1962, which ended Nu's government and Burma's parliamentary era.

Ne Win imprisoned Nu until 1966. In 1969 Nu went into exile, first organizing an armed resistance movement, the Parliamentary Democracy Party, from bases along the Thai border, before relocating to India. He returned to Burma under a general amnesty in 1980 and, in a striking final turn, was ordained as a Buddhist monk that July, devoting himself for several years to editing and translating Pali canonical texts. During the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, the elderly Nu briefly emerged from retirement to declare a symbolic interim government, for which the successor State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) placed him under house arrest from 1989 to 1992. He died in Rangoon on 14 February 1995.

Ideas

As early as 1935, in a speech later reproduced by Manuel Sarkisyanz, Nu diagnosed the underlying cause of both colonial exploitation and class conflict in Buddhist rather than Marxist terms: the "primacy of the Self" (attavada), an inflated attachment to the ego that Buddhism, no less than socialism, existed to overcome. Throughout his career, Nu treated Buddhist doctrine and left-wing economic reform as mutually reinforcing paths toward the same goal, which he termed lokka nibban, an "earthly nirvana": a just, materially secure society whose citizens, freed from want, could devote themselves to meditation and the pursuit of ultimate liberation. He drew on the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence (anicca) and the folk myth of the primeval Padeytha ("Wishing") Tree to argue that both unregulated capitalism and doctrinaire Marxism were philosophically deficient, and that Buddhist socialism represented a "middle way" that could incorporate Marxism's redistributive aims while rejecting its materialist metaphysics and atheism.

Nu's government also revived the Ashokan model of dhammavijaya, "conquest by righteousness," most visibly through state-orchestrated processions and enshrinements of Buddha relics between 1949 and the mid-1950s, intended to bind Burma's fragile, ethnically plural union together under a shared, non-coercive Buddhist symbolism. Tilman Frasch has argued that this practice, whatever its precolonial rhetorical antecedents, was itself a distinctively modern, colonial-era innovation rather than a simple restoration of precolonial kingship.

Nu's synthesis proved unstable. His landmark speech of 29 January 1958 to the AFPFL's Third All-Burma Congress, an hours-long dissection of dialectical and historical materialism, marked a turning point: while he continued to endorse the AFPFL's redistributive economic program, Nu now insisted that Marxism's materialist metaphysics was fundamentally incompatible with Buddhism, and that only self-declared Communists, rather than the broader left, could properly be called Marxists. This break, which his Socialist Party colleague U Ba Swe pointedly declined to follow, coincided with, and helped precipitate, the AFPFL split of 1958, and it foreshadowed Nu's increasingly assertive Buddhist nationalism, culminating in the 1961 State Religion Act.

Writings

• Modern Plays. Rangoon: Red Dragon Book Club, 1938. In Burmese. [An early play collection published through the Nagani Book Club, reflecting Nu's dual career as a nationalist politician and popular playwright.]
• Towards Peace and Democracy. Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1949. [Collected speeches from Nu's first year as prime minister.]
• Towards a Welfare State. Rangoon: Government Printing and Stationery, 1952. [Collected speeches articulating the Buddhist-socialist framework of Nu's early government, including the ideal of lokka nibban.]
• The People Win Through. Rangoon: Society for the Extension of Democratic Ideals, 1952 (New York: Taplinger, 1957). [A widely translated anti-communist play, later staged internationally, dramatizing the moral case against armed insurgency.]
• Burma under the Japanese. New York: St Martin's Press, 1954. [A memoir of the wartime occupation, begun during Nu's brief postwar retirement.]
• "The Buddha". The Guardian (Rangoon) 5 (February 1958): 9–21. [An essay on the life and significance of the Buddha, published immediately before Nu's landmark speech repudiating Marxism.]
• "The Dhamma". The Guardian (Rangoon) 5 (March 1958): 9–20. [A companion essay to "The Buddha," setting out Nu's understanding of core Buddhist doctrine on the eve of his formal break with Marxist ideology.]
• Speech to the Third All-Burma Congress of the AFPFL, 29 January 1958. [Nu's extended, hours-long critique of dialectical and historical materialism, in which he declared Marxism's materialism ultimately incompatible with Buddhism while retaining the AFPFL's redistributive economic program; widely published in the English-language press in Burma.]
• Saturday's Son (memoir, written in prison, 1962–1966; trans. U Law Yone, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975). [Nu's English-language autobiography, covering his political career through his imprisonment after the 1962 coup.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Su, Khine Thant (2022). "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity in Colonial and Postwar Burma: An Analysis of U Nu's Political Thought". In: Galway, Matthew, & Marc H. Opper (Eds), Experiments with Marxism-Leninism in Cold War Southeast Asia: 107–136. ANU Press. [Open-access chapter tracing the evolution of Nu's discourse on morality and Buddhist socialism from the Nagani Book Club period through his 1958 break with Marxism.]
• Frasch, Tilman (2013). "The Relic and the Rule of Righteousness: Reflections on U Nu's Dhammavijaya". In: Whalen-Bridge, John, & Pattana Kitiarsa (Eds), Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia: Forms of Engagement: 115–138. Palgrave Macmillan. [A critical reassessment of Nu's political use of Buddha relics between 1949 and 1957, arguing that dhammavijaya was a colonial-era innovation rather than a straightforward revival of precolonial kingship.]
• Butwell, Richard (1963). U Nu of Burma. Stanford University Press. [The standard political biography, based on extensive interviews with Nu and his AFPFL colleagues; the fullest documented account of his life and government through the early 1960s.]
• Trager, Frank N. (1959). "Political Divorce in Burma". Foreign Affairs 37.2: 317–327. [A contemporary analysis of the 1958 AFPFL split, including the ideological dimension of Nu's dispute with Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein over the relationship between Marxism and Buddhism.]
• Sarkisyanz, Manuel (1965). Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution. Martinus Nijhoff. [The foundational, exhaustively documented study of Buddhist political ideas in Burma, situating Nu's synthesis within a longer indigenous tradition of Buddhist kingship and millenarianism.]
• Sarkisyanz, Manuel (1961). "On the Place of U Nu's Buddhist Socialism in Burma's History of Ideas". Studies on Asia 2.1: 53–62. [A concise precursor to Sarkisyanz's 1965 monograph, arguing that Nu's Buddhist socialism was a modernized expression of an indigenous Ashokan ideal of kingship.]
• Totten, George O. (1960). "Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma". Comparative Studies in Society and History 2.3: 293–304. [A comparative treatment that includes an extended paraphrase and quotation of Nu's 1958 speech dissecting Marxism, situating it within a broader account of Buddhist-socialist relations in Asia.]

Secondary Literature in Other Languages

• Bechert, Heinz (1966). Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in den Ländern des Theravada-Buddhismus [Buddhism, State, and Society in the Countries of Theravada Buddhism], Vol. 1. Alfred Metzner Verlag. [The founding comparative study of Buddhist modernism across Theravada Southeast and South Asia; situates Nu's reforms within the broader regional pattern of postcolonial Buddhist revival.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "U Nu". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 7 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/U_Nu.