Buddhist Monks, Metta and the Myanmar Cyclone

What Myanmar needs now is metta, sweet metta, to make a Buddhist paraphrase of Burt Bacharach's song. But Myanmar gets a cyclone instead. Metta, or the loving kindness taught by the Buddha and put into practice by his monks, is an action not a belief. The junta, the generals who run Myanmar (as they renamed what used to be Burma), for all their talk of being good Buddhists, are deny metta even as they deny assistance from other countries.

As a result of the cyclone, more than sixty thousand people were dead and missing, with more than a million left homeless, in a country with a population of fewer than fifty million. If a similar cyclone hit the United States, with more than 300 million people, we would be looking at over six million homeless.

In September 2007, Buddhist monks showed that metta faces, even stares down, evil. Monks kept on praying, of course, but like the preachers in the civil rights movement in the United States, they went into the streets, not only loving peace but also making peace, despite the pressures of the repressive military dictatorship. It is not the first time that the monks of Myanmar or Burma have taken a key role in politics, no matter how dangerous that role may be.

Buddhist monks were significant in the resistance to British colonial rule. In 1919, for instance, there was a riot when a group of monks tried to throw a group of British sightseers out of a Buddhist temple, after the Britons refused to remove their shoes. (This was an ongoing issue throughout the British period.) One of the monks was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder. Another monk was imprisoned for telling the British governor to go home.

Such heroic resistance by Buddhist monks made their religion an important part of the independence movement. To this very day, Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar is a realtiy, with the generals exploiting a self-proclaimed devotion to Buddhist ideals, as they beat, imprison, and even kill monks and, most recently, let the people starve rather than open up the country for foreign aid.

In their connections with the people, however, the sangha or order of Buddhist monks (second in size in Myanmar only to the military) sees the suffering, despair, and poverty that the generals ignore... and cause. In fact, in the dreary videos coming out of Myanmar, the robes of the ever-present monks are the only patches of bright color.

The generals have accused Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi of sacrilege for saying "any human being can become a Buddha in this life." For many in Myanmar, however, the generals who kneel in Buddhist temples are the real threat to the country's religion.

Buddhist Aung San Suu Kyi, like Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and Christan Martin Luther King, Jr., has added a spiritual dimension to her politics. As she has grown spiritually during her years of hardship, she has grown into leadership.

Like the people of Myanmar (or Burma), Aung San Suu Kyi is strengthened by metta, loving kindness, in the face of oppression and cyclones, that the Buddhist teaching might be realized in her own country, whatever its name: "When the ruler of a country is just and good, the ministers become just and good; when the ministers are just and good, the higher officials become just and good; when the higher officials are just and good, the rank and file become just and good; when the rank and file become just and good, the people become just and good."