Chapter 7. Mental Culture and Freedom. From the book `Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics: Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy' by Gustaaf Houtman.

I have related the Myanmafication project to a quote by one of the regime's journalists, namely that ‘Myanmar resembled a house that tumbled down. The Tatmadaw had to pick up the pieces and build a new one.’[1] However, there is much evidence that, given their Buddhist tradition, many people in Burma have no desire to live in this house.

In Part I, I described Myanmafication as a response by the military to Aung San Suu Kyi's effective challenge and as a compensation for the loss of Aung San to the opposition. It is a political programme to use impersonal means – culture, language, race and Buddhism – to attain to national unity by hegemonizing all diverse peoples in Burma into a singular Myanmar civilization and thereby uproot all opposition for once and all. The neutralizing element of the Sangha is gone, and its place has been taken by the army. Myanmafication in itself is thus a counter-culture; it is a military response to the challenge posed by the opposition, and in particular Aung San Suu Kyi.[3] The army and culture have both proved instruments that work well together since these do not permit rational argument surrounding their objectives. Both are presented at the core of Myanmarness – both are presented as defences against foreign colonialists.

As we have also seen, however, the paradox is that both are propped up by foreign money. I have suggested that foreign support, and in particular Japanese support, for the Myanmafication project replicates the Japanese support Aung San and his comrades received during the national independence struggle. Also, within these ideas of culture there is a vast difference between the Pondaung archaeology scouts who are ordered into the field to find the earliest Myanmar being, and the regime's cultural advisors who advocate a more spiritual approach to culture. In this chapter I wish to more clearly delineate how these different ideas of culture live side by side and whether there is any overlap between them. Furthermore, how does the democracy movement position itself in relation to culture?

Pagoda culture or mental culture?

Steinberg suggested that Aung San Suu Kyi, because of her confinement and because of the general conditions of censorship, is not able to reach the common people. He recommends she should begin to participate in the platform of ‘Burmese culture’ by addressing the common Burmese people. He believes she should participate in the grand project of building her own kinds of housing for the Buddha's relics in the manner of King Manuha, who was captured and imprisoned by Anawratha.

Steinberg proceeds to suggest that Aung San Suu Kyi should follow royalty of the distant past, as did her predecessors U Nu and Ne Win, and build herself a pagoda. Indeed, perhaps Steinberg was prompted by Aung San Suu Kyi's own earlier reflections on Manuha Min's predicament while travelling through Mon country on her way to the Thamanya Sayadaw. She had herself only just been released from house arrest at

(c) ILCAA 1999 - Gustaaf Houtman. Mental Culture in Burmese Crisis Politics. ILCAA Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia & Africa Monograph Series 33, Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1999, ISBN 4-87297-748-3, p179/392

that point in time, and Manuha's act of building a pagoda while imprisoned in Pagan crossed her mind. Indeed, she identified with Manuha, who had caused Anawratha to experience such great fears. She concluded that ‘the sympathetic account of King Manuha is one of the most admirable parts of Burmese history, demonstrating a lack of ethnic prejudice and unstinting respect for a noble enemy’.[5]

The Myanmar culture myth

The regime has decided to make Myanmar culture, a singular idea of culture, the centrepoint for all peoples of Burma. Their propaganda has formulated the idea of the Myanmar family, all tied together by the Mongol spot. Against this stand the feeble attempts of the cultural advisers to loosen some of these ideas, but this proves difficult when using only old-fashioned and introductory anthropology textbooks.

Culture is by no means a simple concept, and the Burmese regime has not sufficiently problematised it before its wholesale adoption in their Twelve National Objectives. First, the very concepts of culture the regime employs have not been researched with any seriousness; there is no interest in describing the terminology and values whether in Burmese (yin-gyei-hmú y¨\ek¥:m§ and daleí-hton-zan Del.TuMsM) or the other languages in Burma. Second, even the ‘international’ concepts of culture used are drawn from sources that are not renowned for demonstrating the problems inherent in the concept of culture, but rather, aim to simplify for undergraduate students. Raymond Williams found culture to be one of the two or three most complicated in the English language.[6] More important, however, is that Kroeber and Kluckhohn distinguished 164 definitions in their famous review of what anthropologists meant by culture.[7] However, by today's count such would represent but a fraction of the current range of definitions as one traces the diverse anthropological developments in different countries.

Major changes have taken place over time in the way the concept is understood. The earliest anthropologists at the beginning of this century, while European colonial power was at its height, interpreted culture as a good possessed only by the privileged few. Evolutionary anthropologists such a Tylor saw in culture a development away from the coarse state of nature into which we were born, so that the peoples closest to nature also had least culture. Societies were assumed to move through various phases in cultural development until they attained to civilization. This approach often assumed the conjunction between language, race and culture as joint evolutionary developments. On the other hand, diffusionists, less concerned with evolution according to set patterns of development, saw ‘culture circles’ (kultur kreise) which emanated from the point at which, for example, a pebble hits the water.

In these accounts, whether evolutionary or diffusionist, culture is a privileged centre from which high values are emitted across space and time, that should be gratefully accepted and consumed by weaker peoples; the strongest cultures have the greatest effect on their surroundings. Wright has reviewed the attributes of this old sense of culture as a relatively static culture as follows: unchanging, in balanced equilibrium or self-reproducing; underlying system of shared meanings; ‘authentic culture’; identical, homogeneous individuals. [8]

If these early theories saw culture not only as desirable but as privileged central points dominating entire landscapes of human communities, subsequent ideas about culture developed that effectively did away with the view that culture necessarily belonged to the privileged centres of civilization. Culture was no longer inferred from spectacular reports that produced the idea in the early days of ‘armchair’ anthropology. At the time, fieldwork was rarely performed and knowledge hardly employed first-hand observation and linguistic skills, that are today regarded as vital tools in anthropology. It was in particular fieldwork and participant-observation that radically altered the view of culture. This initially gave rise to functionalist theories, such as Malinowski's fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders, who proposed that culture is produced and maintained independently in all societies, including societies in the periphery of strong civilizations. Also, peoples such as the Australian Aborigines, who had hitherto been assumed had no culture, were demonstrated to have highly sophisticated cultures.

A further step in the democratization of culture took place when Raymond Williams argued that all peoples not only accept and possess culture, but also make culture by their own agency. These cultures, in

turn, contest the reified cultures of the elite. This permits us to speak of sub- and counter-cultures as appropriate responses to a centralised discourse of civilization.

The regime's culture discourse – in particular as based on the idea of Mongolian racial unity – reads like a standard colonial idea of culture that aims to produce a history consistent with old-fashioned western linguistic, geographic, but in particular racial classifications. It follows up on what historians such as Harvey said, namely that ‘the Burmans are a Mongolian race, yet their traditions, instead of harking back to China, refer to India … the surviving traditions of the Burman are Indian because their own Mongolian traditions died out’.[9] In similar vein, Luce wrote that, ‘the Abhiraja/Dharaja legends showing the continuity in the Buddha's Indian lineage with those of Burmese royalty were presumably invented to give Burmans a noble derivation from the Sakiyan line of Buddha Gotama himself. But one only has to put a Burman between a North Indian and a Chinese, to see at a glance where his racial connections lie.’[10] To fight colonialism with old colonial ideas is the legacy of an army that has its origins and traditions ultimately outside Burma. The paradox is that the army demands the civilian population to wear longyi and accuse democracy protesters of westernisation, while they are themselves wearing trousers, the ultimate symbol of western decadence and can seemingly not come up with theories of culture that transcend those of their oppressors half a century ago.

The local values myth

The pagoda is too easy a way out of the culture quagmire. For the regime populating the landscape with bright and shining pagodas at the expense of the civilian population is as useful as is the colonial discourse and search for Mongolian origins in the Mongolian spot. This is based on a reductionist anthropology practised in the colonial idea, which proposed a concept of culture that permitted drawing larger boundaries of communities so as to assert domination over them. The idea that the regime can stand for ‘local values’ by adopting such discourse of the Myanmar family is damaging the fabric of society.

Anthropologists of the post-colonial period are of the opinion that the creative personal elements of culture are as dynamic as the call for civilisation. The smaller communities at the edges of larger communities are equally creative in developing their cultures. This discovery led anthropologists to realise that the creative aspects of culture always work to counterbalance the inherited and transmitted elements.

The Burmese army realise that it could not recover its Aung San ancestral lineage it had so carefully manufactured now that Aung San's charismatic daughter has entered the political arena. She contested and led the attack on their painstakingly crafted concept of institutional culture that could build some sort of a bridge between the people. It had to grab for what is available beyond Aung San's lineage, and is now rewriting Burma's entire history and remanufacturing and repackaging Burma's culture into a unique sub-type of an Asian value system which, they hope, Japan will finance, the package tourist will consume, businesses will support, the ethnic minorities will resign themselves to, and they will themselves benefit from politically and economically. The resulting cultural unification of the country, they hope, should be sufficient to overcome all forms political opposition.

Aung San Suu Kyi retorts that it is false to delineate such hastily forged ideas of national culture. She says that ‘there is nothing new in Third World governments seeking to justify and perpetuate authoritarian rule by denouncing liberal democratic principles as alien. By implication they claim for themselves the official and sole right to decide what does or does not conform to indigenous cultural norms’ [Y11].

Politics has thereby been transformed into a debate about what these local values called culture are that might go into local concepts of democracy. Indeed, democracy has become contested at the level of culture. In response, Aung San Suu Kyi perceptively commented on this rhetoric of culture and development at the level of the nation has no meaning without local empowerment, without permitting parallel cultural concepts to operate at the local level.

In her view, truly Burmese culture is mental culture – the culture of Byama-so tayà. This will be analysed later, but suffice to say here that these express universal and transcendent values – transcendent of material and substantive difference in status and power – in a way, first of all, to which people respond locally, and second, that it is a local ideal comparable to western values of democracy. As we have already seen, all politicians of repute have handled these concepts, and even the regime's own thinkers and journalists currently agree on their over arching importance.

In his first lecture he set out ‘the essence of Buddhism’ in terms of the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path. He quotes Friedrich Nietzsche's admiration for the ‘absolute soberness and clearness of Buddhism’.

He places Buddhism, in its emphasis upon mind and the inward condition, in a very different category from other religions and suggests that it is a system that operates beyond tradition and culture, as these are mere conventional templates.

He refers to this liberating Eightfold Path as ‘a path of inner culture, of inner progress’. Having thus taken Buddhism out of the realm of religion, competitive faith and culture, into the realm of mental culture, i.e. personally confronting reality through the first-order instrument of one's own physical and mental manifestation, the second lecture he then proceeds to delineate the importance of karma and rebirth. He aimed to show that the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth ‘has nothing to do with the transmigration of any soul or ego-entity, as in the ultimate sense there does not exist any such ego or I, but merely a continually changing process of psychic and corporeal phenomena’, and to point out that ‘the kamma-process and rebirth-process may both be made comprehensible only by the assumption of a subconscious stream of life [bhavanga-sota] underlying everything in living nature’.

The third lecture is devoted to paticca-samuppada, or the theory of dependent origination. Realised by the Buddha at his enlightenment, it represents the practical understanding of ‘the conditional arising of all those mental and physical phenomena generally summed up by the conventional names “living being,” or “individual,” or “person”’. According to this theory, all life-forms arise from the kamma generated through ignorance (avijja).

The lecture ‘Mental culture’ is the last lecture. Here, having placed Buddhism, as the system of direct confrontation with reality outside the realm of culture, and having presented ignorance (avijja) as perpetuating life-in-samsara, he sketches ‘mental culture’ as the only form of mental training that attains release from the cycle of rebirth.

I have already emphasized Aung San's and Thakin Kodawhmaing's concept of national unity as rooted in byama-so tayà and, ultimately, in samadhi or concentration. These, together with vipassana, the next stage in mental training, are all comprised within the concept of bhavana, which represents, in Nyanatiloka's vocabulary, the system of mental culture in its entirety.

Nyanatiloka draws attention to Sri Lanka being lacking, unlike Burma, in mental culture.

Nyanatiloka's account of Buddhist mental culture sketches it as the ultimate goal in Buddhism and as the most accurate culture in its original sense of coping with nature. In that sense, since it is based on self-liberation, it goes beyond the collective aspects of culture.

We are thus left with Buddhism not only as a mental culture, an inner culture, but also a counter-culture. This permits us to understand one strand in the history of Burmese national independence politics of Aung San and Thahkin Kodawhmaing, who recognized in mental culture a vital counter-colonial instrument that permitted transcending factionalism and that would eventually result in national unity. It also permits us to understand why men such as Ba Han, who wrote a book on Blake's mysticism, should sketch ‘The Good Life’ in The Planned State, as the need for ‘physical as well as mental culture’.[14]

Mental culture is ‘high’ culture

As Tambiah wrote, the ascetic ‘erases the layman's cognitive and affective maps by crossing the latter's boundaries of social and physical spaces, culinary distinctions, and pure-impure categorizations’, for ‘the ascetic who closes his sense doors while the layman's are open is also a breaker of conventions, a dissolver of man-made cultural categories by which he orders and reifies the world into a durable reality’. The ascetic here is ‘a mindful observer and contemplator of process, of growth and decay and dissolution; and what better subject is there for this than the human body and what better viewing ground than a place of cremation?’.[15]

The advantage of mental culture in a multi-cultural environment such as Burma, is that it permits the creation of a ‘neutral’ space where cultural differences are erased. Aung San Suu Kyi is suspicious and has expressed criticism of the institutionalization of a ‘national culture’ that is being devised by a dirigiste regime which she finds ‘can become a bizarre graft of carefully selected historical incidents and distorted social values intended to justify the policies and actions of those in power’. ‘It is often in the name of cultural integrity, as well as social stability and national security, that democratic reforms based on human rights are resisted by authoritarian governments’. She believes that the poor need more than material assistance, they need ‘empowerment’ so as ‘to change their perception of themselves as helpless and ineffectual in a changing world’.[16] Such empowerment is supplied not by culture, but by the development of spiritual resources as part of a ‘revolution of the spirit’.

Mental culture, which requires very little space and is highly portable, is not visible, yet has a cosmological reach, negotiating the boundaries of the largest domains known to mankind such as self, prison, country, cosmology and samsara. By contrast, culture can merely negotiate ethnic and national boundaries.

High culture is therefore ultimately rooted in a Buddhist spiritual quest. This overcomes difference and transcends locality through understanding, rather than fostering and asserting difference through the production of substantive material and ideological difference on the basis of locality or material culture. Such is an opinion shared with Buddhists elsewhere.[18] And it is indeed a feature of Aung San Suu Kyi's mental culture of politics.[19] However, it is as well to bear in mind, that this concept of culture as mental culture is itself derivative from the very same crisis politics already outlined, which began with Mindon's realisation that reform must be undertaken in the wake of the Second Anglo-Burmese War to keep the long-nosed British, as Hpo Hlaing put it, from ‘kissing the girls of Burma’.

When we investigate the meaning attributed to culture by the regime's own advisers, we see an elaboration of what they think are universal ideas of culture, drawn from old-fashioned and introductory anthropology texts. However, the regime's cultural think-thank do not quite see eye-to-eye with the generals on Myanmar culture in terms of locally originating Burmese ideas at all. Khin Maung Nyunt's definition of culture involves a distinction between ‘tangible’ culture and ‘intangible’ culture as follows:

At the ‘Human Resource Development, Nation-building and Culture’ seminar Khin Maung Nyunt set out the roots of ‘Myanmar culture’ as close to the spiritual development and ethics as advocated by the NLD. Khin Maung Nyunt proclaims that ‘Myanmar ethical and moral principles such as the 38 modes of auspicious conduct (Mangala Sutta) which includes advice for living a good and happy life as well as earnest advice for kings and ministers so that they may govern well and wisely’. He isolates the following as the main features of Burmese culture:

The cultural adviser U Khin Maung Nyunt ends up saying what Aung San, U Nu, and since 1971 the BSPP, and now the senior members of the NLD also say – this is that byama-so tayà or brahma-vihara, mental culture, is the way for Burma. Ye Htut also adds to the definition of other speakers that ‘Myanmar national

culture surpasses other cultures in subtlety and profundity’, but it is not due to Burma's superior material culture. Rather, it is because ‘Myanmar culture is culture that promotes spiritual refinement.’

His view is that ‘Myanmar culture’ is ‘the culture of the spirit’, and the government's ‘objective to raise the national character and spirit is now included in the State's [three] social objectives’. The cultural advisers to the regime, therefore, politely but firmly point the generals towards a less reified Myanmar culture that draws on ultimate freedom as innherited from Buddhist teachings. U Thittila views Burmese concepts of ‘high’ culture (as distinct from ‘Burmese’ culture) as ultimately centred upon mental culture, for the Burmese place it at the highest and most central level of their value system. U Thittila, the first Burmese monk to spend many years in Britain, put it that Buddhism is the most significant source of nourishment for Burmese culture. ‘Take away our religion and what of culture is left? Just what would be left if you took away from the lotus the life-giving waters … nothing but the odour of decay’. He defines Buddhism according to the Dhammapada as the Buddha's teachings ‘not to do any evil’, ‘to cultivate good’ and most importantly, ‘to purify one's thoughts’. His definition of culture is therefore a form of spiritual culture tightly integrated with Buddhism.

Having sketched the generals' culture concept as centering upon racial purity and the Pondaung original Myanmar man, on the one hand, and the NLD and the regime's own cultural advisers' preference for Burmese culture as rooted in the spiritual concept of brahma-vihara, on the other, perhaps there is scope for their meeting. The Gya-Aye song [g¥aeAqIK¥c\:] was composed by Pegu U Thet Tin, and deals with the YMBA and the dyarchy question. The last line says ‘Brahma-vihara, the old name for Burma’ [òbhîwihaeRH:Ami òmn\maòpv\].[24] Myanmar and Burma, we are told by many Burmese authors, are words derived from ‘Brahma’ [òbhîa] (see App. 1.8). This suggests that the spiritual and the material views of culture may yet be reconcilable. The question is how this reconciliation might be attained. What on earth do these military intelligence Pondaung fossil scouts and civilian practitioners of the byama-so tayà social meditation have in common? Are they not both looking for the limits of culture, each in their own way? The difference is that one seeks to assert material difference between outsiders and insiders on the basis of race and culture, while the other opens up the higher Brahma heavens, where cultural and gender distinctions no longer exist because it is beyond the distinctions that belong to material form. One houses it, and the other uproots the very foundations of the house, not wishing to live in it any longer. The question is, which is the more fruitful and beneficial to society?

[1] Nawrahta (1995:69).

[2] Dhammapada 153, 154.

[3] I am indebted for this idea to my discussions with Miyazaki Koji and Setsuho Ikehata.

[4] Steinberg, David I. ‘What medium for the message?’ Bangkok Post, 16.08.1997.

[5] ASSK (1997a:7–8).

[6] Raymond Williams. 1976. Keywords. Flamingo, p. 87.

[7] Kroeber, A.L. & Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1952. Culture: a critical review of concepts and definitions. Cambridge, MA.: Papers of the Peabody Museum XLVII.

[8] I am indebted to reading Susan Wright. 1998. ‘The policization of “culture”.’ Anthropology Today. 14, 1, pp. 7-15.

[9] Harvey (1925:5).

[10] Luce (1959).

[11] For a Burmese appreciation of Nyanatiloka see mc\:yuewx AtÊopét†iTU:m¥a: [Unusual biographies: biographies of foreign (Buddhist) missionaries]. NHluM:lH, 1980, pp. 57–72. This also includes biographies of Ananda Mettaya (English monk), Lokanatha (Italian monk), Daw Sudhammawati (Nepalese nun), and Col. Olcott (American).

[12] Carrithers (1983:26–45).

[13] Thanissaro Bhikkhu. ‘The Meaning of the Buddha's Awakening’. (http://world.std.com/~metta/ftp/modern/awakening.html).

[14] Ba Han, Maung. The Planned State: an evaluation of the social and economic foundations of the State in the light of a comparative study of the conditions in the East Asiatic and Western Countries. Rangoon: n.p., 1944, p. 105.

[15] Tambiah (1984:37).

[16] ASSK (1995:264).

[17] Thanissaro Bhikkhu. The Meaning of the Buddha's Awakening. 1997.

[18] ‘A cultured man has grown, for culture comes from a word meaning “to grow.” In Buddhism the arahant is the perfect embodiment of culture. He has grown to the apex, to the highest possible limit, of human evolution. He has emptied himself of all selfishness – all greed, hatred, and delusion – and embodies flawless purity and selfless compassionate service. Things of the world do not tempt him, for he is free from the bondage of selfishness and passions. He makes no compromises for the sake of power, individual or collective.

In this world some are born great while others have greatness thrust on them. But in the Buddha-Dhamma one becomes great only to the extent that one has progressed in ethical discipline and mental culture, and thereby freed the mind of self and all that it implies. True greatness, then, is proportional to one's success in unfolding the perfection dormant in human nature.

We should therefore think of culture in this way: Beginning with the regular observance of the Five Precepts, positively and negatively, we gradually reduce our greed and hatred. Simultaneously, we develop good habits of kindness and compassion, honesty and truthfulness, chastity and heedfulness. Steady, wholesome habits are the basis of good character, without which no culture is possible. Then, little by little, we become great and cultured Buddhists. Such a person is rightly trained in body, speech, and mind – a disciplined, well-bred, refined, humane human being, able to live in peace and harmony with himself and others. And this indeed is Dhamma.’ Robert Bogoda Buddhist Culture, The Cultured Buddhist, Bodhi Leaves No. 139, Published in 1996, Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy.

[19] The preposition ‘mental’ in ‘mental culture’, I fear, evokes in English a prejudicial connotation in the sense of ‘mental’, i.e. a term suggesting ‘temporary or permanent impairments of the mind, due to heredity, birth injury, environment, or accident, which usually need special care.’ It conveys such ideas as mental breakdown, deficiency, derangement, disease, disorder, handicap, illness, incapacity, retardation, subnormality. However, as Williams points out, the term ‘culture’ has undergone definite changes. It started life as meaning the cultivation of crops and animals, which remained its main sense until the beginning of the 19th Century. From the 16th Century onwards it was applied metaphorically to the mind, as in Bacon's ‘the culture and manurance of minds’ (1605). This use decreased after the 17th century. There ought to be a space somewhere in the English language for this concept.

[20] Khin Maung Nyunt. ‘The law to protect and preserve cultural heritage regions’. MP, September 1998.

[21] MP, November 1997.

[22] Ye Htut (1997:179–80).

[23] Thittila (1996:215).

[24] See emñmi>miu:ûkv\x ny\K¥µ>Pk\Ss\Sn\>k¥c\tµ.eqæ: zatiman\et:qIK¥c\:m¥a:x rn\kun\x qIhmc\:x 1981x m¥k\NHa 12X

Chapter 7
Mental culture and freedom

Pagoda culture or mental culture?

The Myanmar culture myth

The local values myth

Mental culture – the concept

Mental culture is ‘high’ culture

Chapter 7 Mental culture and freedom

Pagoda culture or mental culture?

The Myanmar culture myth

The local values myth

Mental culture – the concept

Mental culture is ‘high’ culture

Chapter 7
Mental culture and freedom