Burma: The State of Meditation

One of the most important things about this book is just how terribly needed it is. There is no other book that takes a cold, hard look at the relation of modernist meditation movements in Burma to the military regime. This is critical to understanding the operation of power within Burma, something for which we have little knowledge informed by the complexities of anthropological fieldwork. Western aficionados of Burmese modern meditation know little of its cultural and political context. The movement Jordt studies here is arguably the most influential of any on Western Theravada Buddhism, and it is the most widely propagated across national boundaries within Southeast Asia. This book is based first and foremost on a minor miracle of access: the many years that the author has spent in Burma as a meditation student. Jordt started out not as an anthropologist but as a meditator who for years was involved in the main center of Burmese modernist meditation in the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition. As a result, she was able to get to know this meditation movement from the inside out and to become the acquaintance and sometimes friend of many in a unique historical generation in Burma, the displaced elite from the first nationalist period. These people, who under better circumstances might still be running the country today, turned to a life of meditation as a result of the series of increasingly brutal military regimes that have dominated the country since 1962. The main question the book poses is one on many people’s minds these days: how does a military regime remain in power for over 40 years while being hated by a large majority of its subjects? Jordt answers this question by exposing how the question itself is misinformed, how it presupposes an absolute rift that exists only when thinking in one dimension—that of habitual political thought. There is, however, a Buddhist cosmological level where far more is shared between the sides than is apparent to outsiders who bring their own interpretive frames to bear on the situation. It is not as though Burmese Vipassana meditation movements are supporters of the military regime, nor are they in any kind of absolute political opposition. Jordt chooses to explore, in particular, how cosmological and soteriological notions of Buddhist polity inform the political situation in a way that cannot be accounted for with an assumption that politics must always involve a question of democracy versus totalitarianism. The place of the mass lay meditation movement in this Buddhist-nuanced account of state formation and legitimacy may not be what every reader is hoping for; recent events of the monks’ demonstrations most likely have created interests that are slightly different from what Jordt addresses. The lay meditation movement is not coextensive with the whole of Burmese Buddhism, although Jordt seems to want to say that this movement is the most important and the most revealing of power dynamics in the country. One insight that translates from her work to the recent events in Burma is that if she is right, and the legitimacy of the regime is intimately tied to its role as protecting and propagating Buddhism, then the regime is probably in considerable trouble now and must do a lot of work to convince people that the affected monks were not properly Buddhist. Jordt does convincingly show that the mass lay meditation movement has over the course of the past 60 years been extremely important to forming a modernity in Burma, a form that is still up for grabs for two reasons, as she pinpoints. First, a stable state that people can believe in has not really ever formed in the way that it has in other countries, and the only form that even began to catch hold was a sort of Buddhist utopian state based on mass meditation, which was derailed by military coup but continues side by side with the state in the lay meditation movement. Second, the Vipassana meditation movement itself is particularly immune to fixation into ideological orders, whether of democracy or others, because it is in its essence based on a nonconceptual epistemology. Some anthropologists, wedded to certain theoretical orthodoxies, will be unable to assimilate the latter as a possibility. Nevertheless, most of the rest of the arguments will not ruffle feathers. Jordt takes the reader through a history of Mahasi Sayadaw meditation as a lay Buddhist movement (much of it informed by her close observation); an ethnographic account of how institutions are founded, funded, and run and their relationships to public demonstrations of support such as those performed by military and public alike; an account of the progress of insight in modern Buddhist meditation that pushes a little at the boundaries of anthropological epistemology (but does not take on the equally deficient critique of religious experience in Buddhist studies); and a discussion of the unique intellectual origins of the nation-state in Burma among a host of other things that are imbricated with Buddhist cosmological and soteriological notions and practices. Jordt ends with some musings that Buddhism and political life will probably take on new forms that will be problematic for the settling of power and legitimacy questions in the future. The musings are eerily prophetic, considering when they were written. The book raises an issue in anthropology that few others