The Power of Metta

We leave shoes and socks in the car, skipping over the hot stones until we reach the shade of the long covered arcade, lined with stalls selling religious knick-knacks, that leads to the great bronze Buddha image at the centre of Mahamuni, Mandalay’s most revered temple.

Pilgrims come pressing along the arcade, country people by the look of them, then fan out into the prayer hall and come to a pious halt before the image. Up there at the front other pilgrims are clambering about on the altar, pasting squares of gold leaf onto the image, some standing on ladders to reach his torso. People have been doing this for so long, our guide tells us, that the gold is now six inches thick; as a result the lower half of the statue, where most pilgrims past their squares, is losing definition and becoming flabby, as if Buddha had gorged on all the veneration he has received here, as if the image were slowly melting under the sun of devotion.

Framed photos of senior generals in Burma’s ruling junta are displayed on the walls. Maung Aye, the second most important general in the regime, is seen pasting squares of gold leaf onto Buddha, bowing before the image, standing benignly by while monks tuck into the food he and his fellow officers have donated. In another photograph Daw Kyaing Kyaing, the wife of Senior General Than Shwe, Burma's ageing strongman, approaches the image with a bunch of flowers.

I feel resistant to Mahamuni’s charms. Buddhism is not a religion of idolatry, despite appearances, but this looks like idol-worship pure and simple. In a country as poor as this it also looked like an absurd waste of gold. But sticking on a gold leaf, it seems, is part of the tour. Our guide ushers us up to the altar and the next minute I find myself standing on it and unpeeling the backing from a filigree gold square and smoothing the gold on to Buddha's left knee in a mood of confusion and futility.

We move out into the courtyard where half a dozen women face each other across a work bench, bent over metal discs and grinding stumps of thanaka and sandalwood into a paste with water. Thanaka is the creamy traditional skin cream Burmese women smear on their cheeks. But the batch these women are preparing is destined to be mixed with water to wash Buddha's face tomorrow morning.

It’s while we are watching these women at work that we spot the new arrivals. Four small children come filing into the hall with their parents, perfectly androgynous in appearance, dressed in floor-length satiny robes embroidered with arabesques of gold and baby blue. They wear coronets on their heads from which sprout wire and paper sprigs, beads dangle over their brows, gold rings glint on their fingers and ear rings on their ears, their faces are made up with powder and mascara and lipstick. They troop into the hall and kneel in prayer before the image.

And while we watch and puzzle over them, more come in behind: groups of boys and groups of girls, some in groups of five or six, one group of around twenty, all in shiny nylon finery and lipstick, aged from five or six to twelve, with mothers draped in jewels and gold ornaments and grinning dads in attendance. Outside they squint into the hot sun for commemorative photographs, proud mums by their sons’ side holding cardboard boxes, fathers grasping fat black lacquer bowls.

Why are these creatures dolled up like child prostitutes? What are they doing parading through the temple to bow down before the swollen gold Buddha? What’s it all about?

The penny drops: the children are dressed up to represent young Siddharta Gautama, the Buddha before he became the Buddha. Gautama was a prince of the Shakya clan in northern India, born and raised in closeted luxury as heir to his father's throne. And because his father had been advised by a sage that one day he would take up the life of a holy man, he was imprisoned in his palace - until the day he ran away.

We follow the families outside where they clamber into the Japanese pick-up trucks that brought them here, the young princes enthroned on plastic chairs in the back maintaining their expressions of princely disdain while mums fret and fan them and shade them with parasols and everyone gets slightly too hot. A band of drummers and xylophonists take their places in a decorated lorry and commence bashing away, a clownish boy dancer all in green cavorts in a pick-up of his own and finally all move off grandly and slowly through the city, the well-off friends or relatives who have coughed up the money to pay for this extravaganza bringing up the rear in a smart new four-wheel drive.

And the next day they all return to Mahamuni, to conclude the story: to re-enact Gautama's decision to renounce the world of samsara and to follow the Way; to bow their heads to the safety razors of the Mahamuni monks, until the hot stones are carpeted in black hair, and to don the maroon robes of the monk and take their vows.

**

Young novices line up for lunch.
Photo: Mario Popham

We came to Burma six months after the rebellion of the monks last September to try to understand where the rebellion came from and what it meant.

When the monks of Burma took possession of their towns and cities last September, the whole world was gripped. It was an amazing spectacle, like nothing we had ever seen before, in Burma or anywhere else. The television news journalists relaying the pictures struggled to make sense of them. It was a protest movement, they told us, a rebellion, an uprising, much like Burma’s great student-led uprising of 1988, which ended in a government-ordered massacre and three thousand dead.

But the differences were more striking than the similarities. Only monks marched, first a few, then hundreds, finally tens of thousands of them, filling the boulevards of Rangoon with their maroon robes: a mighty river in spate. Only in the last days did the ordinary citizens join in, falling in at the side of the columns of monks as if the banks of the river were crumbling into the flood.

Under the monsoon downpours they walked at the steady pace of Buddhist monks everywhere: neither pounding nor ambling, not marching in lockstep like soldiers but clearly a body of people, a corps on the move, saturated with rain, bare feet slapping on the slick tarmac.

No banners, no slogans, no speeches, no protection, no masks, no helmets, no weapons. No shoes, even. They only carried flags, the multi-coloured flag of the Buddhists. And conversely, until the bloody days of the crackdown, they faced no resistance: no police, not one, no army, no hint of control; just these irresisitible rivers swelling with the endless arrival of new streams. And as they marched they chanted over and over the Metta Sutta, the Sutra of Lovingkindness:

"Sukhino va khemino horitu, sabbasatta bhavantu sukhitatta," they chanted, "ye keci panabhutatthi, tasa va thavara va-navasesa;digha va ye va mahanta, majjhima rassaka anukathula..."

"May all sentient beings be cheerful and endowed with a happy life," they chanted. "Whatever breathing beings there may be, frail or firm, tall or stout, short or medium-sized, thin or fat, those which are seen and those unseen, those dwelling far off and near, those already born and those still seeking to become, may all beings be endowed with a happy life...As a mother protects her baby, her only child, even so towards all beings let us cultivate the boundless spirit of love..."

We watched them marching, but we didn't really know what was going on. What was it all about? Where did this unique rebellion spring from? And where might it lead?

**

If you go to Burma your steps will be dogged by young boys flourishing packs of picture postcards. One of the sights featured in every pack is Kyaiktiyo, the Golden Rock pagoda, a boulder three times the height of a man teetering on the edge of a cliff east of Rangoon, entirely covered in gold leaf. The story goes that it was put there on purpose: an 11th century king with supernatural powers was offered a hair from Buddha’s head by a hermit, who instructed the king to find a stone the same shape as the hermit’s head, erect a stupa on top of it and enshrine the hair in the stupa. The king did as he was told, magically transporting the rock from the bottom of the sea and planting it in this unpromising position where at any moment it appears that it may slide down and crush anyone unlucky enough to be standing underneath. The secret to its stability, of course, is the Buddha hair squirreled away in the stupa.

Burma is like that rock. For twenty years Burma has been teetering on the edge of a cliff. On 8th August 1988 thousands of Burmese students rose up against the military regime of Ne Win, who had ruled the country with an iron fist for twenty-six years. The insurrection spread to the population at large, the army blinked and within weeks a revolution had taken place. A generation of tyranny was erased as a free press, trade unions, student organizations and political parties blossomed. But by October, with Ne Win sidelined, a new group of generals seized the initiative and in days of ruthless shooting they killed the Burmese revolution stone dead.

Burma’s was the first great uprising of the late ‘Eighties, harbinger of Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and everything that followed. Only in Burma’s case the rock merely continued to teeter; it didn’t go over the edge. And it has been teetering ever since.

Burma is a great emancipation waiting to happen, but the waiting has been going on so long that it has gained a terrible permanence of its own. There is something mesmerising about the contrast between the country’s desperate condition – so fragile, so poor, so badly and abusively ruled, such an outrage to the international community – and the fact that, year after year, decade after decade, it fails to come crashing down.

Trapped in her lakeside home like that Buddha hair shut away in Kyaiktiyo’s stupa is the person whose story is coterminous with those twenty teetering years, whose emergence as a political leader appeared to be the key to the country’s transformation but who has now spent more than 12 years under house arrest. Her imprisonment seems as crucial to the generals’ survival as the Buddha hair’s is to the stability of that rock. Once or twice a year she is exhibited to the cameras when the outside world gets too clamorous to be ignored, brought out like a religious icon paraded through the streets during its annual festival.

Suu Kyi emerged as the electrifying face of new Burma during those hectic months in the summer of 1988: beautiful, articulate, westernised, the daughter of Aung San, the founder of the Burmese army and father of the nation, returning from exile to take up the challenge of redeeming her native land.

With her hurriedly assembled party, the National League for Democracy, she won fully 84 per cent of the vote in the 1990 general election, despite being locked up in her home throughout the campaign. The great majority of her compatriots, including the many ethnic minorities, chose her to lead the country into the modern world; but the regime barred her from taking even the first step, transforming
her instead into the Sleeping Beauty of Burma; forcing her to go from being an active player on the world stage – temporarily hampered by restrictions that, when common sense prevailed, would surely be dropped – to a sort of living goddess, like those sad pre-menstrual girls imprisoned in their temple in Kathmandu whose imprisonment guaranteed (until the Maoists sent the king packing) the safety of the kingdom. Even in western parlance Suu Kyi has declined from “leader” to “symbol”.

The last time the Burmese regime looked to be on the verge of making important concessions was six years ago. After tortuous negotiations the UN’s special envoy, a Malaysian diplomat called Razali Ismail, obtained Suu’s release. And we who had watched and admired her incredible grit through the years in which the regime had imprisoned and toyed with her willed her on to an amazing vindication.

“The small, grubby concrete building,” I wrote in the Independent on 13 May 2002, “stands on a broad road in the middle of leafy Rangoon...The headquarters of Burma’s National League for Democracy is always a mass of people these days: students wearing lungi flapping fans; grizzled, whiskery veterans; women with tiny babies; all clustered round on their haunches on the pavement outside. The sprawling, dingy space within is a constant hubbub of activity: a tiny urban village, a domesticated political commune.

“A woman in the corner is going full pelt with a treadle sewing machine, running up party flags; at the far end a free English lesson is in progress, open to all, party members or not. A few foreign journalists sit and stew; party members scoop drinking water out of a cauldron that sits on a tripod behind a column. The librarian marshalls her small, battered collection of books.

“There is a sudden commotion at the door, an urgent, hushed announcement, and the men and women around the entrance stop whatever they are doing and stand erect, forming two neat lines. The party’s general secretary, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, steps briskly into the office, arm swinging like a soldier, the ghost of a smile on her face, and vanishes up the stairs.”

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