Buddhist Monks, Metta and the Myanmar Cyclone

Buddhist Kindness Meets Cyclones and Dictators

What Myanmar needs now is metta, sweet metta, to make a Buddhist paraphrase of Burt Bacharach's song. But Myanmar gets a cyclone instead. Metta, or the loving kindness taught by the Buddha and put into practice by his monks, is an action not a belief. The junta, the generals who run Myanmar (as they renamed what used to be Burma), for all their talk of being good Buddhists, are deny metta even as they deny assistance from other countries.

As a result of the cyclone, more than sixty thousand people were dead and missing, with more than a million left homeless, in a country with a population of fewer than fifty million. If a similar cyclone hit the United States, with more than 300 million people, we would be looking at over six million homeless.

In September 2007, Buddhist monks showed that metta faces, even stares down, evil. Monks kept on praying, of course, but like the preachers in the civil rights movement in the United States, they went into the streets, not only loving peace but also making peace, despite the pressures of the repressive military dictatorship. It is not the first time that the monks of Myanmar or Burma have taken a key role in politics, no matter how dangerous that role may be.

Buddhist monks were significant in the resistance to British colonial rule. In 1919, for instance, there was a riot when a group of monks tried to throw a group of British sightseers out of a Buddhist temple, after the Britons refused to remove their shoes. (This was an ongoing issue throughout the British period.) One of the monks was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempted murder. Another monk was imprisoned for telling the British governor to go home.

Such heroic resistance by Buddhist monks made their religion an important part of the independence movement. To this very day, Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar is a realtiy, with the generals exploiting a self-proclaimed devotion to Buddhist ideals, as they beat, imprison, and even kill monks and, most recently, let the people starve rather than open up the country for foreign aid.