The Only Yogi in Paradise

Thanksgiving was my 280^th day in Myanmar, 120 spent in retreat. This was unexpected—I knew I would do a one-month retreat at the very beginning of my time here, and I was hoping to do a longer retreat at the end, but in-between I thought I’d be teaching and editing and vagabonding.

Turns out I’ve developed a wicked attachment to meditation. Yesterday I had a strong sense of sadness that I’m going to have to give up the retreat lifestyle in a couple of months. I’m envious of my friend Paul from Australia, who had the resources to semi-retire and spend close to a year in retreat. The same goes for my bhikkhuni buddy Sandra from Mexico, who just left the Kalaw Shwe Oo Min (SOM) Center after spending seven months here looking at her mind.  

This is them:

 

And as long as I’m posting photos, here’s one of me:

Jon at 60. Linn (a student of mine at Inle Lake) at 30. Tell the difference?

Of course, envy and attachment to meditation are both foolish in light of the Buddhist principle that you can label all of your unwholesome thoughts as attachment, aversion, or delusion. There is no fourth category. It’s one of several principles I’ve spent time testing in retreat, and I’ve found it to be true: everything comes down to lobha, dosa or moha (the Pali names for those three mind states). Therefore, it’s comical to develop an attachment to a process that’s supposed to teach me how to recognize and work with and avoid the pitfalls of attachment. I’m not the first to occupy this space.

I’ll have plenty of time to contemplate attachment on this current retreat. Sandra left yesterday, making me the only yogi at SOM Kalaw. I see four other people daily: Koto, a 20-year-old college student with surprisingly good English for someone who’s never been out of Myanmar; Go-An, a 17-year-old kid who drives me nuts doing the exact same things I did as a 17-year-old (loud radio, playing the same song over and over again, smoking reefer, and generally acting like he’s the center of the universe); KeKe, a 19-year-old who has recently fallen in love, and who just got caught making long-distance calls to her sweetie using the center’s telephone—a major SOM scandal; and Maposo, a large, strong, 50-ish Shan woman with seven children who, through her cooking skills, is giving me the greatest gift of all: exquisitely normal bowel movements.

(I regularly deal with two other mammals: Maxim, a four-month-old chocolate Labrador who defecates wherever he damn well pleases, thank you; and eight-year-old Nicky, one of the foulest-smelling German Shepherds I’ve ever met. Nicky has taken a shine to me, and shows it by rubbing up against me at every opportunity.)

Kalaw is 4,000 feet above sea level, and it’s surrounded by mountains that go up another 2,000 feet. There are multiple benefits to the terrain. This is the “cool season” in Myanmar, but at SOM Yangon the daily temperature can still hit the high 80s/low 90s with high humidity. Here at SOM Kalaw in early December I wake up to the 40s, wear a ski cap and thick sweater during my 5 a.m. sit in the meditation hall, and then slowly peel off layers as the temperature slides up into the 70s.

Next benefit: the view from a bamboo kuti (a small building for visiting monks to sleep in).

This particular kuti overlooks a deep green valley filled with a mix of trees and farmland, and looks across a couple of small hills to two of the highest mountains in the area, both capped with their own monasteries and pagodas.

Meditation masters encourage their students to look at objects in the world as paramattha (“ultimate reality”). We’re not supposed to look at them as conceptual objects such as trees, two-story brick houses, or attractive men/women, but as they really are: colors and shapes, no more, no less. From the kuti the colors are bright blue, multiple hues of green, copper red (for the soil), gold (on the many stupas in view), and bright whites or dark greys, depending on the cloud cover. All with brief flashes of tropical mountain bird color.

The kuti is rarely occupied these days, and I’ve laid claim to its front porch now that Sandra has absconded. I sit there every afternoon for 2-3 hours, doing my meditation practice and occasionally marveling at all the lovely conceptual objects.

Another benefit of the elevation: if I leave the center, hang a right, and climb up a steep 100 yards, I start walking on a hard clay road that forks and forks and forks again as it meanders through the mountains. There’s lots of squatters in them there hills—landless Myanmar citizens who are clearing the land and moving in without permission. I have mixed feelings about them. Odds are that many of them or their elders were pushed off their legitimate farms by the military regime over the past 50 years, so I can understand their desire to take back what was taken away. But too many are cutting down all the trees and planting tea bushes and vegetable gardens on absurdly steep terrain, causing huge amounts of erosion. They’re going for the short-term gain, and no one’s around to stop them—or better yet, to help them do things the right way.

On one walk I met a Nepalese family tending their small vegetable garden—Daddy, his strikingly pretty 16-year-old daughter, and his 13-year-old son. All three were fluent in English. They turned out to be Jehovah’s Witnesses; it took less than five minutes for Daddy to take a stab at converting me. I managed to turn the conversation toward his son, who told me he liked to read. I innocently asked, “What’s your favorite book?” Daddy interceded, and in an icy, no-nonsense voice said, “The Bible. He doesn’t need any other book.”

I’ve seen them a couple of other times on my walks. They live in a shack with pirated electricity and no running water about a half-mile from SOM. No evidence of a mother. The kids do not go to school. I hope the daughter is safe.

So I’m the only yogi in paradise, and I will probably be the only one until mid-January, when U Tejaniya (the SOM Yangon Sayadaw) may bring a busload of yogis for a short visit. I must depend on my dhamma books and a computer full of dhamma files and films to serve as my teachers for the next six weeks, since the resident SOM Kalaw monk (a Vietnamese-born American citizen) has been called back to California to take care of his 85-year-old teacher. The interim caretaker, a Canadian monk who turned out to be a wonderful meditation instructor, had to go back to his monastery in Myanmar’s Mon state last month.

For now, it’s just me and my hard disk.

A Nadir in the Foot Achin’ Blog

I can’t help it, it’s been almost three months since the last entry, and I’m starting a new retreat this afternoon. Not enough time to write a real blog entry describing what’s gone down since May, so it comes down to this: bullet points.

* I spent just under a week in Pyin Oo Lwin living the fat expat life of good restaurants, a cheap guest house with a big garden, and reliable wi-fi at a café around the corner.

* I met a young Aussie whose country count is in the 110-120 range, and he’s only in his 30s. He visited all of those places working for some NGOs and during NGO vacation time on six continents.

* We shared a taxi from Pyin Oo Lwin to Mandalay and spent a couple of days seeing the sights. I had very little interest in Mandalay from what I had heard and read, I couldn’t figure out the attraction. We avoided the main palace and the most heavily promoted pagodas, and instead visited a couple of beautiful teak meditation halls in outlying neighborhoods. We climbed Mandalay Hill, saw the Mustache Brothers’ political humor act, ate a few memorable meals on the street and a couple of forgettable ones in restaurants, and had a good time. Now my impression of Mandalay is that it is much more laid back than Yangon—and maybe a lot more fun, but I didn’t get much below the surface.

* He went his way to Colombia via Miami, I took the overnight bus from Mandalay to Nyaung Shwe, where I’d been invited to teach English for a while. I thought the classes were supposed to start the second week of June. Turns out I was almost 3 weeks early. It was the first of many instances where there was a large gap between what I was told and what the situation was.

* I got sick for the first time while I was waiting for the teaching program to begin. It was a combination of some kind of stomach flu/virus/bacteria and bronchitis. Four days in bed, three days afterwards toward full recovery. I wanted my next reincarnation immediately. I discovered the SAN Pharmacy on the main road in Nyaung Shwe. Drugs, drugs, and more drugs, many of them requiring prescriptions in the States but over-the-counter here. The woman who runs it may have a degree in pharmacy, most likely not, but she sure knows her drugs. Over the 10 weeks I spent in Nyaung Shwe she prescribed the right drug for me three times. I bought an asthma inhaler for my lungs for about $3.50 US. In Seattle I paid $24 for the last one I had, back in 2000.

* I recovered in time for some more surprises regarding the teaching program. Originally said to last for 1 month (4 weeks), it got expanded to 7 weeks. Instead of 40-50 students for 4 teachers and 2 teacher aides, it was 90 students. I had 19 all to myself, so did one other teacher; the two lower-level classes had 1 teacher and 1 aide each. It sure makes a big difference when you’re responsible for 19 students all by your lonesome.

* I got sick for the second time at the end of week 1 of teaching. This was the Big One—a stomach bacterial thing that caused me to lose 10 pounds really fast. My fellow teachers told me later that I was really scary to look at, gaunt, drawn, pale. For the better part of two weeks all I did was teach, prep for the next day of teaching, have diarrhea, and sleep. I finally went to the doctor and got a couple of killer anti-bacterials; it took me another few days to be able to keep something in my gastrointestinal tract for longer than a few hours.

* Fortunately, I had no editing assignments while I was dealing with the Big One. In hindsight it is the main regret of my Nyaung Shwe experience: when I had zero editing assignments I was too sick to go hiking in the nearby mountains, or to build relationships with monks at two nearby monasteries. Once I recovered, my editing clients sent lots of projects, motivated by an email I sent to them letting them know my plans for another long retreat in August/September.

* Weeks 3 through 6 were kind of a blur because of all the work I had to do for teaching and editing. Originally the plan was to have two teaching hours a day.  That changed to two teaching hours plus a third hour that was vaguely labeled a “conversation” hour. Conversations between 1 teacher and 19 students tend to turn into monologues pretty quickly, so the third hour morphed into another instructional hour. That meant prepping for 3 hours of class time 5 days/week. For someone who hadn’t taught in 15 years, that was a lot of prep. For the other teachers, all of them with public school backgrounds but no ESL experience, it was also a lot of prep.

* On my 60^th birthday we took a trip to Kakku to see the 2,478 stupas there. It is a special place, one that has real presence in terms of Buddha dharma. 

* I got sick for the third time at the end of week six. This time it was a garden-variety cold, the kind that all teachers get while facing classrooms full of coughers and sneezers for 3 hours a day. This one only lasted 4-5 days. I only had to spend one day in bed, and the woman at the SAN Pharmacy once again came through with flying colors, recommending a medicine I’d never heard of before but worked really well.

* It’s been a long time since I taught and lived in China and Taiwan, so I had forgotten about the tradition in Asian countries that when you have a guest teacher for a period of time, and when that teacher is getting ready to leave, everyone wants to take him out to lunch or dinner, or invite her to their homes for lunch or dinner, and give gifts in appreciation. So much kindness! So many invitations! So many gifts! I’d forgotten how exhausting it can be to say goodbye in Asia. Thankfully, as I’ve mentioned before, I am taking a year off from drinking alcohol. If I drank all of the glasses of wine and beer that were offered to me during the last week of teaching, I may not have survived as well as I did.

* Now I am back in Kalaw, tying up loose ends with my editing clients and buying a few things for my retreat—a straw mat to do yoga, a couple of bags of cookies to satisfy illicit cravings while I’m eating only two meals a day, toothpaste. My wish: to regain the momentum that I lost because of the health problems and long hours teaching and prepping that got in the way of a steady practice in Nyaung Shwe. At least that’s my excuse.

* I know I will be in retreat for at least two weeks, and I hope to do four full weeks if possible. After that, I’ll rent a room somewhere and work on editing. I’ll be sure to take the time to write some real blog entries then. These bullet points will have to do for now.

E - I - E - I - O

I’ve been asked this question three times by travelers who are not meditators.

“Something I don’t get about this Buddha thing—why so many? I mean, you go into a cave and there are thousands of Buddhas. And you go to Shwedagon Pagoda and there’s another couple of hundred. How come?”

Short answer: merit toward eventual liberation, or receiving some kind of blessing from Buddha. Longer answer: donating a Buddha statue is viewed as a way to get merit without spending the required time looking at your mind and seeing why it does what it does when it does. As I'm sure Buddha would have preferred rather than have his followers buy more Buddha statues.

Last Wednesday was the end of my fourth full month in Myanmar, and I’ll take a wild guess at the number of images of Buddha that I’ve seen, either painted or sculpted, during that time: over 10,000. That includes all of the small images of Buddha painted on the walls of temples built 800-900 years ago.

Someone had to pay for all of those statues and paintings. Understanding that gives you a peek into the ways that things have always been done in Myanmar.

Until the late 19^th and 20^th centuries, there was a very clear-cut distinction between monks and lay people. If you were truly interested in meditation and liberation, you had to become a monk, since there was no other way to get instruction in vipassana, shamatha, or any other meditation practice, or to get support for your personal efforts toward nibbana.

(An interesting aside: I am told that interest in meditation as a central Buddhist principle has ebbed and flowed over the centuries, at least in the Theravada tradition. There have been long periods when meditation was not really required of monks, interspersed with periods when meditation was emphasized as central to liberation and the monastic life.)

Sometime during the past 100 or so years a number of meditation masters, countable on the digits of any one of your four limbs, decided that lay practitioners could meditate, and in fact should be encouraged to meditate regardless of their earthly responsibilities. That was a radical idea at the time.

Prior to that shift, you had your meditators in robes, and everyone else wanting opportunities to receive some kind of blessing or merit. Today you can still see simple acts of kindness that have long been considered the most direct way to receive merit: feeding a monk or nun. Here’s a case in point, just outside the main gate of the Yangon Shwe Oo Min Meditation Center:

Historically, kings have occupied the other end of the spectrum. Every king in Myanmar history has been obligated to commission the construction of stupas and temples—the bigger, the grander, the better—and to support (and to receive political support from) the sangha of ordained monks. The most powerful kings (in many cases meaning those who were the most violent and successful in killing sentient beings during military conquests) built some of the greatest temples.

Quantity has been emphasized at certain times in Myanmar history. Thus, you have Bagan, where kings paid for the construction of over 4,000 temples and stupas between the 11^th and 13^th centuries. The ones made of wood are gone. The brick ones are in various states of disrepair, and the current government is collecting money from a broad range of international donors to rebuild them. In many cases the motivation for sponsoring the rebuilding of a temple or stupa in the 21^st century is exactly the same as the motivation for building them in the 11^th century: to earn merit.

Then you have a place like Kakku, which I hope to visit sometime next week. Here I can give you a precise count: there are 2,478 stupas at Kakku. A local legend states that the great King Ashoka of India started the “stupa garden” in the third century BC. If you have a few minutes, search for images online.

Then you’ve got your caves overflowing with Buddha images. Spelunkers are out of luck in Myanmar if they’re looking for empty caves to explore—where there’s a cave, there are dozens or hundreds or thousands of Buddha statues inside. Each statue was given by a donor looking for merit. The donors of older statues are long-dead and long-forgotten. But today’s donors will be long-remembered (at least for a couple of centuries) because they paid the sculptors to carve their names and the dates of their donations on the bases of the statues. All in the name of merit.

Arguably the most famous cave is the Shwe Oo Min cave in Pindaya—that’s right, the same Shwe Oo Min who was the teacher of my Sayadaw in Yangon. I haven’t been to Pindaya yet, it’s on my list. But I have been to a separate Shwe Oo Min cave in Kalaw, where I did my second retreat. Some pics:

The most sensual Buddha I've seen to date rests in the Kalaw cave:

My first day in Kalaw I went searching for the Shwe Oo Min Meditation Center, and that’s when I found out that many monasteries, meditation centers, and caves all over the country are named after that teacher. I did not find the center that day, but I did find a Shwe Oo Min monastery that did not welcome foreign yogis, and just down the road from that monastery I found the Kalaw version of the Shwe Oo Min caves, with this admonition before entering:

Because my mind is what it is, within minutes of entering the cave I was inspired to sing:

Old Shwe Oo Min had a cave,

E-I-E-I-O.

And in that cave he had some Buddhas,

E-I-E-I-O.

With a Buddha Buddha here, and a Buddha Buddha there,

Here a Buddha, there a Buddha, everywhere a Buddha Buddha.

Old Shwe Oo Min had a cave,

E-I-E-I-O.

(Every-bo-dy sing:)

Old Shwe Oo Min had a cave . . .

As they say in the meditation biz, everyone has their causes and conditions, and understanding them is a big step toward liberation. I am happy to be your cause and condition should you ever visit these caves and feel like breaking out in song.

Here’s a 20-year-old photo of Shwe Oo Min (center) with Sayadaw U Tejaniya, my Yangon Sayadaw, on the left and up one step. It hangs on the wall of the main meditation hall of the retreat center in Kalaw.

And one last photo: your humble blogger with my Kalaw Sayadaw (a remarkable Vietnamese monk named U Huai) and fellow yogis: from left-to-right, a Mexican, an Aussie, a Czech, and a Yank. Missing from the photo: the fifth member of our international yogi quintet, a Burmese with excellent English and an amazing knowledge of dhamma. For almost two weeks it was just the five of us, doing our daily practice, having some intense dhamma discussions during mealtimes and in our dormitory, and spending an hour with U Huai every evening at 6, peppering him with all kinds of questions about meditation and Buddhism. A wonderful experience. U Huai is 67. The pic was taken on a hike in the mountains behind the retreat center. Guess which one shops at REI.

I am very fortunate!

Duality

I recently left a town where young men with too much time on their hands and who have been listening to messages of hate from a human in monk’s clothing went on a rampage against their Muslim neighbors, burning down their house of worship and an orphanage. That bears repeating: a mob of young Buddhists burned an orphanage to the ground because it’s orphans were Muslim.

On the following afternoon I stood in front of my hotel and watched at least 100 small motorcycles go screaming by, sounding like massively oversized gnats. Each and every  motorcycle had a driver and a passenger holding at least one weapon—a stick, an iron pipe or piece of rebar, or a large knife. Most passengers held extra weapons for their drivers.

Here’s an image forever burned in my memory: the riders on four or five motorcycles, and in a couple of cases both the drivers and riders, stood out because of the color of their clothes. In Myanmar, monks’ robes are often described as saffron, sometimes maroon. Monks can’t help but stand out wherever they go, but that is especially true in a sea of t-shirted and blue-jeaned motorcyclists, double-especially when they are carrying clubs, pipes, and knives just like their lay comrades, looking for Muslim businesses to attack or individual Muslims to exact revenge.

It’s important that I take a detour here to make sure that this image is interpreted as precisely as possible. Myanmar monasteries are filled with young monks who are there for one of two reasons: it is a traditional practice here for all young men to have their heads shaved and to wear robes for a week, occasionally longer. Think bar mitzvah or confirmation. The second reason is that their families cannot afford to educate them, or in extreme cases, educate and feed them. So they essentially give their sons to monasteries that have the resources to do both.

In other words, Myanmar is filled with young monks who are not in monasteries for the free dharma lessons. Many of them regularly sneak out to shoot pool, watch soccer on TV, hang out at betel nut stands with their home boys, and do what teens and early 20-somethings can be seen doing all over the world: wasting time. In their undeveloped brains, grabbing a weapon and using it to beat someone from another faith while wearing monk’s robes makes sense, the Buddha’s teachings on compassion be damned.

They are not by any means the majority of monks in the Sangha (the official name of the national organization of monks in Myanmar), but they are part of a growing Buddhist nationalist movement within the Sangha that is very worrisome.

The events in Lashio and the images and sounds I heard were powerful enough that three days later, back in Pyin Oo Lwin, I heard the sound of a large number of motorcycles approaching, and I reacted with fear—a new mind circuit being triggered. It turned out that those motorcyclists were part of a very large funeral procession for someone who must have been truly revered. Later that same day I was working on editing in my hotel room when I heard the voices of a large number of males in the distance, chanting in an organized way. Again, a fight-or-flight reaction automatically arose. This time it turned out to be a large group of soldiers—200-300 in orderly columns—out doing their jogging for the day. No guns, no helmets, just soldiers from the local military academy doing their daily running in my neighborhood.

I went back to my room, looked around, and realized how fat my situation was. My hotel had a large double bed, a TV with cable for watching anything I wanted, as long as it was in Chinese or Burmese (plus BBC), and a shower with hot water on demand (unusual in cheaper guest houses). Every morning I ate my free breakfast in a large manicured garden. All for $15/night. When I needed wi-fi, all I had to do was walk five minutes to a little restaurant run by two sisters-in-law, one of whom spoke fluent English and loved to laugh at the same things I do.

The following morning I decided to walk a bit farther—20 minutes or so—for my breakfast and wi-fi hit. I had a bowl of mohinga (fish stew) and a freshly brewed cup of coffee made from local beans on the porch of a restaurant next to a large nursery filled with flowering plants. Breakfast cost $1.50; I added a 33% tip. The restaurant is a modern, open-air building less than two years’ old. It serves lemon squares.

I giggled.

Lashio (where the riots were) and Pyin Oo Lwin (home of the $15 hotel) are at the two ends of the Myanmar spectrum. It takes almost no effort to do the country’s soft side and to keep one’s head in the sand. It took me longer than I want to admit to understand how I had fallen into the media trap of good-versus-evil in Myanmar. Myanmar has a middle class, one that did not drop out of the sky, fully formed, after the 2010 elections.

The Lashio experience was great in one respect because it confirmed some ideas I had in my head before I got on the plane in Seattle in late February. I told you that I had attended 10 weekly lectures on Myanmar sponsored by the Seattle Art Museum/Gardner Center for Asian Art last September through December. And being who I am, I also read a big bag ‘o  books on Myanmar before my departure, mostly recent histories and political stuff.

The last book I read was Nowhere to Be Home, a collection of stories of people who were persecuted in one form or another by the military regime, funded/published by Dave Eggers’ publishing company. Some of the storytellers were forced into prostitution. One was forced to walk in front of a line of Burmese soldiers looking for insurgents, acting as a human mine sweeper. Others did hard time in prison for political speech and organizing.

If I remember right, the book had 28 such stories, and at the end of each one I would say, “OK, that’s enough, no more, I got the idea, I don’t need the depression.” Then I’d start reading the next.

These are the reasons why I look at each and every person over the age of 30 or 40 and think, “What’s your story?” For elderly people I simply assume that their lives have been insanely difficult. That doesn’t have to mean suffering from political repression or violence at the hands of the tatmadaw (the name of the military regime that has controlled Myanmar for most of its post-World War II history). But every once in a while I’ll meet a cab driver who spent six months in prison for voicing support for the National League for Democracy (Aung San Suu Kyi’s party), or a local businessman who spent five years in the slammer for the same reason before becoming a successful money-maker.

Other times I’ve met elderly men who are more interested in boasting how they fathered 13 children than in describing any of the other hardships that they suffered (let alone what their wives suffered).  

I have had many more opportunities to interact with young men and adolescent boys like the ones who burned down the mosque and orphanage in Lashio. Similar to my own adolescent cluelessness about the suffering that my parents went through during the Great Depression and World War II, those kids either don’t know about the suffering of earlier generations, or know but don’t understand it with any depth, or are too busy with their normal teenage stuff to ponder it. I’ve wracked my brain trying to avoid this cliché, but what I see is great potential for a “lost generation” in Myanmar, a large chunk of adolescents without jobs, without schooling, and open to messages of hate against a group that I’m told constitutes 4% of the country’s population. 

Back to Pyin Oo Lwin. If you walk 15 minutes beyond the restaurant where I ate the $1.50 breakfast while I checked my email, you’ll enter the grounds of the National Botanical Garden, an exceptionally pleasant place. It has a walk-through aviary, an orchid garden, and a butterfly museum. If you walk back toward my $15 hotel you’ll go past the Feel Restaurant, which sits on a lake surrounded by houses owned by the Burmese 1% (maybe 10%).

Less than 10 minutes from my hotel is another restaurant called The Clubhouse that has a large porch overlooking a well-tended garden. The main part of that restaurant is in a house that was built by the Brits in the 1920s, when they owned Burma.

It is possible to stay and eat in these kinds of places and never have to confront the idea of anti-Muslim riots. For foreign visitors like myself, who may not be very high on the economic ladder in America but who are incredibly rich compared to the average Burmese, this is a magic time for visiting Myanmar. For no other reason than I am a white Euro-American visitor, I am given deference. I eat in really nice restaurants with beautiful interiors and spend $6 or $7, espresso included. People smile at me all the time. They are happy to know that I like their fish stew.

I’m experienced enough to know that it’s all an illusion, and I’m not talking Buddhist cosmology here, though it helps. I'm taking full advantage of the situation in-between my excursions into the gritty side of Myanmar, while keeping in mind the dual reasons for my visit: meditation and giving something back.

A Mosque Burns in Lashio

If you have time, please read the preceding post first as a set-up for this one.

A couple of hours after I finished writing the last entry, I went for an evening stroll around the edge of the downtown core of Lashio. I came upon some kind of demonstration, with maybe 100 males in their teens and early 20s trying to break down an iron gate to some kind of compound. The number kept growing as messages were passed on by cell phones, and as friends arrived via their 90 cc motorcycles. My cluelessness as to the reason why was made bigger by the appearance of a dozen or so Buddhist monks on the inside of the compound. It didn’t look like a monastery to me, but it’s impossible to miss those saffron robes.

I was in total blackout as to what was going on. There was no one around me who spoke enough English to give me the lowdown. No Live Reporting from Action Central News When You Really Need It. But not having those cues let me look at the situation from a very stripped-down perspective. For the past two days wandering around Lashio I’ve seen countless young men either hanging out at tea shops, hanging out on their motorcycles, or hanging out in their three-wheeled taxis waiting for a fare to show up. A lot of young men with too much time on their hands. A lot of young men listening to messages of anti-Muslim hatred spoken by a renegade Buddhist monk in Mandalay. So last night I saw a lot of frustrated, angry young males waving their fists in the air, calling their friends to tell them “Get down here, there’s something happening,” and pushing against the iron gate. (I went and looked the next morning, and they never succeeded.)

My sense that something bad was about to happen was strong enough that I started moving in the general direction of my hotel, taking the long way. I walked down three streets that are normally filled from sidewalk to sidewalk with portable stalls with people selling stuff. There are three streets in Lashio that have three markets depending on the time of day. The morning fruit and vegetable market starts at 4:30 a.m., and if there’s one of the regular electricity blackouts at that time, the farmers and merchants sell their produce by candlelight. That market shuts down at 7 am, and two hours later the daytimers take over the same streets, selling a mix of produce, cooked food, and some non-edibles like toys. They leave around 5 pm to make space for the mostly clothing night market, which stays open until 10 or 11.

But tonight they knew something I didn’t, or they heard rumors I hadn’t, and as I was walking along two of those three streets all I saw were merchants working as fast as possible to pack their goods in boxes, tear down their stalls, and get out of Dodge. The storefront businesses behind the vendors, which are usually filled with customers during the evening hours, were already shuttered at 6:30.

For the next hour I watched a parade of older residents moving away from downtown. Cars that were normally parked on the street were gone. Almost all lights inside and outside the buildings surrounding my hotel were shut off. But there was not a single cop to be seen, which has been the SOP for several riots in Myanmar cities since mid-March. I will send three stories about those riots as attachments, and suggest that you read at least the first one.

Chances are you haven’t heard about those anti-Muslim riots, starting in a town outside of Mandalay and moving south toward Yangon. All kinds of strange details. Two Muslims accused of starting the fight that lead to the death of a Buddhist monk in one city were sentenced to 13 years in prison; they did not do the actual killing. Not a single Buddhist, lay person or monk, was arrested for burning down 30 Muslim houses and setting fire to a madrassa, killing 25 students inside. I’ve read multiple reports of cops standing along the sidelines, not doing anything to stop the violence at any of the riots. There were curfews in Yangon’s Muslim sector as rumors flew about potential attacks by local Buddhists. But as I said, in Lashio the young men I witnessed were trying to knock down an iron gate with monks on the other side, so at first the Muslim thing didn’t completely fit.

It turns out that it was all about the Muslim thing, and within two hours the main mosque, located three blocks from my hotel, was in flames. After the mob set fire to the mosque, it started roaming the streets looking for businesses “owned by Islamists,” as a fellow hotel resident, a Burmese, described it. As far as mobs go, the only one I saw was pretty small—50 young men max breaking into and destroying a digital photo processing shop two storefronts down from my hotel, where I was essentially sequestered. I couldn’t see anything from any window. But I heard the sounds of big, blunt objects striking folding metal doors, glass shattering, equipment being smashed, and cheers from the crowd over their mighty, mighty victory against the forces of Islam.

I saw a couple of isolated pickup trucks filled with either cops or soldiers during the evening, but no flashing lights and no sirens. Then I heard an announcement over a PA system that someone translated for me as signifying a curfew from 7 pm to 5 am. At 5:30 a.m. I left my hotel with my iPod camera, hoping to get just one shot of the mosque. I went down several side streets that I’d become familiar with over the preceding three days, trying my best to not look like a white Euro-American. I think it was my bald head that gave me away, I should’ve worn a hat. I might have gotten some shots had I left at exactly 5 a.m., but by 5:45 soldiers and cops were setting up barriers so that even local people couldn’t get near the mosque.

So, some unexpected excitement on my journey. I’m a semi-eyewitness to a disturbing trend in Myanmar: anti-Muslim riots. Again, I encourage you to read the first story I am sending, from an “alternative” Burmese news source operating out of Chiang Mai, Thailand. But if you’re pressed for time, I’ll just mention one aspect of this multi-faceted story: some Burmese believe that the riots have been purposefully set up and promoted by the uppermost echelon of the military, which does not like the “nominally civilian” government of the current president, Thein Sein. They are hoping that the riots do spread to Yangon, which would give them sufficient reason to enact a coup and regain power at the top.

I’m in no position to support/refute such an argument, and I'm reluctant to comment because I'm still the new kid on the block. But this is not 1962, when the last coup happened. My understanding is that the civilian government at that time was so corrupt and incompetent that many Burmese welcomed the shift to a military regime, although the socialist dictatorship that eventually emerged was a complete disaster. Times are very different.