Untangling Myth from Memory
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“My main mission, so to speak, is to clarify the differences between the many rumors about Myanmar, that is a special focus of mine-- the myths going on both inside Myanmar and outside Myanmar, about Myanmar, which are all very much related.”
Born in 1942, trained in physics, theology, and sociology, and ordained as a Protestant minister, Hans-Bernd Zöllner spent years serving congregations in Hamburg before being sent to Thailand in the 1980s, where occasional visits to Burma drew him into its enigmatic orbit. What began as pastoral duty soon turned into a scholarly obsession. His later academic career at the Universities of Hamburg and Passau, and his affiliation with UC Berkeley's Numata Center for Buddhist Studies, anchored his lifelong quest: to understand the entanglement of Buddhism, politics, and myth in Myanmar’s history.
From the beginning, Zöllner resisted the easy binaries that so often dominate outside portrayals. “The media have their own image of Myanmar, which is still a little bit like the title of one of my books, The Beast and the Beauty, the confrontational view between good and evil.” Western reporting, he argues, cast Burma as a morality play: dictatorship versus democracy, the monstrous generals against the saintly Aung San Suu Kyi. That frame never fit. “I would argue that both with the Rohingya and with the understanding of democracy on the side of Aung San Suu Kyi, that was just a big misunderstanding on the side of the Western observers as well, maybe partly in Myanmar as well.” For him, the gap lay in a failure to grasp the cultural and spiritual frameworks that underpinned Burmese political life.
At the heart of his analysis is democracy itself. “The Burmese concept of democracy is a concept of qualitative democracy, the quality of the rulers comes first," he says. "And the Western concept is a concept of quantitative democracy, the number of votes comes first.” Zöllner suggests that to Burmese citizens, legitimacy has long rested less on procedure than on the perceived righteousness of the ruler. For Western observers, democracy is about numbers: ballots counted, majorities secured. This fundamental difference, he argues, explains the dissonance between Suu Kyi’s domestic popularity and the eventual disillusionment abroad.
Zöllner elaborates that for a brief span— five or six years— two concepts of democracy coexisted uneasily. On one side was Suu Kyi’s vision, rooted in the ancient Buddhist idea of the Mahāsammata, the great elect chosen by the people to embody justice and order. On the other side was the military’s claim, grounded in karmic merit and institutional control. The experiment could not last. “It did not work,” Zöllner notes flatly. After General Aung San’s assassination, he suggests, the potential unity of these traditions fractured: one path became civil, the other military. They evolved in parallel but never met again. The 2021 coup was, in his reading, the predictable outcome of that unresolved split— another turn in Myanmar’s long cycle of unification and rupture. This unresolved tension, he adds, is part of a larger rhythm in Burmese history, where hopes for unity dissolve into division, only to resurface again.
To explain why these cycles persist, Zöllner turns to Buddhism. For centuries, Burmese kings derived legitimacy through a reciprocal relationship with the Sangha, the monastic order. The British broke that chain in 1885 when they abolished the monarchy, leaving Burma without a unifying institution. Unlike Thailand, where the monarchy continued to anchor Buddhist identity, Burma drifted into a vacuum. Students and monks filled it, leading protests and revolts, but the intertwining of religion and politics only deepened. Outsiders, Zöllner insists, rarely understood this. They treated religion as private belief, when in Burma it remained inseparable from political authority.
It was in this context that the regime sought to cloak themselves in Buddhist legitimacy in the 1990s and beyond. “The generals from 1988 on, totally different from Ne Win, believe what they do because they are legitimized by the good karma that they must have deserved in their former lives, and therefore they are legitimate rulers,” he says. Where Ne Win’s rule had been rooted in control and ideology, the new generation leaned on religious symbolism. They built pagodas, welcomed relics, and staged rituals to project karmic merit. Sitagu Sayadaw even endorsed their campaigns as necessary to protect the Buddhist faith. Other monks and institutions sometimes resisted, sometimes complied, exposing how fractured the Sangha itself had become under the pressure of this new state Buddhism being promoted. And yet these gestures were not superstition, Zöllner emphasizes, but deliberate strategies to claim divine sanction. In this worldview, he continues, rulers governed not by the will of the people but by the weight of their karma. If the people resisted, they— not the rulers— were at fault.
Against this stood Suu Kyi, whose appeal drew from a different Buddhist thread: the righteous ruler chosen by the people. Her speeches in the 1990s reveal an effort to educate citizens into this vision, blending moral authority with participatory ideals. To the West, she looked like a universal democrat. To Burmese audiences, she resonated as a figure of just rulership. These different readings, Zöllner suggests, explain why the world celebrated her as a saint only to condemn her when she fell short during the Rohingya crisis. The West’s “roller coaster” view of Burma, as he puts it, rose and fell without ever being anchored in real understanding. “That is one of my personal critical points to Western policy with regard to Burma, that is a roller-coaster affair, up and down and not guided by any given knowledge into the country.”
Zöllner’s scholarship has long been shaped by tracing myths back to their roots. His Myanmar Literature Project is one example, exploring the Nagani Book Club and other works that inspired independence leaders like Thein Pe and Ba Hein. He has shown how such texts shaped the nationalist imagination, demonstrating that Burma’s modern crises cannot be divorced from its intellectual and cultural history. That same instinct guides his reflections on human rights. In Theravāda Buddhist philosophy, he suggests that the very idea of rights clashes with the doctrine of anatta, or no-self. If the self is impermanent, he asks, how can it lay claim to rights? Western thought, by contrast, enshrines rights as innate and inviolable. This divergence, Zöllner suggests, underpins decades of failed dialogue. While the West demands adherence to universal principles, Burmese leaders think in terms of duties, karma, and collective harmony. He feels that neither side is able to fully comprehend the other.
Even when speaking of today’s junta, Zöllner avoids simple caricature. As a private person, he admits that he finds their actions abhorrent. Yet as a scholar, he insists on asking why they believe what they do. They are not simply gangsters, he argues, but actors within a worldview that convinces them of their legitimacy. The tragedy, as he sees it, is that the opposition, too, has been drawn into absolutism. He suggests that the People’s Defense Forces, born from the Civil Disobedience Movement, have resorted to violence of their own. Myanmar, Zöllner laments, has never cultivated traditions of compromise. From Aung San’s assassination in 1947 to the latest scorched-earth campaigns, he laments that disputes are too often resolved by force. That cycle, more than any individual, is what he believes is keeping the country trapped.
Zöllner ends with a reflection that bridges scholarship and spirituality. He urges outsiders who take an interest in Myanmar— or any predominantly Buddhist country— to begin with a genuine interest in the roots of religion. The challenge, he says, is to distinguish between the personal essence of belief and the distortions of institutionalized religion. He recalls a Catholic scholar’s remark that Jesus and Paul awaited the Kingdom of God, but what came instead was the Church. For Zöllner, the parallel is clear: the institutionalization of Buddhism has served power more than faith. “Institutionalized religion is always a problem, and we have to try to find our own way to live by a personal religion that can guide daily life and encourage good deeds.”