A Pagoda Festival

In the latest image by the Burmese cartoonist JMP, he portrays his usual poorly behaved monk dancing and enjoying himself as the historical Buddha looks on. Clearly on pagoda grounds, a DJ is seen behind a booth blasting out music over a loudspeaker as our bad monk moves to the rhythm. He says, "You also need to dance, Gautama Buddha! I hired a whole band here!"

The image is clearly a commentary on what many Burmese have come to call "loudspeaker culture." To back up, definitions of public space are in essence cultural, with Western countries tending to make a greater distinction between public and private areas. This includes not only one's physical presence, but also the airwaves as well, with judgments on the appropriateness of invading so-called "private" spaces with unwanted sounds. While noise ordinances are common in the West, most all of Asia has what could be called "loudspeaker culture" in some form. From government propaganda to door-to-door salesman to political candidates, sending out one's message into a community-- and wanted or unwanted, into one's home-- is not an uncommon phenomenon in Asian countries.

And yet in Myanmar, it has taken on greater implications. Partly this is because more and more Burmese Buddhists are calling out the incompatibility between the more meditative and mindful parts of the Buddha's teachings and the ear-splitting sounds that loudspeakers produce, especially when they are on monastic grounds. And yet one cannot reference this context without bringing in the unusual tale of Klaas Haytema, a 30-year old Dutch tourist who, unable to sleep one evening in his Mandalay guesthouse in 2016 due to religious chanting being cast on loudspeakers, simply went next door to the monastery to unplug their sound system. The consequence? A sentence of one year of hard labor for "insulting religion."

So there is indeed a lot embedded in this simple cartoon, not least of which is the divergence between the contemporary Burmese monk engaging in a very worldly activity while his spiritual master looks on askance.