When the Goats Chase the Lions
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“There is no such thing as ‘traditional Buddhism.’”
This assertion captures the foundation of Marte Nilsen’s work — her view that Buddhism, like any belief system, is continually reinterpreted through lived experience and social change. She studies how religion interacts with power, adapts to political and cultural realities, and how myths and symbols are used to justify or resist authority.
Nilsen, a senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), focuses on political and violent conflicts in Southeast Asia, particularly Myanmar and Thailand. Her research explores the intersection of religion, art, politics, and society to better understand Myanmar’s ongoing crisis. “I’m a scientist, and I’m a researcher,” she says. “So I’m always looking at religion as part of society, not as an individual endeavor.”
She begins by describing a painting by Burmese artist Chuu Wai, created for her research project on propaganda. The painting depicts the sixteenth dream of King Pasenadi of Kosala (Mahāsupina Jātaka), a story that explores how societies collapse when morality is overturned. Chuu Wai reinterprets the image: rather than goats (commoners) overthrowing lions (nobles), her version shows goats as ignorant soldiers of the military and lions as righteous students and citizens forced into exile. “What we see here is that in her interpretation, the goats [represent] the ignorance of the military, and the lions are the righteous people, the students who are fleeing the country and are now living in Thailand, India, some in Bangladesh and around the world, really." A laughing demon in the background represents the generals, smiling while orchestrating chaos. For Nilsen, this image illustrates how traditional Buddhist stories can be reshaped to mirror political realities.
Building on that interpretation, Nilsen turns to Buddhist architecture and ritual, which she says have long been political instruments. During the late socialist era, when the regime’s legitimacy faltered, the military rebuilt temples and constructed pagodas to project spiritual authority. “The military really needed to take control of politics, obviously, but they did it through religion in many ways,” she says. By aligning itself with Buddhism, the state tried to assert moral rule. Yet monks, artists, and citizens consistently contested that claim, reinterpreting religion to resist power. Nilsen explains that this contestation was visible not only in words or politics but in the lived spaces of daily life — in temples images rebuilt by the state but reimagined by communities, in murals and performances that transformed propaganda into quiet critique. Through these cultural acts, she says, people reclaimed the same symbols the regime sought to control, turning them into tools of moral questioning. It is here that she draws a link between state-led religious propaganda and her broader point about how faith itself adapts and resists manipulation: “Religion is never a static thing,” she says, “It always evolves.”
Her propaganda project explores how opposition movements have used indigenous beliefs, myths, and spiritual symbols to challenge authoritarianism. She notes that Burmese artists have combined Buddhist and cosmological imagery to tell stories of resistance, continuing older traditions of symbolic dissent. Nilsen connects these creative responses to Thailand, where the military similarly claims Buddhist legitimacy while suppressing reform.
She then turns to the rise of the Ma Ba Tha movement. Nilsen explains that Ma Ba Tha gained influence by operating like a grassroots civil society network. Monks in the movement were embedded in local communities, offering welfare and education where the state failed. This close connection built trust that was later leveraged to spread nationalist and anti-Muslim rhetoric. The movement, she notes, was partly co-opted by the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) ahead of the 2015 election, when religion became a political tool. A key point here is that its appeal was rooted in genuine social unease, rather than ideology alone. Many followers also feared the erosion of Buddhist practice in modern life and worried about cultural decline. The growing visible presence of Muslims, even while not being accompanied by any objective population growth, intensified that anxiety. Nilsen emphasizes that while these sentiments were real, they were exploited to advance exclusionary politics.
Contrasting this movement with the rise of Trump’s MAGA supporters in the U.S., she comments that “there are real grievances in the population that they feel no one listens to.” She says this sense of neglect made it easier for political and religious leaders to manipulate fear and resentment for their own ends. Nilsen contrasts this with the National League for Democracy’s approach, observing that while Ma Ba Tha monks were embedded in communities and close to everyday struggles, the NLD leadership was often distant from the grassroots. “It's incredibly important for people who want to have a political impact or social impact to actually be there with the people,” she says, pointing out that Ma Ba Tha’s strength lay in its presence on the ground and its ability to respond to daily needs — something mainstream political actors struggled to match. Not all Ma Ba Tha supporters, she argues, were extremists; many were simply responding to insecurity and neglect. Still, those fears were manipulated to justify intolerance.
As she traces social change over time, Nilsen notes that taboos shifted with political openings. In the 1990s, political discussion was forbidden, but after the 2011 reforms, everything changed. “All of a sudden, the greatest taboo was not there anymore, and people just grabbed that — and then everyone was talking about politics.” She describes this as a remarkable transformation in public life, when private frustrations spilled into the open and political conversations once whispered in secret became part of daily life. The 2012 violence in Rakhine State and 2013 violence in Meiktila, however, revealed how religion could again be weaponized. The new freedom to speak politically was shadowed by fear of discussing faith, showing how fragile openness remained.
Nilsen reflects on Buddhism’s paradox in Myanmar — a religion built on compassion but at times used to excuse violence. She recalls that during the 2007 Saffron Revolution, monks chanted the Mettā Sutta, the teaching of loving-kindness, to guide peaceful protest. Less than a decade later, similar language coexisted with silence around the Rohingya crisis. She believes decades of authoritarian control corroded empathy itself. In her view, the repression that followed the Saffron Revolution extinguished much of the moral courage monks had once embodied.
Nilsen describes how the 2021 coup again exposed divisions within the Saṅgha. Some monks condemned the violence, while others urged restraint, seeing protests as disorderly. Younger generations, however, reimagined spiritual acts as protest — banging pots to repel evil spirits or hanging women’s garments to exploit soldiers’ superstitions. These actions, part ritual and part resistance, reveal how deeply cosmology still shapes Burmese life. Outside formal Buddhism, renewed interest in traditional spirit practices reflects the search for meaning amid instability. In describing the early months after the coup, she says the protests felt like a release of long-suppressed energy — chaotic, creative, and cathartic. “It was like it was a carnival, but ‘carnival’ meaning that you turn everything upside down, like everyday people can be kings. That's a traditional understanding of the carnival, that there are no rules.” Nilsen interprets this as a moment when fear momentarily gave way to imagination, when people inverted hierarchies to reclaim agency, even briefly.
Nilsen also discusses women’s roles in conflict areas like Kachin State. During the reform years, even as the rest of Myanmar liberalized, fighting there escalated. Women became community leaders — organizing schools, protests, and church initiatives that promoted critical thinking. Some worked within state structures to push change from inside. Nilsen sees in them quiet examples of agency that endured despite repression.
Overall, she observes that the semi-democratic decade from 2011 to 2021 produced an explosion of civil society. Local groups, schools, and associations flourished, nurturing habits of dialogue and participation. “Obviously, it wasn't democratic, but the civil society democratized Burma during that period — not on the political level, not on the structural level, but on the popular level.” That experience, she argues, reshaped social consciousness. Though many activists are now exiled or imprisoned, the collective memory of cooperation persists. She likens today’s diaspora to the 1988 generation who once fled, learned, and later returned to rebuild. The new generation abroad, she says, continues that cycle through education, art, and advocacy… even while they have no idea when they can ever touch their home soil again.
Nilsen concludes that Myanmar’s struggle is not only political but psychological and spiritual — a revolution of the mind. The country’s future depends not just on ending military rule, but on unlearning the fear and obedience instilled by decades of dictatorship. Real freedom, she says, will come when people reclaim the empathy and moral courage that oppression tried to erase — a reminder, in her words, of how all things shift and pass. “Life isn't permanent,” she says, referencing Buddhist teachings, “and everything will change. Nothing will stay.”