A Moral Reckoning
Coming Soon….
“I didn’t come to study subject deliberately with a focus on Buddhism.”
Justine Chambers is the author of Pursuing Morality, a book that explores Buddhist moral life among the Plong community in southeast Myanmar—known to outsiders as Pwo Karen—particularly in and around the town of Hpa‑an. Chambers chose “Plong,” the term the people use for themselves (literally “humans” or “humankind”), to center local self‑identification. Her work, the product of many years of immersive fieldwork, traces not only Buddhist ethical practices in everyday life but also the entanglements of those practices with political transitions, spiritual power, armed conflict, and minority identity in Karen State.
Chambers’ academic interest in Myanmar originated in undergraduate work in Australia, where she supported refugee communities from the region. That led to a decision in 2011 to work with refugees at the Thai border town of Mae Sot—a hub for NGOs, refugee advocacy, and research related to Myanmar, especially the Karen community—just as Myanmar was opening up after decades of authoritarian rule. This proximity to political transition and long-standing violence sparked her curiosity about how Karen communities—particularly those not based on the Thai-Myanmar border—were responding to change. Hpa-an, the capital of Karen State and majority-Buddhist, became her primary research site.
She was surprised when she first arrived there: rather than a conflict-ravaged zone, she found a bustling market town teeming with young people, ambition, and optimism. “For a long time, Karen State generally has been considered in the literature as a conflict zone and a place of suffering. But when I got there, it was something very different!”
Still, amid the hope and energy, Chambers noted widespread moral uncertainty. This unease—about Buddhism’s place in changing society, about outside influences, about the erosion of local tradition—became the emotional and intellectual anchor of her research. That is why ethics—or śīla, the Pāḷi term for “morality” or “ethical conduct”— sits at the heart of her book, rather than the concept of the Buddhist religion in general.
The word “pursuing” in her title is deliberate as well, as it signals motion, struggle, and incompletion. “Morality is not innate,” she says, noting that it has to be cultivated. To Chambers, it is a lived, embodied pursuit, a striving enacted through daily actions, thoughts, and decisions, and embedded in social structures. Especially in the Karen Buddhist context, there are different parameters for ethical action according to gender, age, class, and position. For the Karen, sīla shapes community cohesion, spiritual legitimacy, and relations with the land itself.
Chambers takes pains to correct a common misperception about the Karen. They are frequently portrayed as primarily Christian. But while Christian Karen communities, especially in the refugee camps and diaspora, are highly visible, the majority of Karen people inside Myanmar—particularly in the lowlands—are actually Buddhist. Many of her interlocutors narrated a proud lineage of Buddhist practice dating back centuries. Chambers’ book thus functions as both ethnography and corrective history.
In the Karen Buddhist context, spiritual authority is also tied directly to ethical conduct. The more strictly one adheres to moral precepts (such as the five precepts for laypeople or 227 for monks), the more spiritual potency one is believed to accumulate. “The way people understand power is fundamentally through being moral people,” Chambers explains. This moral power is not just personal but environmental: it’s believed to affect weather, crops, peace, and the presence or absence of spiritual disturbances in the land.
This leads her into a discussion about the non-human world, of spirits and karmic forces. The Karen Buddhists who Chambers studied make regular offerings to spirits and interpret misfortunes—like sickness, natural disasters, or even suicide—through spirit-related causality. Far from being “superstitious” holdovers, these beliefs are thoroughly integrated into Buddhist moral reasoning. To live ethically is also to live in respectful alignment with non-human entities.
Chambers is careful not to draw hard distinctions between so-called “pure” Buddhism and indigenous beliefs. She notes that some monastic leaders have tried to sanitize Buddhism of its supernatural dimensions, particularly since the 1980s, but says it has done little to change everyday practices. Whether caring for a house spirit or revering a deceased monk believed to be an arahant, people move fluidly between a Buddhist cosmology and local animism.
One key thread in the conversation concerns how morality becomes entangled with violence. Related to this, the most controversial subject in Chambers’ book is U Thuzana, the Sayadaw of Myaing Gyi Ngu, and spiritual patron of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a Buddhist armed splinter group that broke from the Karen National Union (KNU) in 1994. U Thuzana is revered by many for “bringing peace” to the region and building thousands of pagodas, but also condemned for his association with the displacement of Muslims and the forced conversions of Christians. Chambers met him during her fieldwork and recalls his presence vividly. “He has such a presence and command over people... I personally found him very charismatic.” She acknowledges that many outside observers view him as a villain, but argues that it’s important to understand how ordinary Buddhists perceived him: not as a warlord, but as a figure who restored morality and peace through religion and ethical revival.
Yet that spiritual-moral project has come at a high cost. The DKBA’s formation helped enable the fall of Manerplaw—the KNU’s headquarters and a symbolic stronghold of federalist dreams during the previous revolution and resistance movement against the entrenched military. Many Karen Christians trace the destruction of their lives and communities directly to U Thuzana’s activities. Chambers admits that his legacy is very difficult to come to grips with. “I still grapple with it all the time,” she admits.
The moral complexity of ethical behavior isn’t confined to monks or soldiers. It’s baked into everyday life. For example, she describes how some wealthy donors are businesspeople involved in questionable enterprises like gambling or drug smuggling, and they fund local monasteries to gain public merit despite their dubious backgrounds. “It’s not about being a good or bad person,” she explains. “You should always try and do good things... but it’s never black and white.”
This blurry moral economy, in which harmful acts can coexist with spiritual merit-making, is not unique to Myanmar. But in the Karen Buddhist context, it is particularly salient due to the overlapping pressures of conflict, religious revival, and national marginalization.
Chambers also highlights the ways in which ethics is tied to identity. For example, some Karen Buddhists she studied wear traditional clothing, follow vegetarian diets and engage in daily meditation. These practices not only mark them as moral individuals but as properly Karen.
Chambers’ research raises important questions about how communities navigate moral life in conditions of severe structural constraint, such as military occupation, economic uncertainty, and sectarian tension. What does it mean to be good in a world that constantly tempts or forces you to compromise? To these questions, she offers no easy answers. Her work is more diagnostic than prescriptive. But it provides a richly textured picture of a community grappling with moral life in real time—negotiating inherited Buddhist frameworks, local spirit beliefs, historical traumas, and contemporary challenges.
Coming full circle, she says her book argues that morality in this context is not about rigid adherence to rules but about striving in uncertain conditions—that is to say, “pursuing morality.”
She ends on a reflective note, summarizing both the beauty and the contradictions of what she found: “It’s not just about your own individual path [or even] salvation... it’s also about community, how you exist within that community, and how you are [a] moral being within that community.”