Our Homeland and Our Sāsana: A Brief History of Burma’s Changing Buddhist Landscape

• In Event: 326. Mediating Contrasting Views of the World: Institutional Agents, Map-Making, and the Development of Geographical Thought in Burma

Abstract

The eighteenth century witnessed a fluorescence of historical writing in Burma, among which were prominently: royal chronicles (yazawin), Buddha biographies (bodawin), and histories of the Buddhist religion (thathanawin). This pronounced interest in historiography, which is traceable back to at least the fifteenth century, continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and in the case of thathanawins, into the twenty-first. It would be no overstatement to say that the continuous production of such works over the course of so many hundreds of years has played an important role in shaping Burmese notions of homeland, national identity and polity—all intimately associated with Buddhism. In this presentation, I will describe in broad strokes the depiction of Buddhist history as it evolved in a series of thathanawins composed during Burma’s last dynasty, the Konbaung (1752-1885), and continuing into the twentieth century. Any history of the Buddha’s religion, the sāsana, is also necessarily a history of where the sāsana went—where it was established, still flourishes or declined—and hence is as much a history of Buddhist spaces as it is of events. As part of my talk I will show how the Buddhist geography depicted in Konbaung-era thathanawins becomes modified over time in response to changing circumstances and agendas, and how, in the twentieth century, Burmese Buddhist chroniclers strategically responded to the ‘new’ Buddhist geography and history emerging from Orientalist and modern positivist scholarship which challenged the established Burmese historical narrative and the country’s placement in the Buddhist world.

Author

• Patrick Pranke, University of Louisville