Sunda Khin Part 2
“I heard about the successes of U Ba Khin in healing other people’s ailments, with the eyes, the ears, etc.” Sunda Khin says, referencing the great meditation teacher’s reputation as a healer. “I do know that my father felt that U Ba Khin had more scientific knowledge of trying to heal or to find a way to help people who might be going through some of these ailments that are not being healed by medicine or by meditation at the other meditation centers.”
This second part of Sunda Khin’s interview picks up where the last episode left off, describing the circumstances that led her father, U Chan Htoon, to suggest to a young Indian businessman named S.N. Goenka that he should learn meditation from Sayagyi U B Khin at International Medication Center, to cure his migraine headaches.
Sunda Khin then talks about her younger years, describing how she grew up as the daughter of the country’s first Supreme Court Justice. She has clear memories of spending many happy days in her childhood at General Ne Win’s home, as there was a distant family connection between and Sunda Khin’s mother and the general’s wife, Katie. An official car would often come to pick Sunda Khin up and bring her to their house, where they would spend hours playing Scrabble with Ne Win’s and Katie’s daughter.
She describes when General Ne Win temporarily took power from 1958-1960 in what is known now as the “Caretaker Government,” before he returned control back to a civilian-led government. She recalls that people were happy enough with military rule during those two short years: the authorities were efficient in cleaning the streets, granting business licenses, and overseeing development in ways that civilian administrations had struggled during the Parliamentary Democracy period prior to the military takeover. But then in 1962, Ne Win led the military to overthrow the democratically elected government, this time keeping control for many decades, and plunging Burma into a period of economic chaos and corruption, along with decreased civil liberties. “The Tatmadaw was very much loved, and people took pride that we had an army,” Sunda Khin recalls of the time around Burma’s independence. “The Tatmadaw was started by General Aung San, but in later years when the military decided that they wanted more power and had the coup, then people began to see the military in a different light.”
Ne Win certainly did not get on well with Sunda Khin’s father. The general was suspicious of anyone educated or who had international connections, and U Chan Htoon had both. He had gained his law degree after studying in England and Sri Lanka, and was instrumental in helping the well-known Asia Foundation open an office in Burma, along with several other Western institutions as well. After the coup, however, Ne Win abruptly closed off the country to the outside world; her father was arrested alongside many other democratic leaders. However, the reason for U Chan Htoon’s arrest was unique, as they saw him as a threat to their power. Sunda Khin explains the military was afraid about a particular provision in the Constitution (which her father had written), which specified that an interim government could be formed with the Chief Supreme Court Justice and two members of Parliament.
At the same time, Sunda Khin’s mother lost her successful bottled drink factory (just as the Goenka family lost their business empire) to the regime’s nationalization policies. She remained bitter to her last days that past acquaintances, who were now on the Revolutionary Council, had wiped out her family’s livelihood, reducing her to selling her jewelry just to survive. Ne Win’s xenophobia also brought about an unfortunate, mass exodos of Indians, Chinese, and Anglos who had long called Burma home, and so many Burmese lost lifelong friends.
In trying to make sense of that tumultuous time, Sunda Khin falls back on the widely held, Burmese Buddhist concept of tha gyarr thar tha nar (သိကြားသာသနာ). This belief refers to the type of karma that has almost immediate consequences in life, which can deliver devastation not only to individuals but entire societies. This concept is based on an alleged prophecy by the Buddha that the Sāsana would disappear from the world after 2,500 years. According to this uniquely Burmese prophecy, Indra, the heavenly being, was shocked upon hearing this, and came down to Earth to respectfully request that the Buddha extend it another 2,500 years. While he relented, many Burmese consider the year 1958 (also the year Ne Win first took power) as the end of pure Buddhism and the start of “Indra’s religion,” a time when chaos and violence ruled the land.
Sunda Khin explains that since then, the Burmese have not had any rights or freedom to speak of, and she notes her mother often favorably compared the prior era of British rule to what Ne Win and the military wrought. “[The British] gave us laws and roads,” she recalls her mother saying. “Of course, we grew up with this idea of wanting to have an identity, [but now] they're all fighting and the country is disintegrating. There won’t be anything left there, with scorched earth policy, and they burn and bomb.” So for Sunda Khin, the only way to explain the sudden and almost complete loss of prosperity, safety, and opportunity is that it occurred at the time of tha gyarr thar tha nar. Moreover, she recalls her father reassuring her that faith in Buddhist teachings provide a kind of worldly protection, so Sunda Khin wonders if the total upheaval and devastation wrought by the military might be a consequence of a kind of loss of purity in the Burmese people’s collective practice and devotion. In any case, the prevailing belief that the Burmese are now living in “Indra’s time” has continued until today to have tangible consequences: the more recent, anti-Muslim “969 movement,” for one, claims that because the Buddha’s protection of the Sāsana had ended in 1958, they claimed the mantle of “protecting Buddhism” for themselves.
Since Sunda Khin’s story also intersects with the mission of Sayagyi U Ba Khin and S.N. Goenka, and a prophecy appeared around the same time that is woven into that tradition; namely, that the 2,501 year mark actually fell in 1955, the year of the 6th Buddhist Synod, which also coincided with Goenka’s first course at IMC. In this version of the prophecy, those two events heralded the resurgence of vipassana meditation, which is predicted will last for the next 500 years if the practice is kept “pure.” (Because the actual year of the Buddha’s death cannot be pinned down with accuracy, the two prophecies, drawn from the same source, calculate the end of the first Sāsana period three years apart.)
U Chan Htoon was incarcerated for over four years and endured terrible conditions, serving as a kind of tragic precursor for how the military regime persecuted, tortured, and even killed pro-democracy leaders over the decades. Sadly, the pattern would repeat itself even within her own family— her brother was imprisoned for helping to write a letter protesting the military’s handling of former UN Secretary General U Thant’s funeral in 1974, and then again in 1988 for smuggling out key information and media to the Swedish journalist, Bertil Lintner, and BBC journalist Chris Guinness. The latter connection was especially important because Guinness’ reporting was the first the world heard of the brutal crackdowns of that era (Guinness continues to play a role in advocating for the democracy movement, reporting on the aftermath of the 2021 coup).
Before his arrest, U Chan Htoon found himself caught up in emerging, geopolitical issues between the US and the Communist world, as the Cold War was heating up throughout Southeast Asia. Since 1958, he had been the president of the very influential World Fellowship of Buddhists (WFB), an organization which attempted to forge a pan-Buddhist alliance. Drawing on Buddhist principles, the WFB lobbied the United Nations for a nuclear test and weapons production ban, and were active in other ways in worldly affairs as well. However, US observers became concerned about covert Communist influence in the Organization; in some cases, it wasn’t even behind the scenes, such as when WFB delegates from China tried to pressure the organization to expel Taiwan, while also calling for Beijing to host the WFB’s next conference. U Chan Htoon also had his challenges on the domestic front. He found himself having to navigate tensions between traditional monks in his country who could not see past Burmese Theravada orthodoxy, and the WFB’s more open-minded mission to bring together different iterations of Buddhism into a single, pan-Buddhist organization. But her father had earlier experience balancing these staunch, Burmese Buddhist perspectives with divergent understandings and practices, which he gained while being on the Convening Board of the 6th Buddhist Synod in 1955.
Yet the thorniest of these issues occurred when South Vietnamese delegates demanded that the WFB stand up to Ngo Dinh Diem’s discrimination against the country’s Buddhist minority, a story told in detail by Eugene Ford in Cold War Monks. This alarmed the US, as such a move would certainly weaken one of their most important allies in the region against a rising Communist tide; indeed, the nominally unaligned but Communist-leaning leader of Cambodia, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, used this claim as a pretext for organizing massive, anti-Diem demonstrations across the country. And it was at that already tense moment that the Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, further inflamed passions by infamously setting himself on fire to protest the Buddhist community’s persecution at the hands of the government (an action that U Chan Htoon strongly condemned as violating core Buddhist tenants). When Malcom Browne’s Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of the monk’s suicide became public, the protests against Diem only grew.
U Chan Htoon immediately recognized the danger that the WFB could fall entirely under Communist influence as a result of the situation in South Vietnam. He had to figure out how thread the needle between having the WFB express solidarity with the South Vietnamese Buddhists while not making statements that might be exploited by the Communists. He managed to do so by downplaying WFB’s institutional influence, thus lowering the expectations as to what they could accomplish, and instead recommending that foreign government and the United Nations play a larger role.
However, before this crisis could be resolved, he was arrested, and the WFB headquarters was moved from Rangoon to Bangkok— which caused American observers to breathe a sigh of relief, as they viewed the conservative Thai regime as a trusted anti-Communist partner in the region. Meanwhile, Ne Win worked to ensure that the largely Buddhist population of Burma did not get drawn into supporting South Vietnam’s Buddhists, which could drag his nation into the War. Indeed, some in the WFB attributed U Chan Htoon’s arrest to Ne Win’s fear that the latter could rally Buddhist support to challenge his recent coup.
Sunda Khin tells another story which yet again highlights the curious way her family has been involved in so many touchstone events from the past half century of Burmese history. One day a client of her father discussed a troublesome inheritance case. They needed to urgently sell a lakefront property, and offered it to U Chan Htoon. He agreed to purchase it, furnishing his ruby ring as a deposit. Later, Daw Khin Kyi, General Aung San’s widow, asked if she might be able to acquire it, as she desperately wanted to leave their family home, where her son had tragically drowned. U Chan Htoon agreed, but as ownership deeds were not so formal then, it was never quite certain whose name the title was transferred to. Eventually Aung San Suu Kyi inherited the house, and it became world-famous site of her decades-long house arrest. As the military regime was long intent on discrediting or removing her to decrease international sympathy towards her plight, they coerced her brother to challenge the ownership of the home, and so U Chan Htoon’s role in acquiring it became relevant again even several decades later. Sunda Khin adds that her uncle Leo, an Anglo-Indian, became yet another family member to face imprisonment, for his role in providing Aung San Suu Kyi the typewriter she used to write her memoirs in that lakeside home while under house arrest.
Sunda Khin next describes her childhood friendship with the remarkable Louisa Bensen, a beauty queen of mixed Jewish and Karen ancestry who became a Karen insurgent leader after the 1962 coup, and whose life was detailed by her daughter in the recent book, Miss Burma. Since Sunda Khin only knew her from their time as Girl Scouts, she was shocked when she later learned of Louisa’s exploits. “Louisa was one of the most very even-minded, very kind, very quiet, very loving girl,” she recalls. “We never thought that she would be doing these things!” They later rekindled their friendship after the 1988 democracy movement, where along with Sao Shwe Thaike’s son, they all attended Gene Sharp’s important and well-regarded nonviolent training sessions in Washington, DC. She also took part in the government-in-exile that came after the 1990 elections were voided—the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB)—which many see as the precursor to today’s NUG.
Later on, during the transition years, Sunda Khin worked on several education initiatives with colleagues, funding various teacher training programs back home along with supporting monastic schools. Because she, herself, had benefited from a very good education, but after the 1962 coup most Burmese did not, she hoped to give back. But like so many other good projects, this all came to a sudden stop two years ago.
Sunda Khin was living in Maryland at the time of the coup. An acquaintance close to the military warned her that they were planning a takeover, but she didn’t believe it, and was shocked when it actually happened. “I had no idea that normal, sane people would destroy all that!” she exclaims of the progress that was being made during the transition years. And while Sunda Khin feels that this current revolution goes far beyond the past attempts— the access to technology, the understanding of social media, the brief taste of freedom the transition period offered, and building unity between diverse groups— she also acknowledges that an entire generation is being traumatized by incessant violence and trauma, which will take years to overcome. “These people are so angry,” she says about today’s activists, “and the anger is leading them to do all these things, and who am I to sit here and say, ‘Oh, this is wrong?’” So while there is now an armed component to the resistance movement, something that was never seen as either a materially or philosophically viable option in the past, she feels they have every right to now determine the best way to finally uproot this tyranny.
“A lot of things have happened, but I have a lot of hope for things to change,” she says in closing. “I might not see it right now, or before I die, but I'm hoping that it will change and that the people will be able to have their own government and their freedom. That is my hope.”