Author Archives: tetsukoizumi

Buddhist Nationalism in Myanmar

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

What kind of Buddhist culture develops in a specific place often depends on the historical evolution of the people and society in that place. “To be a Burmese is to be a Buddhist” is a saying that captures an integral role Buddhism has played in shaping the Burmese national identity. The Burmese’s resolve to hold on to their Buddhist culture has been severely tested by a number of historical events such as the destruction of their Buddhist temples and pagodas by the invading army of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century and the loss of royal patronage by the dissolution of the monarchy by the British colonialists in the nineteenth century. These adverse historical events may explain why Burmese Buddhism has evolved into a highly political culture, with monks actively involved in political affairs. The politicized Buddhist culture is still apparent in Myanmar today, as the country was renamed in 1989 from Burma, with monks lending their support for democratic movements.

While the role of Buddhism in shaping their national identity came into sharp focus when the British came to Burma and governed as a province of their Indian Empire, little did the Burmese—or, for that matter, other people in the world—anticipate that Buddhism would be used as a pretext for discrimination, even execution, of a group of people with a different faith tradition. But that is exactly what happened, and is happening, to the Rohingya in Myanmar.

The Rohingya are an ethnic minority group of nearly million people in the western Burmese province of Rakhine. The Rohingya trace their origin in the region to the 15th century, when thousands of Muslims came to the former Arakan Kingdom. They differ from Myanmar’s dominant Buddhist groups ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. The label “Rohingya” as a self-identifying term surfaced in the 1950s to give them a collective political identity. But successive governments in Myanmar have refuted the Rohingya’s historical claim to Rakhine State, and denied the group official recognition as one of the country’s 135 ethnic groups, except under the democratic government of Prime Minister U NU (1948-58, 1960-62), who was he first prime minister of independent Burma until 1962 when the military junta seized power.

The Rohingya are discriminated in Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, for the color of their skin, which is darker, and their language, but most importantly for their Muslim faith. Another factor that may have contributed to discrimination against the Rohingya is that fact that Rakhine State is Myanmar’s least developed state with a poverty rate of 78 percent, compared with around 38 percent national average, according to the World Bank. Denied citizenship, the Rohingya have been registered as temporally residents with identification cards, known as white cards. But the Rohingya even lost that temporary residents status when President Thein Sein cancelled the temporary identity cards in February 2015.

The current wave of discrimination and execution of the Rohingya started when, in August 2017, a militant group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked police and army posts, killing more than 500 people. This incident prompted the government to declare ARSA as a terrorist organization and mount a brutal campaign to destroy Rohingya villages. More than half of Rohingya population in Myanmar fled the country to neighboring countries of Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia.

There is no question that what is happening to the Rohingya is a case of genocide, according to the UN definition by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, ratified on January 12, 1951.1 What is difficult for us living in the rest of the world to accept is the fact that this atrocity against a minority group is done by the Burmese Buddhists who have contributed a lot to the worldwide spread of Buddhist practice. Though introduced and propagated as a political means to promote national identity in the post-independence nation, it was the Burmese Buddhists who elevated vipassana, or insight meditation, as a popular Buddhist practice. In fact, the worldwide spread of this practice owes to a number of influential Burmese teachers, such as Ledi Sayadaw (1846-1923), who called for the renewal of lay life that included meditative practice, Saya Thetgyi (1873-1945), who was instrumental in the evolution of insight meditation into a global phenomenon, Mahasi Sayadaw (1904-1982), who became head of the Thathana Yeiktha meditation center in Rangoon in 1949 appointed by Prime minister U Nu, and U Ba Khin (1899-1971), who set up International Meditation Center in Rangoon in 1952.2 Granted that insight meditation in Burma grew out of the Theravada tradition, it is nevertheless a form of Buddhist practice that would lead its practitioners to panna, or wisdom, which certainly includes compassion and loving-kindness toward fellow human beings.

  1. See Maung Zauni, “Buddhist Nationalism in Burma”, Tricycle, Spring 2013.
  2. Erik Braun, The Birth of Insight Meditation: Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Learning from the Great Pandemic of 1918

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Tetsunori Koizumi, Director

For historians, every year is an anniversary of one event or another that happened in the past. Last year, 2017, was the 500th anniversary, or the quincentenary, of the Reformation that took place in 1517, and the 100th anniversary, or the centenary, of the Russian Revolution that took place in 1917. This year, 2018, is the centenary of what is known as the Great Pandemic of 1918. While it may seem irreverent to attach an adjective “great” to an epidemic, we may learn a valuable lesson from this epidemic that started out as an outbreak of influenza in a small local area in one country to quickly become a worldwide epidemic never seen in history, hence the adjective “great.”

We may note that history books refer to the Russian Revolution in 1917 as the Great October Revolution, although it actually took place in November according to the Gregorian calendar adopted in the rest of the world. There is no question that it was a great victory for the Bolsheviks who had been fighting to end the autocratic rule of the Romanovs since its founding in 1903, including the uprising of 1905 against the killing of hundreds of workers by Czar Nicholas’s troops petitioning for labor reforms and the February Revolution of 1917, which brought down the Romanov dynasty.

The 1918 outbreak of an influenza epidemic is called the Great Pandemic of 1918 because it spread worldwide to become history’s worst epidemic in terms of human tolls. To be sure, there had been other epidemics that claimed heavy human tolls in history. The plague that begun in 1347, known as the Black Death, that wiped out half the population of Europe in 20 years would be one example of such great epidemic in human history.1 Another example would be a cholera epidemic that broke out in the Ganges delta in 1817 and spread towards Europe, reaching Austria, Germany and Poland by 1829. And we may also include the AIDS epidemic of the twentieth century as still another example of a great epidemic. However, the number of deaths due to the AIDS epidemic is nothing compared with the number of deaths caused by the 1918 outbreak of an influenza epidemic.

Indeed, what makes the 1918 outbreak of an influenza epidemic great is the great speed with which it spread around the world and the great number of human tolls that it claimed. The pandemic is believed to have started out as an influenza outbreak among farmers in Haskell County, which is in the southwest corner of Kansas, according to a recent study.2 Soldiers in training for combat in World War I at Camp Funston, Kansas, were the next to be infected, and from there the influenza spread to other army camps in the US, and then to France with the arrival of American troops there. Spain was the next country affected—so badly that the people started to call the second wave of the outbreak as the Spanish flu. And from Spain it spread worldwide, including countries on the African continent, and even to New Zealand. The pandemic lasted only 15 months, but turned out to be the deadliest pandemic, claiming the lives of 670,000 Americans and between 50 million and 100 million people worldwide. Compared with about 35 million people worldwide who have died since the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic, we can see the magnitude of the 1918 outbreak. And this is the reason why it is now called as the Great Pandemic of 1918.

For those of us living in the world one hundred years after that historic outbreak, it is important to examine whether the world is susceptible to another such pandemic. Considering how advances in medical sciences have uncovered the causes and cures for most diseases that afflict us humans, we may think that such a pandemic is a thing of the past. But the truth of the matter is that we humans are not immune from health threats that come the natural environment. The Great Pandemic of 1918 is believed to have started from hogs in rural Kansas. If that were indeed the case, it would be what we now call a swine flue. By now we know that a virus can jump across species from an animal to humans. The 2013 outbreak of influenza, H7N9, which infected thousands of people worldwide, was the case of bird flu. While medical researchers continue to develop an effective flu vaccine, the effective of such vaccines is still limited, and we cannot completely deny the possibility of another outbreak of a great pandemic due to a new strain of influenza.

The centenary of the Great October Revolution of 1917 turned out to be a low-key affair, called the Day of People’s Unity even in Russia. This is understandable, considering that the USSR, the country the revolution gave rise to, no longer exist. We can only hope that the centenary of the Great Pandemic of 1918 will also turn out to be a low-key affair in terms of the number of human tolls due to influenza. In the meantime, we need to constantly remind ourselves that we humans, after all, share the universe with all the other living things, including influenza viruses that keep on changing and transforming themselves just as we do.

  1. For this and other examples of plagues in history, see McNeill, William H., Plagues and Peoples, New York: Anchor Books, 1976.
  2. For a detailed account of the Great Pandemic of 1918, see Barry, John M., “Journal of the Plague Year: 1918 Outbreak”, Smithsonian, November 2017.