Editing Burma (section)

=== Buddhist Nationalism, Marxism, and the Origins of Buddhist Socialism ===

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>