A former Burmese soldier, living his life with "complete awareness from moment to moment"
The following is an excerpt from Alan Clements’ Burma’s Voices of Freedom, Volume II. This astounding exchange with a Burmese man who is at once a meditator, a Buddhist, a military man, and a politician reveals how he attempts to integrate all these disparate parts of his life. This also happened to be the basis for a question I posed to Alan in our discussion earlier in the year.
Alan Clements: Are you a religious man?
U Kyi Maung: It is a difficult question for me to answer. I live by a few precepts taught by the Buddha. If I were to tell you what these precepts are, I’m afraid you might be confused; so I’d rather not elaborate. Be it sufficient just to say that whatever they are, these few precepts have enabled me to get on well with my life. For example, you were quite surprised when I told you how much we laughed together on the day of [Aung San Suu Kyi’s] arrest or again in some grim episodes that we covered together. It can be explained by the fact that the narrator had no regrets at all for what had happened in the past. The “I” and the “me” of the past are dead and gone. By the same token, the narrator of the present is not worried about what might happen to “him” of the future. In fact, “he” is not status-conscious at all. What I strive for is to live a life of complete awareness from moment to moment and to provide the best service I possibly can to all living beings without discrimination and with a detached mind. Does religion serve politics? I do not speculate. I just try to do my best.
Alan Clements: Sir, you follow the teachings of the Buddha which is the path of non-attachment. May I ask, how does your understanding influence your leadership in your people’s struggle for democratic freedoms?
U Kyi Maung: Drive around the city streets and you are bound to come across big red billboards at road junctions on which are written slogans reflecting the current thoughts of the authorities. These billboards are representatives of the forces we have to contend with. Someone once wrote that “the kindest of men had to watch their words.” One of the things that Buddha taught us was to step outside ourselves and see our own stupidity—as often as we can. We regard the teachings of the Buddha as an inner compass to keep ourselves on course. Actions geared to the mood of the moment and not related to the overall strategy could prove to be disastrous.
Alan Clements: Sir, before your resignation from the Burma Army you were a respected commander. You were in combat, you’ve faced bullets and I suspect that you’ve killed people—the enemy. As a Buddhist can you kill with love in your heart?
U Kyi Maung: Yes, I have killed men in war—the enemy. But with love in my heart? You can’t lie truthfully, can you? So no, I wouldn’t call it love in the real sense. I’ll explain briefly. I was not fighting out of hatred for the enemy who was attempting to crush us. It’s just honest combat. I had a job to do and I was doing it.
Deputy Chairman of the National League for Democracy U Kyi Maung is regarded as the man most singly responsible for leading the National League for Democracy to overwhelming victory in the elections that took place in Burma in May 1990, while Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and U Tin Oo were in detention. In his youth he joined the struggle for independence from Britain, suffering head injuries during a demonstration in 1938. At the outbreak of war, he joined the Burma Independence Army and later rose to the rank of colonel. He was strongly opposed to the military takeover of 1962 and was therefore forced to retire in 1963 from control of the South-Western Command. He was twice imprisoned, for a total of seven years, and in 1988 on the outbreak of the democracy movement he was imprisoned for a third time but released after a month. In September of that year he became one of the twelve members of the Executive Council of the NLD and it was in that capacity that he led the party to victory in the 1990 elections after the leadership of the party had been arrested. In September of that year he was tried by a military tribunal and sentenced to twenty years in prison. However, he was released in March 1995 and soon resumed his work for democracy as Deputy Chairman of the NLD. A cultivated man with a great love for literature and music, he is known by many for his immense courage and his commitment to the freedom of his country.