Episode #251: A Sacred Struggle
“There's really not that much attention on the history and the lives of Christian communities in Myanmar,” says Alexandra Kaloyanides, addressing her recent book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom.
Kaloyanides actually took a rather circuitous route in arriving at this subject. While in college, she enrolled in the Antioch Buddhist Studies abroad program, in Bodhgaya, India. There she lived at the Burmese vihara and practiced meditation under Munindra. Later, she spent a month in Myanmar, learning about gender issues within the Saṅgha. This led to her becoming an editor at Tricycle for six years, where she focused on the American Buddhist experience. Finally, as she began exploring grad school options, she decided to go in a somewhat different direction, choosing to look into Christian communities in Myanmar. “I became fascinated with this idea of these young evangelical Americans who ended up sort of by accident in Burma,” she says. “I wanted to tell that story, because of the way that I had come about as a young American who ended up in Burma, and then thinking about this longer history of Western fascination and confusion and conflict regarding Buddhism.”
Back during her first visit to Myanmar, she had also visited a few churches. “I was focused exclusively on Buddhism, but I visited a few Catholic churches and said some prayers for my Catholic mom,” she recalls. But after returning to the States, she couldn’t find many serious books or academic articles describing Christian communities there. What little she did find was quite critical, either presenting a rather one-dimensional picture of manipulative missionaries tricking the gullible natives into conversion, or shrewd locals feigning an interest in the faith in order to gain material benefits. For this reason, part of the approach she wanted to take involved cultivating an appreciation for the agency of those ethnic peoples who did decide to take on that new faith, as well as immersing herself in the culture of American Baptist communities, to better understand their background and rationale. At the same time, she felt it important to address the pervasive chauvinism found throughout the missionaries’ writings. “Even the most sensitive missionary reports back to the States, they still present Buddhism as inferior to Christianity, even when they're celebrating Buddhism and saying how wonderful [those] teachings are,” she notes.
Describing the backdrop to those initial missionary efforts in the East, Kaloyanides contextualizes it within the pervading Orientalist perspective of the time. She notes that the origins of missionary interest in Asia can be traced to early 19th century theories that ancient Sanskrit manuscripts told of a Jesus-like figure, leading some to suspect that the messiah had actually traveled to Asia, but in the ensuing centuries, his teachings had been lost there. “Therefore, [their thinking went], this place is so ripe for Christians to come and reintroduce the teachings of Christ,” she says. “The early missionaries and their sense of ‘this land of darkness’ that they could bring light to that was very different from their own, this did support a larger, imaginary binary that then ended up supporting colonialism. However, there was also a self-romanticization, thinking about ancient Christianity in these exotic ways and reimagining their own paths and futures.”
In any case, based on these theories, a group of earnest American missionaries set out for India. But because this was only a few decades after America’s own rebellion against British rule, not surprisingly, there weren’t exactly cordial relations between these American missionaries and the British colonial authorities ruling the subcontinent, so much so that they did not even permit them into the country. So it was that that first batch of American Baptists, led by Adoniram Judson, boarded an outgoing ship and found themselves in Rangoon. This accidental voyage marked the start of the Christian mission in Burma, in 1813. Interestingly, this predates the era of British colonial rule there; more often, in other parts of the world, Christian missions followed in the wake of colonial conquest.
Moving her focus to the ethnic perspective, Kaloyanides notes that Westerners weren’t the only ones harboring a similar mythology around this time. She explains that some Karen tribes spoke of a prophecy regarding a book that had somehow become lost to them, but whose spiritual truths would be delivered back to them by a future messenger. For this reason, the American missionaries were warmly welcomed by the Karen; to them, the arrival of the Christian faith was not seen as something foreign, but rather as the return of that ancient, lost wisdom. This mythology served cultural and political as well as religious purposes for the Karen, providing them not only with a rationale for why they had suffered so much loss at the hands of the Bamar Empire, but also hope in the form of regaining a lost identity. As for the American missionaries, Kaloyanides notes how some of them even began to speculate that the Karen might be one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Kaloyanides describes other curious intersections between these otherwise disparate cultures; for example, a strong belief in supernatural powers and invisible forces, held by both the Bamar and the region’s ethnic groups, mirrored the post-Civil War interest in America in trying to communicate with the dead. But Baptist missionaries were horrified by the large number of Buddha images found across Burma, misinterpreting it as idolatry. “They lived in a certain kind of stark culture, in the sense that they probably had never even seen a painting or an etching of Jesus ever in their lives before they left! So there were no visual depictions of Jesus or the Saints or Heaven that they would have had experiences with.” She notes that they had a particularly troubled relationship with Burmese pagodas, towards which they expressed a mixture of fascination and horror, all the while struggling to understand the role that pagodas played within the faith. Some missionaries held such an extreme fear of pagoda spaces that they all but advocated for them (along with all their Buddha images) to be reduced to rubble; others were less strident, and tried to understand them on their own terms, so as to better develop strategies to undermine the Burmese people’s fervent faith in Buddhism.
Kaloyanides next examines how education factored into this equation. Her research into education led to appreciate, in particular, the empowerment of missionary women through their role as teachers. Teaching was their sphere in the evangelical movement. Kaloyanides makes a connection between how missionary women became empowered a educators, and how in Burmese education, women were similarly beginning to carve out a space during that time, with some even becoming proficient in Pāḷi. She also describes how missionary women formed their own mini-community within the broader missionary movement, often corresponding with each other. They also came to balk at the traditional “men going out into the jungle to preach to grateful natives” model, which was not very successful. They understood that conversion was a process that needed time and repetition, and that media in various forms—such as books—helped. So they lobbied to have resources put to schools as opposed to just sending men out to preach. Towards this end, they also brought in modern scientific objects like globes and telescopes, which were new to Burma at that time. These were very compelling for the local population, drawing attendance to the schools. A more modern education, in English, is actually one of that movement’s enduring legacies in Burma.
Yet unfortunately, from the missionary perspective, the attraction of those schools had little or nothing to do with Christian doctrine, and regardless of method, attempts to convert the Bamar were not successful at all. Kaloyanides characterizes the issue as how a Burmese person might have framed it, something like, “I hear what you're saying about this great God of yours. We've got a lot of gods and spirits, too, but none of them are actually going to get us all the way [to full liberation].’”
Still, the response from non-Bamar peoples was wholly different. “The story of an all-powerful God that could forgive sins was something that was really attractive,” she notes, as was “joining a Christian community that transcended the local environment.” In particular, these tribal communities were drawn to the idea of being able to be “saved” in this very life, rather than having to wade through countless incarnations, dictated by karma, until they became enlightened.
Kaloyanides also explains how missionaries impacted Burmese culture in unintended ways. For example, Christians imported the first ever printing press into the country in 1816 in order to make the Bible more widely available. Decades later, the use of the printing press by the Burmese played a pivotal role in being able to widely share the Buddhist sermons of Ledi Sayadaw. And again, missionary school education had a lasting impact, opening up the doors to a different worldview. One notable example of a Bamar who used his education to great advantage was Sayagyi U Ba Khin, who attended prestigious St. Paul’s on a scholarship. By learning English and rising to the position of a government minister, U Ba Khin was then able to teach Buddhist meditation to foreigners, something that would have been unimaginable in a previous generation.
Interestingly, the Baptist missionaries became very intrigued by a mysterious Burmese Buddhist sect known as the Paramats, whose interests seemed to dovetail with their own. Deriving their name from the concept of paramārtha, or “ultimate truth,” they rejected the ritualized observances of the religion, such things as bowing to Buddha images and even giving alms to monks, advocating that the true Buddhist path involved direct realization of ultimate reality. Their beliefs were seen as heretical by the royal court, who persecuted the Paramats; some adherents were even crucified as punishment. Missionaries saw this group as representing a possible wedge that could be exploited to enable Christian conversion, though Kaloyanides dismisses as just deluded fantasy. However, she did find some interesting areas of overlap in the two groups. “I was interested in the way that for both of these minority religious groups, the Baptist Christians and the Paramats, that objects were key. They were focusing a lot of attention on Buddha statues and pagodas objects, and so this idea that religious change was happening around conversations of immaterial and material powers became really interesting to me.”
Although it was obviously the missionaries’ goal to convert the Burmese to Christianity, ironically, their presence ultimately facilitated a greater understanding of Buddhist thought in the West. Kaloyanides notes that perhaps the first Buddhist books that came to America arrived in the form of kammavaca, or manuscripts written on palm leaves, containing ceremonial instructions for ordinations and other rituals. These were looked on with suspicion by American Baptists, who looked askance at even the more ritualistic performance of Catholicism, let alone an entirely different religion; they were more interested in using their understanding of those books as a means to undermine and hopefully subvert the local faith. She also describes how inadvertently—and maybe ironically—those kammavaca ended up providing the basis for a wider understanding of, and interest in, basic Buddhism as understood in the West. However, she notes that as the field of Buddhist Studies developed, early Buddhist scholars came to view those kammavaca mainly as ritualistic, cultural “baggage”; their interest was uncovering the “real” teachings of the historical Buddha.
In her final analysis, Kaloyanides characterizes the missionaries’ work in Bamar communities as a failure. “Burmese Buddhism became, if anything, more pronounced, stronger, more powerful in the face of all of this change and challenge!” On the other hand, their “sweeping and ambitious” program in ethnic territories was very successful, so much so that the military has been long trying to suppress ethnic Christian practices through Buddhist missionary efforts. Kaloyanides points out this conflict has only gotten worse since the military coup, and she fears for the ethnic Christian communities she had been in touch with over the years she spent on her research.
“The question I really had was what role did this small and quirky mission have to play in some of those bigger changes [that happened in Myanmar]?,” Kaloyanides asks rhetorically, describing the core thesis of her book, while noting that it continues to be a question that she explores. “To really think about the more subtle influences, the way people are thinking about geography, modernity, world religions, all of that. We all know intuitively that Burma goes through this huge change there… and people don't talk about or think about Christianity that much! But there's places where there's this big impact.”
In closing, Kaloyanides calls attention to “the power of compassion, forgiveness, or grace,” that has characterized how some ethnic Christians have been able to respond in the face of generational trauma at the hands of an oppressive Bamar military. “That's what religion feels like, what it means to them,” she says. “In trying to tell these stories, that's the real challenge, because you could spend a lot of time on the atrocities and the horrors of colonialism and imperialism and cultural misunderstandings. But you also do want to make space for the power of those things like compassion, of grace, and of liberation.”