What are Myanmar’s Buddhist Sunday schools
teaching?
by Matthew J Walton, East Asia Forum, 16 December
2014
Oxford, UK -- A Buddhist monk
sits in front of a classroom of children in a small town in rural
Myanmar. He chants lines which the students dutifully repeat, as
they do every week at these Buddhist ‘Sunday school’ classes. The
monk teaches Buddhist values, regales students with stories of the
Buddha’s previous lives, and talks about Myanmar’s history as a
Buddhist nation.
How should we interpret this
scene? Is it simply an innocent example of imparting religious
values to the next generation or another worrying indication of the
insidious spread of anti-Muslim nationalism in Myanmar?
Frustratingly, the answer might be both, which makes it difficult
to know how to respond or intervene. In periods of rapid transition
and modernisation, people develop an intensified concern regarding
the loss of their cultural identity and traditions. These anxieties
were present in colonial Burma in the first decades of the
twentieth century and galvanised the nationalist movement at the
time; they are also pervasive in contemporary Myanmar.
The outside world has focused almost exclusively
on the admittedly worrying anti-Muslim orientation of the Buddhist
nationalist movement in Myanmar, but another emerging aspect of
contemporary Buddhist practice in Myanmar demonstrates that the
relationship between religion and nationalism is complex and must
be analysed carefully. Since about 2010, different organisations
have been creating networks of Buddhist Sunday schools in an
attempt to instill Buddhist values in children, who, they are
worried, will not grow up with the same religious understanding or
devotion of previous generations.
The rapid expansion of these classes has seen
some organisations teaching tens of thousands of students in
hundreds of locations across the country. Where they are centrally
organised, the level of top-down control varies. MaBaTha (the
Organisation for the Protection of Race and Religion, that has been
promoting a series of discriminatory laws connected to religion)
merely sells a curriculum book and invites interested lay people to
develop their own classes. At the other end of the spectrum, a
group called the Dhamma School Foundation has a much greater level
of organisation, with a detailed teacher training curriculum, the
involvement of monks in teaching, and regular evaluations including
site visits. Nowhere do these classes supplant the public education
that children receive, but, as might be expected in a Buddhist
majority country, the line between the two is not always
clear.
Some might be concerned that these informal
schools will simply be vehicles to inculcate children in an
increasingly virulent anti-Muslim nationalism. But the curricula
for most are relatively innocuous, teaching exactly the kinds of
values one would want to promote among Buddhists in
Myanmar.
Does this mean we can champion these schools as
an effective response to religious conflict in the country?
Unfortunately, the answer is probably no, at least not until there
also develops an alternative understanding of the appropriate ways
to promote and protect Buddhism.
The dominant framework within which most
Buddhists in Myanmar at the moment are interpreting the notion of
protecting their religion is against the external threat of Islam.
Teaching materials themselves may not be problematic but when they
are used by monks who also spread misinformed rumours and negative
images of Muslims, the message children get is not that Buddhist
values should be promoted to make Myanmar a more peaceful country
but that Buddhist identity is under threat and must be secured
against an outside enemy. More worryingly, even when these classes
are not linked to explicit anti-Muslim rhetoric, students and
teachers are likely to interpret their lessons within the context
of the currently dominant narrative of Buddhism in Myanmar in
danger of being overwhelmed by Islam.
Well-intentioned but incautious outside voices
seeking to address Myanmar’s religious conflict have at times
exacerbated tensions. For example, the Time magazine article about
hardline Buddhist monk U Wirathu merely resulted in a circling of
the wagons. A critique of one monk’s reprehensible preaching was
interpreted as an attack on Buddhism writ large.
Buddhist Sunday Schools are part of a (in many
ways laudable) response by Burmese Buddhists to the anxieties they
are facing regarding the opening up of their country to outside
influences. Some even emphasise the kinds of inclusive and tolerant
practices that will be a necessary foundation of a religiously
plural Myanmar. Criticising or dismissing them as simply vehicles
for the spread of religious bigotry would be counterproductive,
alienating many Buddhists whose main engagement with a group like
MaBaTha might be in its pro-Buddhist guise rather than its
anti-Muslim orientation. But one aspect cannot be easily separated
from the other.
It will be necessary to clearly communicate to
Burmese Buddhists that, while their attempts to promote the best
values of their religion are admirable, unless the narrative that
posits Buddhism as under threat from Islam is altered, there is a
danger that their efforts could actually encourage an ignorant and
violent intolerance that is the very opposite of what the Buddha
taught.