Monks in Bagan in need of food

Local volunteers have reported that monks in Bagan are in urgently need of alms-food, and so our local team is concentrating on collecting funds for this region now. This is the first of several upcoming reports to come. As such kind of information is seldom reported elsewhere, we hope that the wider audience of international practitioners and meditators may become informed by this writing, and can support those monastics now facing such difficulty. 

The Bagan area’s ancient majestic temples are famous with both local and international tourists. In fact, thousands of monks and nuns live in monasteries in the small villages that are found amidst the temples of Bagan. These monastics rely on villagers for food and other support, and their lay supporters rely in turn on tourism, to be able to support these monastics. This article describes the hardships currently being experienced by monastics in Bagan through interviews with some of their local sponsors.

The tourism industry in Myanmar and Bagan has experienced a steep decline in recent years, leading to high unemployment among the region’s lay population and creating a severe economic crisis. According to local volunteers, the hotels, inns, restaurants and other businesses that serve the tourism industry are mostly owned and run by people from other areas of Myanmar, particularly those from cities like Mandalay and Yangon. The bigger sites are owned and run by larger corporations based in other countries. Locals are employed at these businesses, or they might run small businesses involved in primary production of lacquerware, which are sold at low prices to bigger businesses, or sold in small shops or stalls around temple entrances. This is how they make the livelihood that supports the region’s monastics. 

Describing the monks’ alms rounds, a local named Ko Oo said to me, “Since the coup, it has become really hard and takes a lot of time--about one or two hours--for monks in Old Bagan to walk their alms-round in Nyaung-U, which is the nearest residential area. The monks from Min Nan Thu village or West Pwazaw [tiny hamlets between temples] have to walk for as much as an hour and a half one way to New Bagan!” (New Bagan is an area where locals were forcibly relocated by the military in 1990. It is a rural area without access to proper facilities, roads, water or electricity. Some residents believe this was done out of punishment for the resident having supported Aung San Suu Kyi in the 1990 General Election. For more information, see this article in Lost Abroad.)

“In normal times when tourism in Myanmar was developing successfully, the monks didn’t need to go so far for alms-rounds because the locals who run the souvenir shops at the gateways to the most famous temples could afford to offer food to the monks,” Ko Oo said gloomily, recalling the days before the pandemic and coup. The monks in monasteries near the temples could easily get enough food from lay supporters at the temples, who were able to offer them rice and curry. However, after tourism in Bagan collapsed following the military takeover, the people running the shops could not even make enough to support themselves, let alone give to monastics. Now, the monks and novices have compassion for the economic hardships of their lay supporters and so they walk for more than an hour to go on their alms-rounds, looking for new donors to feed them. Thus the collapse of tourism has made life more difficult for monastics in Bagan. 

Monasteries such as Shwe Chan Thar Monastery near the famous Ananda Temple and Kyan-Sit-Thar U-Min Pariyatti Monastery near Gu Byauk Gyi Pagoda have large monastic populations. The former has 25-30 novices and the latter has 70-100 monastics in total. Similarly, meditation centers in the east of Bagan and the southeast of Nyaung-U have over 100 nuns in residence. Shwe Gu Parahita Monastery near the famous Shwezigon Pagoda in Nyaung-U has 70-80 novices who are mostly orphans from ethnic minority groups. These large monasteries are having trouble feeding their large monastic and young novice populations. In the regular days before the pandemic, the job of feeding, educating, and clothing these monastics was not so challenging. Now, and especially after the coup, their struggles have increased because of the lack of local visitors to Bagan, though more people did come for the most recent New Year Festival. 

Contrasting the big monasteries and meditation centers, some might think the secluded forest monasteries are not experiencing any hardship. However, this is not true. They are also in dire need of food because they are located far from residential areas and close to mostly unknown temples, pagodas and stupas. These tiny monasteries with only a handful of monks are isolated from the villages of Old Bagan, New Bagan and Nyaung-U. Like the monks in the larger monasteries described above, these monks also have to walk for more than an hour for alms. 

A monk at one such forestry monastery told me that things were especially hard during the third wave of COVID-19 infections in August and September last year. Due to their isolation, these forest monasteries have little access to medicine or medical care. He said that when one of his fellow monks was sick, he walked all the way to Nyaung-U in search of a donor who could help provide medicine. On the way, he was given a ride on a motorbike, but when he arrived, the market was not open and most of the shops were closed. The entire town was silent like it had been abandoned. He walked around in search of a pharmacy but when he finally found one it did not have the medicine he needed in stock. Depressed and almost in tears, he walked all the way back to his monastery. Fortunately, a monastic supporter near a temple he passed on his way had some medicine to offer.

The monk who spoke to the volunteer said that none of his fellow monks passed away because he was there to care for them as they fell ill one after another, but many monks in other forest monasteries died from COVID-19 infections. At one monastery, all three monks were infected simultaneously and all three died in short succession because they had no one to care for them. This is the tragic news about Burmese monks and nuns which no one is hearing about, buried under the cacophony of far worse atrocities affected our homeland every day now. It is hard for us to stay alive while also helping monks survive while following their vinaya, monastic rules. But we try. 

After passing through the pandemic, monks and nuns are still faced with the problem of having to travel long distances to find alms-food. Even after such travels, there is no guarantee they will even be successful. Some monks have decided to move to monasteries that are closer to urban areas or villages, though in their hearts they do not want to give up their forest seclusion. This is another way the coup is attacking the heart of the Dhamma practice in the Golden Land.

These stories come from informal conversations our volunteers had with monks in Bagan when they visited to investigate the situations there. Please take the time to share this with practitioners who may consider a donation to support the monastics of Bagan in the wonderful land of Myanmar.