Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Myanmar has some half million monks and a large population of nuns—at least 1 percent of the country is in holy orders, and many others have served in the past. Most boys spend a while as monks, then return to their families. Even a casual visitor will pick up a bit of Buddhist arcana. To wit, the six types of religious structure are the pagoda or stupa (or zedi), a solid structure that often contains a relic; the temple, a hollow, square building for worship; the cave, which serves as a meditation center for monks; the ordination hall; the monastery, where monks live; and the library, where the Buddha’s scriptures are kept. Most figural monuments of the Buddha are made with a base of brick, or occasionally limestone, and covered with plaster and lacquer. The standard policy is to fix the plaster and lacquer as they fade or chip, which results in Buddhas that look newly reupholstered, without any patina of age. The eleventh-century reclining Buddha at Thaton, recently restored, looked as if it had been fashioned on Tuesday by a pastry chef.

Wherever you go in Myanmar, you are in a former capital—a place where some ethnic group reigned for a while. Bagan was the capital from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries. That was the era when it became fashionable to build pagodas and temples, and noblemen competed with one another to construct the grandest and most splendid, while poorer people built more modest structures. The detritus of that spiritual one-upmanship is a twenty-six-square-mile plain festooned with 4,446 religious monuments. It’s impossible to understand this trove through photographs, because its power lies in its sweep. We walked among the pagodas; we drove among them; we climbed one of the temples to watch the sun set; we surveyed the whole gloriously littered landscape from a hot-air balloon. Even in person, it’s hard to compass the scale of Bagan’s Plain of Temples. It’s bigger than Manhattan, more than eight times the size of the estate of Versailles. Some of the buildings have been poorly restored by the junta, others are dilapidated but still coherent, and countless others lie in ruins. Whichever one you are looking at, you see a thousand more over its shoulder. If one feels exalted by the Golden Rock, one is humbled by Bagan, for both what it was and what it is.

Issues of faith are a constant conversation, and many secular experiences are filtered through Buddhism. San San Oo, a psychiatrist in Yangon whom I met through friends, had been told repeatedly that Burmese people healed themselves through Buddhism and didn’t need her ministrations. She tried to explain that therapy might help people brutalized under the regime to emerge from post-traumatic stress disorder, but they insisted they would transcend it only through religious practice. San San Oo uses hypnosis and had finally managed to build a practice by characterizing hypnosis as a means for someone else to raise you to a meditative state. She told me she felt certain that it had the same brain-wave profile. Her husband, the artist Aung Min, who had been a provocateur before the reforms, said, “The Buddhist way means that anger is bad; it upsets emotion and thinking, causing only negativity and destruction. But I was so angry. So I did four months of hypnosis, and my anger diminished. It’s just deep meditation.”

While Buddhism predominates and Islam follows behind, other faiths are also in evidence. There is a significant Christian population, and there are even a few Burmese Jews. Sammy Samuels is descended from Iraqi Jewish merchants who came to Yangon in the nineteenth century and set up business selling Burmese tea and rice to India. They established the city’s synagogue, a Jewish school, and a cemetery, and they married Buddhist women who converted to Judaism. By 1919, some three thousand Jews were in Myanmar. After 1969, most of the community migrated to Israel or the United States, but not the Samuelses. Every day, Sammy’s father goes to the synagogue to greet visitors from abroad; the minister for religions attended an interfaith service there. Burmese independence came the same year as the establishment of the state of Israel, creating an unlikely connection. The Burmese prime minister was the first head of state to visit Jerusalem after independence. Moshe Dayan and David Ben-Gurion have visited the Yangon synagogue. Even under the junta, Myanmar sent students to learn agriculture in Israel. Now the Jews find themselves championing the cause of the Muslims because both are beleaguered minorities uneasily united against Buddhist fundamentalism. Aye Lwin said, “We always were brothers, Muslim and Jews here.”