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.