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The Problematic Monks of the Mango Grove: Secular? Buddhist? Modern?

Sat, April 2, 5:15 to 7:15pm, Washington State Convention Center, Floor: 2nd Floor, Room 213

Abstract

The current focus on Buddhist nationalism and anti-Muslim rhetoric in contemporary Myanmar emphasizes a concept of religion in which identity is exclusivist and deterministic, whereas, international discourse on religious freedom associates the secular with ideals of pluralism and cosmopolitan interaction. However, such discourses ignore the ways in which “religion” and “secular” are both local and historically contingent constructs, each with their own power to exclude those who defy their disciplinary logics. This paper investigates the history a unique monastic complex in urban Rangoon that came to be a place of particular cosmopolitan interaction throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. Thayettaw Kyaung Taik, originally founded in a quiet mango grove on the pre-colonial outskirts, was designated as the home for all Rangoon Buddhist monasteries displaced in the production of a regimented colonial city divided into homogenous ethnic quarters for Chinese, Indians and Europeans. But the diverse ethnic monasteries jumbled together in the complex soon defied colonial discipline and boundaries of Burmese identity. To the horror of respectable elites, this monastery complex not only housed worldly pursuits ranging from dramatic performances and early cinema to political protests, but it offered a home for interaction between migrants from around Burma as well as Europeans, Indians and Chinese. The marginal modes of “modern Buddhism” defined in practices of Thayettaw Kyaung Taik became a mechanism for mobility, interaction, and interconnection, offering distinct constructions of “religion” and “secular.”

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