BUDDHISM IN SRI LANKA AND SOUTHEAST ASIA 153and sets of the new textbooks were sent back as replacements to the monaster-
ies from which they had been brought. An important rule in the Vinaya was
changed to the effect that monks were forbidden to hold ordinations unless
authorized by the central authorities. Monks from outlying areas who posed a
potential political threat to central power were brought into Bangkok for ques-
tioning and sometimes placed under household arrest (Strong EB, sec. 6. 9).
On the whole, however, the reforms succeeded in raising the general level
of practice and study among the majority of monks, in managing to keep Bud-
dhism respectable in the eyes of the more educated members of the society,
and in countering the charges made by Christian missionaries that Buddhism
was a religion of the ignorant and superstitious. At the same time, the central
government's newfound strength enabled it to keep the Thai Sangha from be-
coming politicized like the Sanghas in Sri Lanka and Burma. Thus, the re-
forms followed the traditional pattern of the Theravada connectiori whereby
kings kept their societies together by making efforts to standardize the study
and practice of the religion. Still, the reforms were unable to provide the vil-
lage and city monks with new social roles to replace the ones they had lost to
Western education and technology. In this respect the Thai Sangha was placed
in the same quandary as its brethren in Sri Lanka and Burma.7.5 THE POSTCOLONIAL PERIOD
In the heady days following independence after World War II, lay organiza-
tions in Sri Lanka and Burma began a conscious policy of sponsoring Bud-
dhism, following with th{;<traditional pattern of the Theravadin connection.
In Burma, the most active organization in this regard was the government.
From 1954-56, the Burmese government sponsored a Sixth Buddhist Coun-
cil, inviting religious leaders from all the Theravadin countries to reestablish
contact and reedit their texts. Prior to that, the prime minister of Burma, U
Nu, founded a government-sponsored meditation center in Rangoon and
persuaded Mahasi Sayadaw-a scholar/meditating monk from Mandalay who
·traced his meditation heritage back two generations to a monk living in a cave
in Upper Burma-to become the center's chief teacher. Mahasi's method of
meditation equated mindfulness with a precise noting of fleeting mental and
physical events, pursued relentlessly until it produced certain physiological and
psychological reactions that were identified with the stages of insight knowl-
edge as set out in The Path of Purification. U Nu's plan was to make the center
the starting point for a reform of the entire Burmese Sangha, but he fell from
power before he could achieve his aim. Still, the center spawned many off-
shoots not only in Burma, but also in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, and the
West, making the Mahasi method one of the more prominent meditation
methods in present-day Theravada. U Ba Khin, Burma's accountant general
in its first decade of independence, also established his own personal medita-
tion center in Rangoon, with himself as teacher, and his method of practice