Editing U Ba Swe (section)

== Ideas ==

Ba Swe's central intellectual commitment, sustained across more than two decades of public life, was that a deepening study of Marxism strengthened rather than eroded Buddhist faith. Addressing the Trade Union Congress (Burma) in 1950, he told delegates that Marxist and Buddhist Abhidhamma, systems of philosophical psychology, were "not only similar" but "a thing of one nature," even as he insisted that only the Buddhist teaching could ultimately "give liberation and release from the existences throughout transmigrations," treating Marxism as a valid but subordinate, mundane truth within a wider Buddhist framework of liberation from suffering.<ref>U Ba Swe, address to the Trade Union Congress (Burma), 1950, translated and quoted in Sarkisyanz, Manuel (1965). ''Buddhist Backgrounds of the Burmese Revolution''. Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 196–198, citing U Ba Swe (1955), ''Bama-to hlan-yei: hnin Bama lou'tha: lu-ti'/!-'' (Rangoon), pp. 27–28, 44–45.</ref> He made a parallel argument two years earlier in his English-language pamphlet ''The Burmese Revolution'', writing that "the more I study Marxism, however, the more I feel convinced in Buddhism ... for any man who has deeply studied Buddhism, and correctly perceived its tenets there should be no obstacle to becoming a Marxist."<ref>U Ba Swe (1952). ''The Burmese Revolution''. Ministry of Information, quoted in Totten, George O. (1960). "Buddhism and Socialism in Japan and Burma". ''Comparative Studies in Society and History'' 2.3: 293–304, p. 301.</ref>

Alongside this doctrinal argument, Ba Swe habitually rendered revolutionary politics in Buddhist vocabulary: he used the Buddhist term for liberation from impermanence (''bhava'') to denote social liberation, in keeping with a broader Burmese left-wing idiom in which Buddhist terminology, including the monastic practice of "overturning the alms bowl" (''thabeit hmauk'') as a refusal of alms from unworthy donors, supplied the vocabulary of political strikes and protest.<ref>Sarkisyanz (1965), ''Buddhist Backgrounds'', p. 169.</ref>

This reconciliationist stance placed Ba Swe in direct and increasingly public tension with U Nu, who in his own landmark speech of January 1958 declared Marxism's materialism fundamentally incompatible with Buddhism. Frank N. Trager, reporting on the AFPFL split later that year, observed that Ba Swe, as leader of the Swe-Nyein faction, "did not like U Nu's assertion that Marxism and Buddhism are irreconcilable, for he had expounded a view which combined the two."<ref>Trager (1959), "Political Divorce in Burma," p. 322.</ref> Ba Swe's position also differed from that of his own close political ally, Kyaw Nyein, who, far less of a traditionalist in philosophical outlook, did not share the AFPFL leadership's broader project of reconciling socialism with Buddhism.<ref>Butwell (1963), ''U Nu of Burma'', p. 153.</ref> Ba Swe's synthesis was thus neither Nu's late-career turn toward Buddhist nationalism nor Kyaw Nyein's secular technocratic socialism, but a sustained middle position, sincerely held rather than merely rhetorical according to contemporaries, in which Marxist analysis and Buddhist soteriology were treated as complementary rather than competing accounts of liberation.