Uneasy days for monks in Myanmar

October 24, New York Times
- Choe Sang-Hun

Mandalay, Myanmar — As the lunch gong chimed through a tree-shaded
monastery, several hundred monks in burgundy robes lined up on a
mid-October day, all holding alms bowls.

It is a common scene in Myanmar, formerly Burma, where one out of every
100 people, many of them children, are monks. But the lunch line at the
Mahagandhayon Monastery, the country’s largest, used to be much longer.

“We usually have 1,400 monks here,” said a senior monk. “Because of the
situation, parents took 1,000 of them home.”

For decades, two powerful institutions have shaped Burmese life: the
500,000-member Buddhist clergy, which commands a moral authority over the
population, and Senior Gen. Than Shwe’s junta, whose 450,000-strong
military controls the population through intimidation.

Their uneasy coexistence has shattered. After scattered demonstrations
erupted against sharp increases in fuel prices in August, thousands of
monks protested the junta’s economic mismanagement and political
repression. The military responded with batons and bullets.

The guns have prevailed over mantras, at least for now.

As of Oct. 6, the government said it had detained 533 monks, of whom 398
were released after sorting out what it called “real monks” from “bogus
ones.” Monks and dissidents contend that many more were detained.

“They took away truckloads of monks and laypeople,” said the deputy leader
of a monastery in Yangon, the country’s most populous city. “They had the
monks kneel down, with their hands on the back of their heads. Anyone who
raised his head was beaten.”

He said at Ngwe Kyayan, Yangon’s largest monastery, soldiers took food and
donation boxes, and beat the abbot and vandalized images of Buddha, as
some of its 300 monks fought back.

The monks, he said, began demonstrating against the economic deprivation
of the Burmese. “It’s a terrible situation,” he said, speaking on
condition of anonymity, like others interviewed, because he feared
government reprisals. “Monks took to the streets to draw attention to this
problem, pleading for loving kindness. But our government is worse than
Hitler’s Nazis. They have no respect for religion.” When it was over, The
New Light of Myanmar, a state-run English-language newspaper, said, monks
had been “defrocked” during interrogation so that they could be questioned
as laypeople, then “ordained” and sent “back to their monasteries.” Monks
denounced the process.

The junta also used divide-and-rule tactics, by persuading the
state-sanctioned Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee, which oversees the clergy,
to take its donations and to order monks to stop protesting or face
punishment.

“Some of these senior monks are bribed by the regime,” said an editor at a
Yangon magazine. “They have accepted so many good things in life — cars,
televisions, big houses, telephones and mobile phones — that they simply
have to listen to the regime.”

At the Mahagandhayon Monastery here in Mandalay, soldiers had pulled back
by mid-October after cordoning off the temple for weeks. But their trucks
continued to lurk in alleys nearby, as rumors circulated that, if the
monks rose up again, it would probably be in this city, the nation’s
second most populous. About 20,000 of its million residents are monks, one
of the highest concentrations in the country.

Young men from across the country train here as monks, and they have grown
more passionate about the poverty and injustice their nation has suffered
under the military government.

The fear was still palpable at Mahagandhayon, where monks chanted mantras
over their last meal of the day, a late-morning lunch of vegetable soup,
eggplants, rice and a treat from a donor — instant noodles. But they were
still reluctant to discuss the military’s crushing of the demonstrations
in late September.

“They are afraid of guns!” a senior monk said before vanishing into the
dining hall.

Long before the protests, monks were aware of people’s suffering. When
they went to receive alms, said the senior monk in Yangon, they saw “no
happiness in people’s faces, people whose minds are preoccupied with
finding food and surviving one day at a time.”

But the military’s use of force against the monks has unsettled
fundamental Burmese values.

“To Burmese, monks are like sons of the Buddha,” said Maung Aye, a taxi
driver, as he drove around Yangon’s Sule Pagoda, which is said to enshrine
a hair of the Buddha and was a focal point of the protests.

A shop owner in Yangon said his 5-year-old son, who had been reared with
Buddhist beliefs in karma, had cried out: “I don’t want to become a
soldier. If I have to kill a monk, the worst thing will happen to me in my
next life.”

At a Yangon temple, sitting before a golden Buddha figure, two middle-aged
monks spoke with resignation and anger.

“We learned a lesson from 1988,” one monk said of the large pro-democracy
uprising that the military put down, leaving hundreds, perhaps thousands,
dead. “If it changes nothing and only gets worse, why risk our lives?” The
other monk said: “We would like to love our government. We tried but
couldn’t. We want to like to go out and demonstrate again, but we know
they are out there with their guns.”

During the Buddhist Lent, which lasts three months, into late October,
monks focus on studying scripture and refrain from leaving their
monasteries, except for early outings to collect alms. The fact that monks
ventured out in protest during this period was widely seen here as a sign
of just how angry they were. But by mid-October, many monasteries in
Yangon were deserted, after military raids had driven thousands of monks
to flee.

In towns across Myanmar, monks have traditionally filed down streets at
dawn seeking alms, and laypeople have gained merit by donating rice and
other food. Families take pride in what is often seen as adopting monks,
providing them with food, clothing, books and other goods for a few months
or years.

As poverty has worsened in Myanmar, however, the alms processions have
increasingly turned into a sad exchange of apologies for having to beg and
for being unable to give. Now, with the monks scattered, the alms lines
have dwindled in big cities like Yangon and Mandalay.

For centuries, whoever seized power in this country sought legitimacy by
lavishing money on pagodas and monasteries. When the democracy leader Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi called for a “second struggle for national independence”
in 1988, she chose Yangon’s gold-spired Shwedagon Pagoda as the site to
deliver her watershed speech. So when monks marched in September to the
home where she is under house arrest, the act was a moral reproof to the
government.

But the monks are not immune to criticism. Although senior clerics are
elected by monks and revered by laypeople, “they form a small, closed
society which doesn’t know anything about the community at large,” the
magazine editor said. “Some of them do not know how poor people live in a
small village.”

Other laypeople defended the aging clerics who have taken gifts from the
government. Those monks, they said, are under a moral obligation to accept
donations, and fear that confrontation could cost more lives.

Still, witnesses said piles of rice donated by the government were left
uncollected at the gates of some monasteries, a rebuff of the government’s
effort to placate the clergy.

In mid-October at Mahagandhayon, the monks were going about their daily
routine. The senior monk said he hoped that the rest of the students would
return in a month or so. One young monk who had remained said, “Please go
out and tell the world exactly what really has happened in this country.”

He added, “I am scared just talking to you about this.”