Myanmar Without the Dhamma: Reporting on a Soapbox
What a powerful conversation. Daw Viranani, an American nun who has been in Myanmar since 2006, spoke to us from Chan Myay Myaing Monastery in northern Yangon about the current situation. Although the noise from military jets interrupted our talk several times, the wisdom of her words still came through. While our podcast episodes usually take weeks to produce at minimum, given the importance of this talk, we are working to get this out in just 48 hours. We can only do this with your support, so please consider making a donation to help our efforts on this series. Please note that the following excerpt has been edited for written form.
“That honoring of complication is something that I really see missing, in what is written about this country.”
“The Dhamma is so central to this culture, and so not understood by the people who write about this place in the media from overseas. So all those sorts of things get reported from a vacuum of understanding about how incredibly important it is, for this whole culture. It's woven through the whole thing. And these implicit assumptions about how the practice affects one's life, aren't even understood, they're not part of the conversation.
And also not part of the conversation is the fact that it's complicated! And that understanding of complication is a very dharmic understanding, actually, because when you understand Dhamma, you understand samsara. And you understand the vagaries of samsara, you understand that things are complicated, and not black and white. And the conditions are very difficult.
And that honoring of complication is something that I really see missing, in what is written about this country, and what is written about the players that create the news that other people in the rest of the world absorb about this country, the big players on both sides of the aisle. And so it's very easy to demonize certain people because of one thing or another. But that negates the very fact of this complication.
And there's so much that we do not understand not being here, not living here. And even I as a foreigner being here for a long time now, I know there are things about this culture, I will never understand. So to not overlay my own ideas of right and wrong so rigidly on this, is also an act of Dhamma.
And that's also missing when you're reporting on a soapbox without understanding that.
So the understanding of Dhamma is incredibly important. How am I responding to this, and overlaying my own ideas on this culture that to me is quite different from mine, and holds values that are quite different from mine: political values, social values, Dharma values. The Dharma values I resonate with, the rest is often a mystery.
There's so much that gets left out. It's a very two dimensional view of this country when I read something in the press from outside, and it frustrates me because they're just not getting it. This Dhamma aspect really needs to be taken into account, both the the implicit aspect of it as it plays out in everybody's day-to-day life, but also, the understanding that we overlay our own views on something that is much more complicated than we're giving it credit for.”