50 Asia The EconomistNovember 16th 2019
21T
hey hadtravelled for hours, some for
days. It didn’t matter. They had made it
to Taung Pyone. Every August hundreds of
thousands of pilgrims from all over Myan-
mar descend on this village 20km north of
Mandalay to commune with nats, spirits
willing to bless the faithful with good for-
tune if they are given the right offering.
Nats accept bananas, coconuts, booze and
cash—the more the better. At this year’s
festival, devotees clutching wads of bills
queued under a gazebo to meet one of the
nats’ flesh-and-blood envoys, a medium.
But the time-honoured display of piety is
marred by seven Buddhist nuns with
shaved heads and pink robes, who are bick-
ering with the devotees. Nat worship, the
nuns insist, is base superstition—a stain
on the true faith.
Buddhism is the overwhelmingly domi-nant religion in Myanmar. Roughly 90% of
the population is Buddhist. There are some
500,000 monks and a further 75,000 nuns
in a country of 54m. Holy folk have often
been at the forefront of politics, leading the
failed “saffron revolution” against military
rule in 2007, for instance. More recently
nationalist monks have helped propagate
the idea that Buddhism is under threat in
Myanmar, and urged holy war against Mus-
lims—a campaign that helps explain pub-
lic indifference about the army’s campaign
of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a
Muslim ethnic group living in the extreme
west of the country.
Some monks rail not against perceived
external enemies, however, but against
cankers within Buddhism. Han Tun, a 65-
year-old spirit medium or natkadaw, was at
Taung Pyone festival three years ago whenten Buddhist monks wielding metal rods
disrupted a spirit-possession ceremony he
was attending. They threatened to beat the
50-odd people there if they refused to hand
over their offerings to the nat. Han Tun and
the other mediums complied, but the
monks tore down the shrine’s decorations
and smashed statues of the nats anyway. “It
was the worst experience of my life,” says
Han Tun.
It would not be the only act of desecra-
tion he would witness. Han Tun and three
other veteran natkadawsclaim that, start-
ing about ten years ago, Buddhist monks
began to target nat-worshippers. Some-
times they just scolded and insulted them;
at other times they physically threatened
them, stole offerings of food and money
and destroyed statues of nats. These at-
tacks have taken place not just in Taung
Pyone, they say, but at other festivals and
spirit-possession ceremonies around the
country. Khin Swe Oo, the custodian of the
most prominent nat shrine in Taung
Pyone, says that shouting, threats and
physical destruction of holy objects have
occurred every year for the past five years. A
decade ago, she notes, such disturbances
were rare.
Anawrahta, the most celebrated king of
medieval Burma, drew up an official list of
37 nats to be assimilated into the Buddhist
pantheon. To this day every Burmese vil-
lage has a shrine or two to local nats. Yet
many Burmese Buddhists disdain spirit
worship. Keziah Wallis of Victoria Univer-
sity of Wellington in New Zealand says that
the rift first appeared in the 19th century,
when a new understanding of Buddhism as
a rational philosophy free of the mummery
of religion began to take hold. Raucous
spirit-possession ceremonies, lubricated
with alcohol and hypnotic music, were at
odds with this conception of Buddhism.
Some began to describe nat worship as a
corruption of the faith, to be tolerated only
because it was traditional.
No longer. Hostility towards the spirit
lords has grown over the past decade, says
Ms Wallis, due in part to the opening of
Myanmar to the world. Urbanites are
ashamed of what they see as Buddhism’s
“dirty, shameful, crazy cousin”, as she puts
it. Similar movements to cleanse Islam of
what purists see as the superstitions of un-
educated villagers have a long history in In-
donesia and Malaysia. Efforts have been
made to purge Buddhism of folk religion in
Sri Lanka and Thailand, too.
Establishing the identity of those re-
sponsible for the attacks described by the
natkadaws is difficult. No individual or or-
ganisation has claimed responsibility. Za-
wana Nyarna, an abbot from Taung Pyone,
claims that the monks from his monastery
and the six others in the village are inno-
cent. Several natkadaws think that some,
perhaps all, of the individuals perpetratingTAUNG PYONE
Not content with bashing Muslims, monks are now turning on folk religionBuddhism in MyanmarNat guilty
fernos, says Mr Rice. Many Australians
worry about such changes. Claire Pontin,
deputy mayor of New South Wales’s Mid-
Coast Council, has seen her “damp, green
land transform in a matter of years”. Her
council declared a climate crisis weeks be-
fore the fires started closing in.
The conservative government coddles
Australia’s coal industry, however. It at-
tacked the opposition Labor Party’s plans to
cut emissions at elections earlier this year
and won. The prime minister, Scott Morri-
son, has refused to say whether a link may
be drawn between the fires and climatechange. Instead he has offered “thoughts
and prayers” to the victims.
Other members of his coalition are
more vociferous. A former deputy prime
minister, Barnaby Joyce, reasoned that
Greens were partly to blame, since they
have campaigned against controlled “back-
burning”, which clears the bush of dried-
out undergrowth. “We’ve had fires in Aus-
tralia since time began,” said his successor,
Michael McCormack. He dismissed at-
tempts to link them to global warming as
“the ravings of some pure, enlightened,
woke capital-city greenies”. 7