CIA Archives: Buddhism in Burma - History, Politics and Culture

http://thefilmarchive.org/

Buddhism in Burma (also known as Myanmar) is predominantly of the Theravada tradition, practised by 89% of the country's population It is the most religious Buddhist country in terms of the proportion of monks in the population and proportion of income spent on religion. Adherents are most likely found among the dominant ethnic Bamar (or Burmans), Shan, Rakhine (Arakanese), Mon, Karen, and Chinese who are well integrated into Burmese society. Monks, collectively known as the Sangha, are venerated members of Burmese society. Among many ethnic groups in Myanmar, including the Bamar and Shan, Theravada Buddhism is practiced in conjunction with nat worship, which involves the placation of spirits who can intercede in worldly affairs.

With regard to "salvation" in the Buddhist sense, there are three primary paths in Burmese Buddhism: merit-making, vipassana (insight meditation), and the weizza path (an esoteric form of Buddhism that involves the occult). Merit-making is the most common path undertaken by Burmese Buddhists. This path involves the observance of the Five Precepts and accumulation of good merit through charity and good deeds (dana) in order to obtain a favorable rebirth. The vipassana path, which has gained ground since the early 1900s, is a form of insight meditation believed to lead to enlightenment. The third and least common route, the weizza path, is an esoteric system of occult practices (such as recitation of spells, samatha meditation, and alchemy) and believed to lead to life as a weizza (also spelt weikza), a semi-immortal and supernatural being who awaits the appearance of the future Buddha, Maitreya (Arimeitaya).

The history of Buddhism in Burma extends nearly a millennium. The Sasana Vamsa, written by Pinyasami in 1834, summarises much of the history of Buddhism in Burma. According to many historians, Sohn Uttar Sthavira (one of the royal monks) to Ashoka the Great came to Burma (Suvarnabhumi or Suvannabhumi) around 228 BC with other monks and sacred texts, including books.

The Ari Buddhism era included the worship of Bodhisattas and nagas, and also was known for corrupt monks. King Anawrahta of Bagan was converted by Shin Arahan, a monk from Thaton to Theravada Buddhism. In 1057 AD, Anawrahta sent an army to conquer the Mon city of Thaton in order to obtain theTipitaka Buddhist canon. Mon culture, from that point, came to be largely assimilated into the Bamar culture based in Bagan. Despite attempts at reform, certain features of Ari Buddhism and traditional nat worship continued, such as reverence of Avalokiteśvara (Lawka nat), a Boddhisatta. Successive kings of Bagan continued to build large numbers of monuments, temples, and pagodas in honour of Buddhism. Burmese rule at Bagan continued until the invasion of the Mongols in 1287.

The Shan, meanwhile, established themselves as rulers throughout the region now known as Burma. Thihathu, a Shan king, established rule in Bagan, by patronising and building many monasteries and pagodas. Bhikkus continued to be influential, particularly in Burmese literature and politics.

The Mon kingdoms, often ruled by Shan chieftains, fostered Theravada Buddhism in the 14th century. Wareru, who became king of Mottama (a Mon city kingdom), patronised Buddhism, and established a code of law (Dhammathat) compiled by Buddhist monks. King Dhammazedi, formerly a Mon monk, established rule in the late 15th century at Innwa and unified the Sangha in Mon territories. He also standardised ordination of monks set out in the Kalyani Inscriptions. Dhammazedi moved the capital back to Hanthawaddy (Bago). His mother-in-law Queen Shin Sawbu of Pegu was also a great patron of Buddhism. She is credited for expanding and gilding the Shwedagon Pagoda giving her own weight in gold.

The Bamar, who had fled to Taungoo before the invading Shan, established a kingdom there under the reigns of Tabinshwehti and Bayinnaung who conquered and unified most of modern Burma. These monarchs also embraced Mon culture and patronised Theravada Buddhism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_in_Burma

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[joeaung08]

ေနလိုလလိုက်က္သေရထြန္းေတာက္ခဲ့ေ­သာျမန္မာတို႔ရဲ႕ဂုဏ္ျမင့္မားလွပ­ခဲ့တဲ့အတိတ္ကာလမ်ားျဖစ္ပါေတာ့တယ­္။ အဲဒါေတြျပန္ၾကည့္ရရင္ ၀မ္းနည္းသလိုလို ဆုံးရႈံးသလိုလို ေနာင္တရသလိုခံစားရပါတယ္။ ကံဆိုးမိုးေမွာင္က်ေနေသာျမန္မာျ­ပည္သူမ်ား အတိတ္ေရႊေခတ္စိန္ေခတ္မ်ားလို ေမာ္ၾကြားေတာက္ပျမင့္ျမတ္ခြင့္ရ­ရပါလို၏ အရွင္ဘုရား။

[witmone1]

Really wonderful Interview with No.1 Politician in Burma. He led Burma to continue leading country in Asia from 1948 to 1962. (13 years - so long). That might paved way to General Ne Win's coup. I remembered, U Nu stepped down but few months later, U Nu returned power in 1957. I hope, U Than Shwe - not to appear again. (U Nu's biography book Saturday Son - Page 292). U Nu said, politic is brain work but his heart is too big :(

Agree - U Nu is least corruption but too religious.

[444719abcx]

Very good video.

[sometimesavailable]

What a simple interview that U Nu made sitting on the floor in a pavilion!

[topsquadcross]

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬❤SnapShot Boys▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ SIT BACK  ＡＮＤ ＥＮＪＯＹ ＴＨＥ MUSIC! ▬▬▬...BE BLESSED

[moonazin]

အဲဒီေခတ္က အဲေလာက္ေကာင္းခဲ့တာ အဂၤလိပ္လုပ္ခဲ့တဲ့ေက်းဇူးပါ။ ျမန္မာေတြအဲေလာက္လုပ္ဖို႔အရည္အခ­်င္းမ႐ွိတာကို အဂၤလိပ္ေခတ္မတိုင္မီနဲ႔ ေနာက္ပိုင္းေခတ္ေတြကိုေလ့လာၾကည္­့ရင္သိႏိုင္ပါတယ္။

[naingaungphyo]

I can't believe and feel sorry :( WTF who made Burma to the bad future!

[leothant1]

Really feel so sad and wanna be proud in front of neighbouring countries and abreast with world.

[rogerhein21]

Actually, If Ka Naung or General Aung San had never been killed in history, our country will be top in Asia.

Now We need to unite regardless of religion, color or ethnic background.

All Burmese Citizens must act for the best interests of our motherland.

[TheGhostOperative]

@perrymoorej how's that so?

[TheGhostOperative]

@witmone1 mixing politics and religion has never been a good idea. we need a leader who is willing to take on the role as a servant of the people, as well as the master, a leader who is willing to SACRIFICE regardless of his beliefs and principles, for the good of the people. that is the kind of leader we need, not some religious nut jobs, power drunken fools nor someone on high horse with holier than thou attitude. but no.....everyone wants the seat, n yet fails to do what is needed to be done.

[lightfdar]

I learned more from this vid about Buddhism than years of high school Religious Education

[perrymoorej]

And The Karen has been slaughtered. Once again, the CIA fails

[xxdonaldqxxx]

The last minute of the video they talk about capitalism. As they are talking about capitalism an advertisement pops up. Priceless !!!!!!!!!!!!

[blechke]

It's really kind of disturbing that the only way to see information that isn't biased or skewed in anyway or sometimes outright sensationalist garbage is to look at one of these old films. We need another edward r murrow.

[TheSanboo]

Of course there was freedom of religion in U Nu period, but regarding to the political if a non Buddhism is going to be the president why he/she should be changed to be Buddhism ? It that mean freedom of religion at all ?

[yourdailycydiafix]

so basically burma women had even more freedom than America in those days... hmm

[TWHAAAT]

This is it . I'm gona be in UN

[Myanmar9999]

@joeaung08 မွတ္ခ်က္ကုုိ ဖတ္ျပီး မ်က္ရည္ေတာင္ က်မိပါတယ္။ သန္းေပါင္းမ်ားစြာရဲ႕ ဘဝေတြဟာ အသုုံးမက်တဲ့ ေခါင္းေဆာင္တခ်ဳိ႕ေႀကာင့္ ေႀကပ်က္ခဲ့ရတာကုုိ ဘယ္လုုိ အစားျပန္ရႏုုိင္ပါ့မလဲ။ အားလုုံး အတိတ္ကုုိ သင္ပုုန္းေခ်ျပီး ေရွ႕ကုုိ ခရီးဆက္ႏုုိင္ႀကပါေစ။