Editing Burma

{{Provisional Entry}}
Burma (renamed Myanmar by its military government in 1989) is the only major area of Theravada Buddhism to have passed, in the course of the twentieth century, through both a wholesale collapse of its traditional Buddhist polity and a sustained attempt to rebuild the modern state on explicitly Buddhist terms.<ref name="sark61">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, p. 53.</ref> Buddhism has functioned throughout the modern period less as a private confession than as the primary vocabulary of Burmese political and national identity, shaping anticolonial resistance, the country's short-lived parliamentary socialism under Prime Minister U Nu (1948–1962), and the military governments that followed. Because indigenous Burmese political vocabulary derived almost entirely from Pali Buddhist terminology, even avowedly Marxist and socialist currents were routinely explained, and substantively reshaped, through Buddhist categories, producing a distinctive tradition of Buddhist socialism, centered on the ideal of an "earthly nirvana" (''lokka nibban''), that ranks among the most sustained and doctrinally elaborate fusions of Buddhism and left-wing politics anywhere in Asia.<ref name="sark65">Sarkisyanz, Manuel (1965). ''Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution''. Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 166–175.</ref>

== Buddhism in Burma ==

Theravada Buddhism has been practiced in the territory of modern Burma since at least the first millennium CE, and by the twentieth century it was professed by roughly 85 to 90 percent of the population, including many members of ethnic-minority communities such as the Shan and Mon.<ref name="matthews">Matthews, Bruce (1999). "The Legacy of Tradition and Authority: Buddhism and the Nation in Myanmar". In: Harris, Ian (Ed.), ''Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia'': 26–53. Continuum, p. 27.</ref> The formative period of Burmese Buddhist statecraft was the Pagan dynasty (1044–1287), whose royal inscriptions articulate a distinctively Burmese ideal of Buddhist kingship. King Alaungsithu's inscription of 1141 and King Kyanzittha's Shwezigon Pagoda inscription of 1098–99 both present the monarch as a bodhisattva-cum-''cakkavatti'' (universal Buddhist ruler) whose accumulated merit and material generosity, redistributing rice, wealth, and irrigated land to all subjects, were themselves the means by which he would ultimately "become the Buddha that saves and redeems all beings."<ref>{{annotation|Sarkisyanz (1961), "U Nu's Buddhist Socialism," pp. 54–55, translating and discussing the Alaungsithu and Kyanzittha inscriptions.}}</ref> Under this Ashoka-derived model, the purpose of the state was to secure the economic and social conditions, above all leisure from want, that would allow the population to pursue meditation and merit-making (''kutho'') toward liberation (''nibbana'').<ref name="sark61" />

The monastic order (''sangha'') was, from 1368 onward, headed by a royally appointed primate (''thathanabaing'') who supervised doctrinal orthodoxy and monastic discipline on the crown's behalf, in a relationship of mutual legitimation between the Buddhist "church" (''sasana'') and the throne.<ref name="matthews" /> By the early twentieth century the ''sangha'' was divided into roughly ten sects or "fraternities" (''gaings''), of which the Thudhamma, comprising close to 90 percent of monks, was overwhelmingly dominant, alongside smaller reformist and ascetic groupings such as the Shwegyin, Hngettwin, and Dwara.<ref name="matthews" />

British annexation, completed in three Anglo-Burmese wars between 1824 and 1886, dismantled this arrangement. Colonial administrators adopted a policy of religious "neutrality" and declined, after the death of the last royally appointed ''thathanabaing'' in 1895, to appoint a successor; the office lapsed for decades, leaving the ''sangha'' without central authority or its traditional royal protector, even as Buddhism continued to be widely understood as the primary marker of Burmese identity.<ref name="matthews" /> Burma's administrative incorporation as a province of British India, its opening to mass Indian immigration, Christian missionary activity, and the erosion of the ''sangha''{{'}}s economic base combined to produce what Manuel Sarkisyanz described as an "ideological crisis" of Burmese Buddhism, experienced as the loss of the country's traditional "cosmic prototype."<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', p. 99, 107; cited in Matthews (1999), "Legacy of Tradition," p. 29.</ref>

After independence, Prime Minister U Nu made the public restoration of Buddhism a central plank of government, establishing a Buddhist Sasana Council, hosting the Sixth Buddhist Council (''Chattha Sangayana'') at Rangoon in 1954–56 to mark the 2,500th anniversary (Buddha Jayanti) of the Buddha's ''parinibbana'', and sponsoring the mass lay ''vipassana'' meditation movement associated with the monk Mahasi Sayadaw.<ref>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, pp. 108–111.</ref> The 1962 military coup of General Ne Win reversed this pattern of state sponsorship, formally separating religion and state, before an unexpected reversal in 1980, when the ruling junta convened a second ''sangha'' council that imposed a unified, hierarchical monastic structure (the Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee) under effective state supervision, a structure that has persisted, with modification, under successive governments to the present.<ref>Matthews (1999), "Legacy of Tradition," pp. 35–36.</ref>

== Radical Buddhism in Burma ==

Burmese popular Buddhism harbored, from at least the early nineteenth century, a millenarian expectation of a "Restorer of the Golden Age" (''Setkya-Min'') or "Buddha-king" (''Buddha-Yaza''), an ideal Buddhist ruler and future Buddha whose advent was to end the present "Age of Decline" and inaugurate a perfect society.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 154–155.</ref> This eschatology repeatedly fueled anticolonial insurgency: pretenders to the Setkya-Min identity led revolts against East India Company forces as early as 1839, and further Setkya-Min and Buddha-Yaza risings followed the final British annexation of Upper Burma in 1885–86, recurring sporadically into the 1920s.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 155–159.</ref> The tradition culminated in the peasant rebellion of 1930–1932 led by Saya San, a former monk and lay Buddhist healer who organized secret village societies (''Galon Athin'') that fused economic grievance over Depression-era taxation and indebtedness with a "royalist," millenarian Buddhism; several monks served the movement as organizers and local commanders before it was suppressed by roughly 12,000 British-Indian troops.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 160–163.</ref>

Alongside this rural millenarian current, an urban and organizationally modern political Buddhism developed from the founding of the Young Men's Buddhist Association (YMBA) in 1906, whose members went on to found the General Council of Burmese Associations and which became, despite its ostensibly religious charter, the principal training ground for Burma's future nationalist politicians.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 128–129.</ref> Politically active monks, most prominently U Ottama, who returned from India in 1921 having absorbed Gandhian ''satyagraha'', explicitly linked ultimate liberation (''nibbana'') to national independence and mobilized the rural ''sangha'' against colonial rule, a mobilization made easier by the lapse of the ''thathanabaing'''s central monastic authority.<ref name="matthews" /> In the 1930s, university-educated nationalists who adopted the honorific ''thakin'' ("master") in the ''Dobama Asiayone'' ("We Burmans Association," founded 1930) turned increasingly to Marxism, distributing translated Marxist-Leninist literature through the Nagani ("Red Dragon") Book Club, founded in 1936–37 with the involvement of the future prime minister Thakin Nu, later known as U Nu.<ref>Su (2022), "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity," p. 113.</ref>

Because Burmese possessed no established secular political vocabulary, Marxist ideas were characteristically explained through Buddhist categories. Thakin Soe, the most systematic theoretician of Burmese Leninism, had studied Buddhist philosophy before turning to Marxist "classics," and he glossed the Leninist unity of theory and practice through the Abhidhamma triad of scriptural preservation, possession of knowledge, and scripturally grounded practice, while rendering the dialectical-materialist notion of the eternal flux of matter through the Buddhist cycle of world-arising and world-destruction.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 168–169.</ref> U Ba Swe, another leading left-wing ''thakin'' and labor organizer who went on to become prime minister (1956–1957), used the Buddhist term for liberation from impermanence (''bhava'') to denote revolutionary social liberation, and Burmese strike terminology itself derived from the monastic practice of "overturning the alms bowl" (''thabeit hmauk'') in refusal of alms from unworthy donors.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', p. 169.</ref> Both currents converged on the term ''lokka nibban'' ("earthly nirvana"), first popularized in print by the poet and Thakin ideologist Thakin Kudaw Hmine in his 1938 ''Thakin-Tika'', which reinterpreted the Buddhist folk myth of the primeval Padeytha ("Wishing") Tree, an age of common property destroyed by the arising of greed, as a charter for socialism and a critique of private property strikingly convergent with, yet independently derived from, Marxist theories of primitive communism.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 169–170, 173–174; Sarkisyanz (1961), "U Nu's Buddhist Socialism," pp. 56–58.</ref> The Stalinist guerrilla leader Thakin Than Tun likewise grounded Marxist theories of the origin of class society in the same Buddhist myth of the "Padaythabin."<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', p. 174; Su (2022), "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity," p. 121.</ref> A parallel, Fabian-influenced strand of Buddhist socialism ran through U Ba Choe, founder in 1936 of Burma's Fabian League and editor of the ''Deedok'' journal, a devout Buddhist and folklorist whose traditionalist influence on the young Thakin Nu during their student years has been considered formative for the latter's postwar Buddhist socialism.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 172–173.</ref>

=== U Nu ===
{{Main|U Nu}}
U Nu (1907–1995) served as Burma's first postcolonial prime minister (1948–1958, 1960–1962) and is the central figure of Burmese Buddhist socialism, elaborating a program in which democratic socialism and a state-sponsored Buddhist revival, including the 1954–56 Sixth Buddhist Council, were joint means toward what he called an "earthly nirvana" (''lokka nibban'').<ref name="sark61" /><ref>Su (2022), "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity," pp. 109–111, 130–134.</ref> He formally repudiated Marxism in a landmark 1958 speech and moved toward an increasingly explicit Buddhist nationalism, culminating in the 1961 act establishing Buddhism as the state religion, a move widely blamed for hardening the ethnic and religious tensions that contributed to the 1962 military coup ending his career.<ref>Su (2022), "Buddhist Socialism and National Identity," pp. 131–134.</ref>

=== U Ba Swe ===
{{Main|U Ba Swe}}
U Ba Swe (1915–1987), a labor organizer who rose to lead the Socialist Party and served as prime minister (1956–1957), was the most consistent exponent of Buddhist-Marxist synthesis among Burma's ''thakin''-generation socialists, using the Buddhist vocabulary of liberation from impermanence (''bhava'') to frame revolutionary social liberation and arguing, against U Nu's later position, that Marxism and Buddhism were fundamentally compatible rather than opposed.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', pp. 169–170, 196–198; Trager, Frank N. (1959). "Political Divorce in Burma". ''Foreign Affairs'' 37.2: 317–327, p. 322.</ref> This disagreement helped precipitate the 1958 split of the ruling AFPFL, after which Ba Swe led the rival "Stable AFPFL" faction, together with Kyaw Nyein, until the 1962 coup ended his political career.<ref>Butwell, Richard (1963). ''U Nu of Burma''. Stanford University Press, pp. 152–154.</ref>

=== After the 1962 Coup ===

Following the 1962 coup, General Ne Win's Burma Socialist Programme Party pursued a doctrinaire, largely secular "Burmese Way to Socialism" that displaced Buddhist vocabulary from official politics even as the state, especially after 1980, tightened administrative control over the ''sangha''.<ref>Matthews (1999), "Legacy of Tradition," pp. 34–37.</ref> Radical Buddhist activism nonetheless persisted and re-emerged dramatically in the pro-democracy uprising of 1988, in which an estimated 60 percent of Burma's monks are thought to have taken part in demonstrations against the military government, and in the subsequent formation of exile organizations such as the All Burma Young Monks Association, which claimed a "historic duty" for monks to resist military rule.<ref>Matthews (1999), "Legacy of Tradition," pp. 37–38.</ref> After the junta ignored the landslide 1990 election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, monks in Mandalay staged, in August 1990, a rare collective "overturning of the alms bowl" (''patta ni kauzza na kan''), refusing alms and religious services to military officials for two months in an act of ecclesiastical censure with few precedents in Burmese history.<ref>Matthews (1999), "Legacy of Tradition," p. 38.</ref>

=== Ashin Nyāna ===

One of the most distinctive dissident Buddhist teachers in modern Burma is Ashin Nyāna (b. 1938), founder of the heterodox ''mou-pyā-wāda'' ("Doctrine of the Sky-Blue [One]") movement, whose followers are recognizable by the sky-blue robes he adopted after his defrocking in 1983.<ref>Foxeus, Niklas (2024). "The Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One in Myanmar: Disenchanted Buddhism". ''Religion'' 55.1: 1–29, pp. 1–2; Kawanami, Hiroko (2020–2021). "The Making of an 'Inside Enemy': A Study of the Sky-Blue Sect in Myanmar". ''Buddhism, Law & Society'' 6: 1–40, pp. 1, 6–7.</ref> Rather than advancing an explicitly left-wing political program, Ashin Nyāna reinterpreted core doctrines of Theravada orthodoxy, rejecting conventional understandings of rebirth, karma across multiple lives, the thirty-one planes of existence, and the miraculous powers traditionally attributed to the Buddha, in favor of a rigorously this-worldly "doctrine of present karma" (''pyissouppan-kamma-wada'') confined to consequences within a single lifetime.<ref>Foxeus (2024), "Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One," pp. 2, 12–17.</ref> Scholars have characterized this reform as a "disenchanted," rationalist Buddhist discourse, and Burmese monastic and state authorities have repeatedly condemned it as heretical (''adhamma-vada''), sentencing Ashin Nyāna to a cumulative near-twenty years' imprisonment between the 1980s and his final release in 2016, and formally banning his movement in 2011.<ref>Kawanami (2020–2021), "Making of an Inside Enemy," pp. 2–3, 29; Foxeus (2024), "Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One," pp. 2, 9.</ref>

Ashin Nyāna's relationship to radical Buddhism in the political sense that is the focus of the RBP remains ambiguous, and the English-language scholarship on him, limited to a handful of studies by two authors, has not addressed the question directly. He has not articulated an explicit program of social or economic transformation, nor aligned himself with socialism, anticolonialism, or other left-wing currents; existing scholarship stresses that, unlike Thailand's Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, he "did not challenge the political status quo nor articulate any overt social vision or activism in his sermons."<ref>Foxeus (2024), "Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One," p. 17.</ref> At the same time, his consistently this-worldly reorientation of Buddhist practice toward the alleviation of present suffering, and his rejection of costly merit-making rituals as a diversion of resources that could instead benefit the poor, bears some family resemblance to the broader modern current of socially engaged Buddhism.<ref>Foxeus (2024), "Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One," pp. 18–19; Kawanami (2020–2021), "Making of an Inside Enemy," pp. 17–18.</ref> His unpublished (and officially banned) treatise ''Hpayā'' ("The Buddha"), circulating in manuscript form since 1984 and periodically revised, portrays the Buddha as an ordinary human being and social reformer rather than a miracle-working, cosmological figure.<ref>Foxeus (2024), "Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One," pp. 13, 17.</ref> Given the near-total absence of English-language scholarship addressing any wider social or political dimension of his thought, Ashin Nyāna is best regarded, for now, as a borderline and understudied case rather than a confirmed instance of radical Buddhism in the sense defined by the RBP, though his consistent, textually grounded critique of enchanted and ritualistic Buddhism arguably merits closer future attention.

== Literature in English ==

* Foxeus, Niklas (2024). "The Doctrine of the Sky-Blue One in Myanmar: Disenchanted Buddhism". ''Religion'' 55.1: 1–29. {{annotation|Open-access study of the dissident monk Ashin Nyāna's rationalist, doctrinally heterodox reform movement, analyzed through the Weberian concept of religious disenchantment; the fullest scholarly treatment of a borderline case for the study of radical Buddhism.}}
* 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. {{annotation|Open-access chapter tracing the evolution of U Nu's discourse on morality and Buddhist socialism from his engagement with the Nagani Book Club in the 1930s through his final break with Marxism in 1958, situating him within the global Cold War context.}}
* Kawanami, Hiroko (2020–2021). "The Making of an 'Inside Enemy': A Study of the Sky-Blue Sect in Myanmar". ''Buddhism, Law & Society'' 6: 1–40. {{annotation|A legal and social history of the state's decades-long prosecution of Ashin Nyāna's movement, based on interviews with Nyāna and his followers and on the sangha court records of his 1980s–2010s heresy trials.}}
* 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. {{annotation|A critical reassessment of U Nu's political use of Buddha relics between 1949 and 1957, arguing that his practice of dhammavijaya was a colonial-era innovation rather than a straightforward revival of precolonial kingship.}}
* Seekins, Donald M. (2013). "Sacred Site or Public Space? The Shwedagon Pagoda in Colonial Rangoon". In: Whalen-Bridge, John, & Pattana Kitiarsa (Eds), ''Buddhism, Modernity, and the State in Asia: Forms of Engagement'': 139–162. Palgrave Macmillan. {{annotation|Traces how Rangoon's Shwedagon Pagoda evolved under colonial rule from a purely sacred site into a public space for nationalist mobilization, including the early twentieth-century "shoe controversy."}}
* Matthews, Bruce (1999). "The Legacy of Tradition and Authority: Buddhism and the Nation in Myanmar". In: Harris, Ian (Ed.), ''Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth-Century Asia'': 26–53. Continuum. {{annotation|A broad survey running from the colonial era through the 1988 uprising and the 1990s, particularly valuable for its detailed treatment of the sangha's political role under the Ne Win and SLORC/SPDC military governments.}}
* Sarkisyanz, Manuel (1965). ''Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution''. Martinus Nijhoff. {{annotation|The foundational, exhaustively documented study of Buddhist political ideas in Burma from the Pagan dynasty to U Nu's government; despite its age, its chapters on millenarian revolt, the Nagani Book Club, and Buddhist-Marxist syncretism remain the fullest documentary source for radical Burmese Buddhism.}}
* Butwell, Richard (1963). ''U Nu of Burma''. Stanford University Press. {{annotation|The standard political biography of U Nu, offering the fullest documented account of the AFPFL leadership, including detailed treatment of U Ba Swe's career, the 1958 party split, and the internal dynamics behind Burma's Buddhist-socialist government.}}
* 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. {{annotation|A concise article-length precursor to Sarkisyanz's 1965 monograph, arguing that U Nu's Buddhist socialism was a modernized expression of an indigenous Ashokan ideal of kingship rather than a purely pragmatic postwar improvisation.}}
* Totten, George O. (1960). "Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma". ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2.3: 293–304. {{annotation|An early comparative treatment asking why Buddhism became central to Burmese socialism while remaining marginal to the Japanese socialist movement; includes primary-source quotations from U Ba Swe on the compatibility of Marxism and Buddhism.}}
* Trager, Frank N. (1959). "Political Divorce in Burma". ''Foreign Affairs'' 37.2: 317–327. {{annotation|A contemporary journalistic-scholarly account of the 1958 AFPFL split, useful for its explicit identification of Ba Swe's disagreement with U Nu over the compatibility of Marxism and Buddhism as one strand of the conflict.}}

== 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. {{annotation|The founding comparative study of "Buddhist modernism" across Theravada Southeast and South Asia, including Burma; foundational for subsequent English-language scholarship on U Nu's modernist reforms.}}

== How to Cite This Article ==
<!-- AUTHORSHIP CHANGE LOG
First version, 8 August 2026. Main: Brons, Lajos. Other: (none).-->
Brons, Lajos ({{REVISIONYEAR}}). "Burma". ''The Radical Buddhism Project''. Version of {{#time: j F Y | {{REVISIONYEAR}}-{{REVISIONMONTH}}-{{REVISIONDAY}} }}. <nowiki>http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Burma</nowiki>.

== Notes ==
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[[category:Burma]]
[[category:Country Profiles]]