Transcript: Episode #342: An Irish Bhikkhu in Burma

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Host  00:19 

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Host  02:05 

For this episode of Insight Myanmar podcast, I'm really happy to be joined by the author, Lawrence Cox, who is actually a co author of a fascinating book called The Irish Buddhist, who is also Other two co writers were Alicia Turner and Brian bakhin, and we're going to be talking with Lawrence about the study of this really fascinating historical character that I believe is still relevant today in many ways, but brings a lost history of Myanmar and Buddhism and colonialism and Western presence in Myanmar. For those who haven't heard this story of really sit down and lockin, because it's a really incredible journey that follows So Lawrence, thanks so much for taking the time to join us. 

Laurence Cox  02:52 

Thanks a lot for having me.  

Host 02:55 

So before we get into this book and what you wrote, we're going to be talking about an Irish man who would take the Pali name dama loca when he was ordained. If you can tell us a bit about where you first heard of his story and what led you to want to go deeper into the rabbit hole of that research and then some of the difficulties of the research you encountered. 

Laurence Cox  03:20 

Okay, yeah. Well, rabbit hole is definitely right, because the three of us spent 10 years working on damaloka, so it was kind of 30 years of people's work to dig this story out before we put it into the book. So very much a rabbit hole. How I came across him was very accidental. So I'd been asked, would I write something about the history of Buddhism and Ireland, which at the time I knew nothing about. I was a Buddhist, but not a Buddhist studies scholar at all in Ireland. But, you know, nobody really knew much about our history. So I started digging into it. Thought it might go back to the 60s or 70s. Then turned out, well, it goes back to the 1860s or 1870s and before that, and you know, started to dig up, as you do, one person after another, who Irish people, who'd been in Asia, who'd become Buddhists, who'd been influenced by Buddhism. But most of those people were, let's say, fairly Genteel. So they were educated people. They were not always particularly political people. They were attracted by the idea of something different. But they were quite high up in the social scale, and we knew that. Or I knew at that time, well, there are actually usually other stories to be found, if you really go looking. And I was looking and looking, and this was before there was so much material online, and came across this letter, supposedly written by an Irish Buddhist monk in Burma, as it then was to an atheist magazine in Kentucky, the Kentucky Bluegrass blade, saying, hey, here in Burma, we're celebrating Thomas Paine, the guy who'd written the Rights of Man and so on as famous radical writer, and we're very much in line with what you're doing in Kentucky or in the States. And I saw this, and I thought that's actually too good to be true. You know, I think this editor in Kentucky has made him up, kept digging and eventually found on ebay a postcard sent or sorry, not a postcard, an envelope sent from Rangoon, as it then was, by the Buddhist track society that this guy, udam Aloka, had signed himself as coming from, went, Hey, this was real. So that was absolutely crazy. Why is this Irish Buddhist monk in Rangoon in, I think 1907 or 1909 writing to Kentucky atheists. And meanwhile, Alicia Turner had come across a reference to him and Brian Bocking put us together and said, We have to find out more. So we did. 

Host  07:01 

Right? And so more you did find out. But even putting the minds of these three academics together and pulling your resources, it still was, the journey to learn more about them was far from smooth, as I understand it. The research was very challenging.  

Laurence Cox  07:17 

Yeah, absolutely. So, like censorship works in different ways, of course, today to how it worked back then. But there is always also a censorship, which is just, let's say, historical censorship. What stories do we choose to remember what stories are convenient to remember. What archives do we keep and today, what archives do we bother to digitize? So you know, if something was published in English in 1900 it's much more likely to survive than if it was published in even in Ba Mar, never mind in a minority language of Burma. And the same is true if it was published in Rangoon, as opposed to somewhere in the provinces, as they would have been called. And of course, it's also true if something was aimed at the Colonial establishment, was written by and for the people who actually ran colonial Burma, as opposed to being written for radicals. So we know of this whole radical newspaper, United Burma, that the political police of the day were very, very concerned about. We know it exists. We have not managed to find a single copy of it. It's vanished completely. So if anybody out there has a box full of United Berber it's a treasure trove, we think, yeah. So finding the right things, finding little snippets here and there, and putting them together to actually piece this story together in so many different countries as well. So we'retalking about the countries that today are Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, China, maybe Tibet also Australia, the US, it's a lot. 

Host  09:44 

Yeah, absolutely. And in those early chapters in your book, the reader definitely has a sense of the questions that you're left with, the puzzle pieces that you're trying to put together and understand you. Know, identifying where those gaps are, and trying to make educated guesses at where they might be connected and kind of tantalizing, given what's there, and also given what's not and what could be and what hopefully will be able to appear in later years, just to tell the story is really remarkable enough, and so let's get into that story before we tell the story of the Irish monk, as the book is called, if you could paint a picture of the background, the context and history of these years that we're looking at and the colonial experience in Burma at that time, so we understand the environment in which these characters are operating. 

Laurence Cox  10:43 

Okay? So there's so many ways of telling that story, right? But one way of saying it is okay, there is this empire, the British Empire, which, at the time, is the biggest that's ever existed. They proudly claim the sun never sat on it. Their opponents say rather well, the blood never dried, but it literally it goes around the world, and it's one of several European empires like that, which, at the time define the experience of most people in the world, in Asia and in Africa in particular, and to some extent in Europe, people's lives are shaped by this. So it's a it's a very, very differentworld, and some of the first dramatic experiences we hear from dama loka side are when he is challenging colonial power on the Shweta gun in Yangon Rangoon. And it's quite telling about the gun that the story has it, and in a sense, it's doesn't necessarily even matter if it was true, but it was believed to be true that the British barracks nearby had cannon pointed At the shewder gun, with the implication that if people were to revolt, if they were to cause too much trouble or whatever, they could just blow the thing up. So you know, Empire is not subtle in this period. It doesn'tpretend to be all nice and just there because people want it to be there. The brutality is very explicit, but also there you see, as well the religious significance of what's going on that it's understood to be a meaningful threat that you know this, the weather gun, the relics that are there, the history of pilgrimage, its visibility, and so on. All of this makes it an incredibly powerful political symbol to which Burmese people respond, as well as this being used then by the colonial power. So there's, there's one way of thinking about it, but you can also think about it by saying, well, the historical capital of Burma was Mandalay, and central Burma had only been conquered in 1885 there's this kind of low level counter insurgency war, because there's a guerrilla war that carries on until about 1889 so central Burma had only been part of the British Empire for about 11 or 12 years. By the turn of the 20th century. It's a very recent experience. But down in Yangon Rangoon, what became the colonial capital, rather than the Historic Royal Capital, and you know the historic one of the historic centers of Buddhism in Myanmar, Rangoon has been developed as a colonial port. So Rangoon is where the wealth of Burma is being sent out on ships, wood, obviously, jewels, all sorts of other things are being shipped out of Burma to for to make money as part of the British Empire, and that has to be made possible. So along with the sort of upper class. Civil Service, the officer class and so on. The missionaries. There are also an awful lot of ordinary sailors, for example, ordinary railway men, these kinds of things, whose work makes Empire possible. And it seems that just before he converted and became a monk, damaloka had been working as a tally man on these docks. So he'd been supervising people, taking cargo on and off ships, and keeping track that everything that was supposed to have gone on a particular ship had got on, everything that was supposed to come off had come off. So that's the kind of very practical reality, and that's a very multi ethnic world. Then Rangoon. 

Host. 15:52 

I think setting, setting the scene of the diversity, the way that capitalism was operating there, in the way that you tell in your book. And I think, um, that's moving in a direction that starts to approach, you know, both what's happening as well as the protagonists, his own socialist views, and how he's carrying those those criticisms, which then leads to his life. So I think that that setting in context is very relevant, very fascinating, too. 

Laurence Cox  16:21 

Okay, so what we can say then is, if you went down on those docks, you would see all kinds of boats. You would see paddle steamers. You would see traditional rowing and sailing boats, a huge variety and a huge variety of people, people from all over the world and many, many different languages. And of course, that's very common to port cities at any point in time. They'reInternational, multicultural places. So there are not only ba Mars, burmans, but there are also, for example, people from the deway to voi ethnic minority who are very much sailors, fishermenand so on, from deway, which is further to the south east, around the coast. And that ethnicity you can find in all sorts of ports around Southeast Asia. There are Irish, English, American sailors working on these docks or landing, staying there, getting back on ships. There's a very large Indian Muslim population. About half the population of Rangoon in this period is Indian, and they'remostly Dockers, so that again, people who've been imported to make this whole capitalist world work. There's a big Chinese diaspora. So it's an extremely vibrant, lively place. It's not as we'resometimes told to imagine the traditional past, homogenous. It's not simple, it's not quiet. It's incredibly noisy at times. 

Host  18:17 

That's wonderful, that's remarkable, and that's a really compelling and colorful backdrop to understand who this protagonist is as he fits in, and we'll flesh out his his life in just a moment. We've described a bit of the background of the country, the economy and the time period where this is operating, before we get into the life of the protagonist, the other kind of character I'd like you to flesh out and to tell us how the understanding of this was operating at that time. Is Buddhism and Burmese Buddhism, not so much what we're finding with Burmese Buddhism at the time, but how it's being understood because through the protagonist gaze, as a Westerner, he is interacting with his understandings of what, who was the historical Buddha? What did he teach, and what, what is Buddhism, and what is Buddhism in this country? And I think this is so important because for the audience listening today, particularly those Western meditators, even monks and nuns who have spent time in Burma, the the experience and the understanding that in contemporary times we've gained of what Buddhism is, what the Buddha taught, and how it's operated in Burma would have been very different over a century ago. 

Laurence Cox  19:34 

So there is a change happening in how people do Buddhism in Asia, there's a change happening in how Europeans think about what Buddhism is, and then dama loca is different again. Soyou've got not only in Burma, but also in Thailand. In many, many countries, there is a revival of. Buddhism in opposition to missionary Christianity. So Christianity arrives very much in this period under the shield of colonialism. It's very you know, the missionary is hand in hand with the military officer, more or less. And this is happening across Asia and at the same time then, and in response to this, Asian Buddhists are thinking, Well, what do we do? Who are we? What do we want to be? So national Sanghas, for example, are becoming much, much more important. One of the reasons we know more about Western Buddhists in this period is it's more of a public, political thing than you know. Maybe 1750 a Western sailor might have washed up somewhere, taken robes. It mightn't have been a big deal. It could have been a very local event within that particular monastery, or whatever. That's not true in 1900 in 1900 these things are much more centralized, so there's a kind of national reformism going on, but there's also this bigger wave of Pan Asian Buddhism, where people look at each other and say, Okay, this British Empire that we're in, it's multinational. It covers many, many places. But you know, what else does that? Buddhism does that? Yeah, because Buddhism connects not just the countries of today's Theravada. It connects them with the countries of the Mahayana. It connects them with India, which people then there's now don't necessarily think of as having living Buddhists, although there are some, but everybody knows that's where it comes from, India and independent Japan, one of the few countries not to be colonized. They are both thinking, is this? Is this a language that we can use to talk about what Asia could be? Can we find something which is genuinely Asian, which is quite modern, forward thinking gives us a way of connecting with each other. And of course, in this period as well, Thailand is one of the other few countries that hasn't been colonized the British exhibit expedition to Tibet is only about to happen. So Buddhism also stands for a certain kind of Asian independence. Japan is going, is about to defeat the Russian Empire in 1904 1905 so there's a big, big remaking of what is Buddhism, what's expected of a Buddhist monk, the move towards or indeed a Buddhist laity, so the double move towards more meditation, towards meditation for the laity, towards a lot more going on In vernacular languages, rather than in Pali or Sanskrit, all of that is happening. We're starting to see the idea of a political monk. So there's a big change happening in many different directions, that this is not just going in one direction, but so many thoughtful Buddhists, lay and monastic are asking themselves, in so many different contexts, what should we be? What does the Dhamma mean today? What should my life be like? And Westerners, as you say, many of them, particularly the upper class, educated ones. They know about Buddhism through books, so they've got some translations available. They know about some of the extraordinary archeological discoveries that are going on the historical sites of the Buddha's life. For example, Anagarika Dharmapala is pushing for Bodh Gaya to become owned by Buddhists, a center for the Buddhist world. So there's archeology, there are those texts, and people in the West, educated Westerners, definitely have an image of the Buddha as not. It's not quite the image that we would have today, because it's not an image centered on meditation for Westerners at the start of the 20th century, I'm not sure that anywhere, certainly in Britain or Ireland, I don't think you could find. Anyone to teach you how to do Buddhist meditation in 1900 people are kind of aware of it, but what they're really interested in is the ethical quality of the Buddha's life and Buddhism as a philosophy. So in the same way that maybe we say somebody lives philosophically, people are very impressed by what they understand Buddhism as meaning in everyday life, and by the vision of the world that they think is associated with it. So that's typically what they're looking for. They want to read texts. They want to think about what those texts mean, which isn't wrong, but it's not quite what we'd expect. Yet they are not mostly going. Do you know what I really want to meditate? That's not their entry point at all. For educated Westerners in 1900 it's long before the hippie trail. But then dhammaloka is different again, because, to the best of our knowledge, he doesn't come at Buddhism through reading books and getting an idea. Oh, there's this. There are these exotic countries on the other side of the world, and they've got ancient wisdom, and I need to connect with that. What we see in his life is he really loves people, and he falls in love with the Asian countries that he encounters, and in particular with Burma Myanmar. He arrives there, and he is just blown away by how people are. He's very clear about this. So he's very warm hearted. He really likes people. He learns local languages, several of them. And what he does when he becomes a Buddhist monk, you know, people sometimes ask him, will you, will you give a talk on the Dhamma? And he says, Look, Burmese monks can do that much better than I can. Yeah, you don'tneed me to do that. What he really practices as a monk is the vinia. So he is really fierce about, you know, not touching money. He's really fierce about going on the arms rounds, about not drinking all of those kinds of things, which in this period are still what most people in Burma Myanmar think is definitive of Buddhism, is the monk who is really practicing the Vinaya. So a lot of Westerners in this period really struggle. They struggle with the food. They struggle with maybe not eating afternoon. They struggle with going on arms rounds. He loves that stuff, so he wants to. He uses being a monk as a way into really having a place to be in Burmese society, if that makes sense. 

Host. 28:23 

Yeah, and that's just fascinating to contemplate today. And I'm so glad you brought that into such relief, because I think for meditators listening to this, especially who have their own history and relationship with Burma, I know in my case, when I first came to the country and I started without any context. Started to hear something about Ananda metia. And there's, there's that book, I think it's called the soul of Burma. Is it, fielding who wrote, and just reading these books or hearing about these characters without context, I just felt this, this incredible affinity and affection towards like, Oh, and, you know, waxing Oh, they're, they're having this, the same experience I'm having now. It's this trajectory of what they did before, and just, you know, filling the heart, and as I would start to learn more about the nuance of the history, realizing, well, this, this isn't exactly so. And I think that, you know, for many today who have, as the case of myself, have had their lives transformed in big or small ways through meditation, and then Burma being the one of the origins and reciprocals of this meditation that is the that is the pathway, the yellow brick road, that is leading to monasticism or teachings or Practice intensive courses, which obviously didn't exist then at all in the way they do now, intensive meditation courses. And so to put yourself back in this character at this time and think about, well, how did he understand Buddhism and monastic Buddhist monasticism, and what was leading him in this direction? If. Not the transformative experience of meditation, that's it's such an incredible thing to wrap your mind around and not get caught up in superimposing Western Sanghas today, et cetera. And so I'mwondering with that, you mentioned what he was doing as he became a monk and was wearing the robes and how he was what was important to him. I wonder, if you know anything about what was driving the decision, just as we talk about Western practitioners today and what's it's a bit easier to track what's driving their motivation and decision to want to take up robes. Do we have any idea in his case, as a before he was a monk, as a laborer, as you described a tally men looking at the possibility of being a monk, what would have been? Do you have any ideas or assumptions of what would have been motivating him to make such an enormous transition in his life? 

Laurence Cox  30:55 

Right? Yeah, so I think there's a personal level, and there's almost a global level, you know. And that sounds quite grandiose, but remember, you're talking about somebody who literally workedhis way around the world sailing. So, you know, he, he really did have a global experience, yeah. So if you did what he did, which is, he leaves Ireland maybe about the age of 14, gets himself to Liverpool in England, works his way across the Atlantic, works up and down the east coast of the states, and then he's a hobo. He works his way across the states as a migrant worker. He winds up in San Francisco, on the docks there, and he starts sailing on these ships across the Atlantic from San Francisco to Yokohama, and then we eventually find him in Rangoon, where he's clearly carried on as a sailor, as a Docker and so on. So if you do that, it's not like you get in a plane in one place and you come out and oh my goodness, suddenly it's very hot. You have lived that global experience in a very different way, including as who is on the crew with you changes in each port you get off and you're going backwards and forwards. You're not doing all of this in one journey. So there's that global as well as the personal. So I'll say a bit about the personal. First, like a lot of Irish people, it seems that he probably had had some alcohol problems. So maybe there was alcoholism in his family, we don't know, but he certainly gives the impression that he had struggled with the bottle. Of course, that's common for sailors. He'd struggled with violence. Perhaps he had also not been very well educated, and this may have had to do with his relationship to religion. So the house he was born and grew up in was literally in the shadow of the Catholic Church in a little place called Bucha stone on the Dublin coast. And these days, of course, if you put those things together, you think, my God, you know, was there abuse there? But certainly there would have been violence, yeah. And there would have been, you know, he's pulled out. Officially, he's pulled out of school at the age of 12 to work, and then he leaves, uh, leaves Ireland altogether about the age of 14. So what we see at a very personal level is becoming a monk. Offers him a disciplined life, a clear life, a clean life, perhaps he seems, you know, very proud of having left these things behind, which is totally understandable. Yeah, that's in some ways much more relatable when you talk to people who are long time meditators today, you find out, yeah, okay, there were reasons in their previous lives that really made them look for this and the lack of education. He is so proud of himself learning all these languages, learning to read and write, working in schools. He also sets up schools for so multi ethnic schools for the children of the poor. For example, in Singapore, he's clearly very, very motivated, and you can get that and of course. That's a common motivation for Asian monks, as well as this feeling that, you know, I want to share education with young people. I want to share possibilities in that period. You know, the idea of setting up schools speaks to people's own experience, if they are poor but bright. So all of that is quite personal, but coming back to that global experience as well, that journey around the world, in an imperial world or a colonial world, it's one that keeps on bringing him into these sort of zones of ethnic conflict. So Ireland is colonized by the British the Ireland that he leaves, but then Liverpool has all these Irish dock workers fighting with the English ones. He crosses the Atlantic, and we find him in a hobo world. This is just after the American Civil War, where there are a lot of conflicts between particularly black hobos, migrant workers, and white ones, who are often Irish. We find him then in somewhere like Montana, and this is between the Battle of the big of the Little Big Horn, and you know, the final defeat of Native Americans in that part of the world. We find him crossing the Rockies where gangs of Irish railway workers are fighting with gangs of Chinese railway workers. And it's the same on the San Francisco docks. The Irish and the Chinese are at war with one another. And what a lot of Irish people, maybe most Irish people, in those periods, do, is they really kind of retreat behind this sort of we're Irish, we're Catholic, we're white as well. Becomes very important. And clearly at some point he refuses to do that. He goes, That's not who I am. That's not what I want. He so he looks in the other direction. He learns people's languages. He really gets on with people. He's not prepared to have these tight racial boundaries. And I think perhaps that's some of what he finds as well. Is this thought of, you know, this Sangha, it's open to me coming from Ireland, and that's maybe particularly true of the monastery where he ordains. So the tavoy Monastery, from the deway ethnic group. The tavoy Monastery is very well known for having people there from all over. Yeah, it's got Western sailors. It's in Chinatown. Basically, people come there. It doesn't matter what the color of their skin is, it doesn't matter what their native language is. They're welcome. So that very kind of multinational space, which you know, of course, there's a long history of in Buddhism. I think that appeals to him. 

Host  38:29 

that your descriptions in the book, I should say of that to voi monastery, it was just fascinating. I've never read anything like it. It's the combination between a monastery and something of a guest house and a halfway home almost. But then, in the context of the your descriptions of the hobo culture, which you give other synonyms for that word beach combing, and he actually ends up being called the Beachcomber monk, tramp loafer, referring to these poor working whites and breaking down this, this, this kind of white this, this monolithic way that maybe we look at it when we're in more general terms of like, oh well, you have the white co the white people coming with the colonial administration, and Then the local natives, and you're breaking down how the poor, disadvantaged whites who come looking for work, just to try to survive like anyone else, are suffering in their own way and kind of anti elite and not benefiting from the system in ways we might think So. I wonder if you might describe a bit about what this first, this hobo culture, and what it meant to be a hobo at this time. And I think like this is where we might bring in Woody Guthrie or some later artists who the at least in my mind, introduced me to some of. These earlier concepts of that time as well as, you know, the poor working whites, and then fleshing out this, really, this incredible depiction that you give of this to boy monastery. 

Laurence Cox  40:13 

Okay, so, yeah, if we've read any Gary Snyder, maybe some of his earlier stuff, or Kero AX book, The Dharma bums, that picks up on this history of the American wobblies. So this kind of likemigrant worker trade union, which still exists today, are the International Workers of the World. And Woody Guthrie as well, kind of mythologizes that. But we know, you know, migrant workers, then as now, the fact of being poor may be dirty, maybe at the risk of violence does not mean that you are stupid, it doesn't even necessarily mean you're uneducated, though most of them have not had a formal education because there's just much less education available for poor people in the late 19th century. But they read, they read an enormous amount, and they debateand they discuss, and they argue about religion, and they argue about politics, they argue about Empire. They also argue about stuff that we'd find, you know, crazy today, because they also connect, you know, the latest discoveries of science or history or whatever they are interested in all these things. And people talk about, you know, the hobo University. There are hobo bookstores. There are all these, you know, little magazines, like political magazines, radical magazines like that, atheist one that I mentioned, the Bluegrass blade. These things get passed around. People, read them, people, share them, sorry with each other. And that's quite like the things then that we see his Buddhist Tract Society published later on. Because these are produced in really cheap paper. They're sold for small prices, and you know that they're short enough, but they're very argumentative. They're very polemical. And you have to imagine all ofthese people. They spend a lot of time sitting around talking to each other. Yeah, you know, if you were a migrant worker today, you're much more likely, if you possibly can, to spend time on a phone. That's how you're connected to people back then, obviously not back then. There's an awful lot, both for sailors and for migrant workers on land. There's a lot of sitting around and talking to each other, sitting around a campfire, maybe telling stories, somebody reading stuff out loud, and other people responding to it, because they're not all literate. That's very common. And yeah, atheism is a big issue. Revolution, social change, challenging empire, other people you know, maybe defending empire, defending God, or whatever you know, the fact of being poor doesn't mean that you're necessarily radical, but you know a lot more radical stuff in that world than we would expect. Yeah, and we see this as well, because you were talking earlier about the gaps in his biography. So very typically, he's we've got five different aliases that he uses, and that probably means there are a few we don't know. In the period that we do really know about him in Asia, we see him put under police surveillance, under intelligence surveillance, we see him put on trial for sedition. There's a kind of extradition order. We see him fake his own death. We see him disappear. So you know that's a world of you know working class radicals who are sailing quite close to the wind. But then we also see, hey, before that, there's 25 years of his life, and we don't know what he was up to. Yeah, we don't know. You know, was he a labor radical? Was he may be an Irish nationalist, radical Athenian? Was he in the Molly Maguires? Was he an anarchist? It's pretty clear he was an atheist, and that was a very radical thing to be back then, quite a working class thing to be. But there was something about it. That meant that even though this was somebody who was happy telling stories about himself, he was very careful not to connect who he was now with whoever they might still be looking for back then. 

Host. 45:16 

Amazing. And so when he became ordained, and he was an Irish monk, a white monk in Burma at that time. How did the Burmese regard him? That really must have been something to feel that their faith and their country was under some kind of threat, and then not necessarily knowing the distinctions and the elite whites and the poor whites to see a Caucasian man choose to leave his society and faith behind, seemingly even though he was an atheist that might not have been noticed so much by the by the general Burmese Buddhist. And what was their sense of seeing a white man wearing the robes and taking up their faith in their country? 

Laurence Cox  46:00 

Well, he becomes an absolute celebrity in Burma, but also in Ceylon, as it then was. For example, there are absolutely mass you know, his events are mass events. So he will speak in these little towns or villages in rural Burma, rural Ceylon, maybe elsewhere, you know, we don't. We've got really good documentation of these. And people will travel for three days to come and hear him, you know. And they will be very moved. They will make donations. He's quite a big deal by by kind of 1905, let's say something like that. And how does that come about? Well, when he'sordained, it's not a quiet affair. So there are some of the most senior monks in the country come to be part of it, as well as the abbot of the tovoi Monastery. It's a big sponsored affair, so there'sa Chinese Buddhist businessman who sponsors this. There's 100 monks being fed. There's 200 laity. It's written up in the newspapers, so it's quite a statement. And part of that statement from the senior monks is, yeah, you know, we're endorsing this guy. We think this guy is the right kind of thing. So why are they doing that? Well, I because of his past, and this political past, this experience with arguing, and also just being, you know, a bolshy Irishman who likes an argument and is really willing to go toe to toe with missionaries on this, he can do something which, at the time, most Burmese bhikkhus can't. So in Ceylon, bhikkhus have been arguing with missionaries for a lot longer. They don't necessarily need other people to do it. But in 1900 in Burma, it'sa little bit more like, let's say you might get a young person and go, Oh, do you know about this social media stuff we hear, we need some social media stuff. Can you do this for us? Yeah, yeah. I'm joking slightly, but clearly they need to answer the missionaries back. They don't quite know how to do it, but this guy, they trust him, and he's clearly pretty good at the polemics. He is willing to stand there on behalf of the Dhamma and push back against missionary Christianity. So they endorse him. They make a big deal out of him. And then, yeah, both in the city, and we can talk about his trial, if you like, but also in the countryside, where he gives these talks, people throng. People are really, really excited to hear Him and to see him. 

Host  49:24 

Right? Yeah, so that's getting into his life as a bhikkhu, and and, and now starting to to have a presence and an identity as a monk. And there's, there's so much there. I mean, you reference the trial that he underwent, how he was under police surveillance. There's there's so many twists and turns that the story takes. So where would you like to go next with fleshing out what whathappened next in his life and journey, and then kind of the deeper political, social, religious, colonial implications behind some of these things that would happen to them. 

Laurence Cox  50:02 

Well, let's talk about shoes first. Maybe Okay, so not only in Burma, but many, many Buddhist countries in Asia. In fact, you know many countries in Asia, full stop, if you go into if you go onto the grounds of a pagoda, if you go into a mosque, into a temple or whatever, you take your shoes off, right? So, absolutely basic sign of respect. And you know, there's famous photos of, I don'tknow, Barack Obama on the schwedon in bare feet with Hillary Clinton when she was, whatever it is, Secretary of State.  

Host  50:50 

Just  to interrupt you, I would add, was actually to give some background of that photo, which is fascinating. That was not a scheduled trip he was supposed to make. He saw it and wanted to go. The Secret Service were alarmed because they had not prepared for it, and they all had to take their shoes off and protect the president and but, but it happened. I mean, this also goes to supporting the point that you're the wider point you're making is that you have the most powerful person in the world making an unscheduled trip to a famous religious site in broad daylight with many people around and the Secret Service and the most powerful person all take off their socks and their shoes. 

Laurence Cox  51:27 

Yes, yes, exactly, so in 19 101 which is when damaloca Really makes shoes an issue. Europeans and colonial officials do not take off their shoes, okay? And this goes back to, in part, I think, the Indian revolt of 1857, this big, big shock that Europeans get when they look around in Asia and go, Oh, my God, we nearly lost India. And then they go, there aren't very many of us arethere. And there are an awful lot of them, meaning Asians. And how they respond to it is they become a lot tighter about what they expect of other Europeans. So Europeans are supposed to dress in a certain way. They are supposed to attend church. They are supposed to go home and marry nice English girls or whatever it is, not mix with the natives. So you get this kind of real color line becomes much, much sharper in the late 19th century as a kind of defense mechanism, and part of that is this insistence on wearing hats, but particularly wearing shoes, so not lowering yourself to the level of the native so I hope you can hear the inverted comments there, but it's very visceral, this sense of we don't dress like them, we don't lower ourselves to their level. And so even tourists, when people go on the schwedon as tourists, as European tourists, they insist on wearing their shoes, and you can imagine that's not a very comfortable thing. Sothere is this moment then when damaloka stops an off duty police officer on the schwed again. And he, of course, is Irish, but he is a monk, so he has done everything that you're not supposed to do as a white person. He has crossed that line. He has shaved his head. He is wearing robes, not European clothes. He's going barefoot, yeah? He goes on his arms round. Begging is completely unacceptable for Europeans. Yeah, totally unacceptable. So here's this barefoot Irishman confronting an off duty cop saying, Take your shoes off, and he really puts his finger there on that whole structure of humiliation, of racial separation, of we think we're better than you in a way that is really hard for the Empire to. Respond to because even though the Empire is racist, even though it is in one sense, hand in glove with missionary Christianity, it also says we're here for everybody. So we're in Ireland, we're here for Catholics as well as Protestants. In Asia, we are also here for Buddhists and Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims and whatever else you might be. We don't make a distinction. And what damalok is saying is, yeah, so do you actually haverespect for the shwetaka? Do you have respect for this pagoda? Are you prepared to say to Europe, it's actually you shouldn't wear shoes on the pagoda. And that just resonates and resonates. It becomes a big, big public issue, you know, and it carries on, as you probably know, until I think 1919, the issue is finally one. So it becomes a real kind of contested point in in Burmese nationalism, in resistance to colonialism and those racial hierarchies. And that's also part of why people respond to him, of course, is he is visibly doing something different. He's not just reading an English translation of the Dhammapada and saying, Oh, I think Buddhist philosophy is very fine. He has, as they say, gone native, and that's very, very threatening for the colonial power structure, and the other reason why it's threatening, not only in relation to shoes, is a lot of the soldiers, a lot of the sailors, a lot of the police and so on in colonial Asia are Irish, right? So the people who are holding the Empire down abroad. They are also being colonized in Ireland, and this is a period when Irish nationalism, and then eventually independence is around the corner. So there's this real worry. We don't want the Irish and the Buddhists talking to each other. We want them very safely in their own boxes. The Irish happy to be soldiers and cops, the Buddhists doing what they're told. Everybody separated by wearing different clothes and so on and so forth. And a kind of dramatic moment of civil disobedience, which is really what this is stopping this cop saying, Take your shoes off. You can't come onto the pagoda wearing shoes. It kind of symbolizes and dramatizes all of those different things. And people get it, yeah, you know, it's every bit as powerful symbolically as the British military pointing their cannons at the schwedger. 

Host  58:03 

It makes me think, as you're talking about, as we're looking at this, at his his challenge to the soul, the off duty soldier wearing shoes and challenging him on the inappropriateness of this it. Makes my mind wonder this kind of essential thing I want, and I wonder if you were able to divine his intentions, or if there were a mix of motivations there. To what degree is this challenge really being a devout Buddhist follower the Buddhist teachings, the pagoda representing this sacred place that has relics and a way to to to not want to disrespect or diminish the power of these relics, relics, and the relics and the pagoda itself being this, not just a representation of the Buddha, but if there really are relics there, Actually containing something of the Buddha or some enlightened figure or follower, and to what degree is this challenge being anti colonialist or anti capitalist, or anti elitist, or anti something? And this also relates to some of the talks that he was giving, these large scale talks that you're you're referencing, as well as the motivations that went into the Burmese Buddhist community and supporting him and seeing him as, as you described just recently, almost as a a secret weapon they can use against this proselytizing influence. And if I remember correctly, as you're talking about the the talks, the in the book, as you describe the Dharma talks that he's giving, I believe that you had written that he gave really more talks that were trying to challenge, challenge Christianity on its own grounds, referencing science and anti colonialism, the violence that went with it. Then, then actually dama talks, as we think about today, where he's. Talking about what the Buddha really taught and how to integrate Buddhist concepts into daily life. And so looking at at this, the example of the Dhamma talks that he gave, as well as this challenge to to wearing shoes in this place and perhaps other incidents in his life, are you? Are you able to distinguish To what degree it's Pro and to what degree it's anti, to what degree it's against, and to what degree it's promoting this new identity, these become, as well as perhaps other incidents in this life that can be that could have those shifting motivations as well. 

Laurence Cox  1:00:37 

Yeah. So, hmm. That's? That's a very interesting question. I'm going to start by saying that he probably feels, to some extent that being a monk, giving that example of living the monastic life that that is, you know, it's a teaching, yeah? Like the, you know, the Buddha's fourth site. It is an indication you can do this. Yeah, we don't, but we do see him preach quite a bit about the importance of education and about the evils of alcohol, the evils of opium and so on and so forth. So, you know that there is he does, you know, come out and say, you know, these are things that you should do education, these are things that you shouldn't do. I think with the shoes, it's absolutely what you've said there about being a devout Buddhist. I think there's also just, you know, a feeling of outrage at the disrespect that's involved, you know, because he has very consciously chosen not to imbibe this racist notion that, you know, European culture is this really superior thing symbolized By going around wearing shoes and what have you. And Burmese culture is this somehow lesser thing that you can just trample all over? Yeah, literally trample all over. So I think there is a Moe, a notion of outrage there as well, but that definitely, as you say, it goes together with choosing the right moment. And he has this political background. He has this political experience, because you've got to realize, you know, those kinds of events, they happened more than once. He wasn't the only person to ever make an issue out of somebody wearing shoes on a pagoda, right? So in some ways, it's a little bit like the Rosa Parks moment. It's not just an individual making an issue out of something unjust. It's the right person, the right time and place, and really knowing how to amplify this, how to say both this is wrong here and now, but also this is wrong in general. Yeah, and that, I mean, you know yourself in civil disobedience of any kind, that symbolic moment, the individual act of bravery or resistance or whatever, it's powerful. It's pretty powerful. So that's important. I think there's the outrage and there's the understanding of the symbolism that which is, you know, quite legitimate. It's not that that's a different political motivation. If you think something is wrong, then you might also want to oppose it in a way that will make a difference, not just in that case, but that will send a message that might help to change the situation. So there's that with his talks, as you say, a lot of them, they are quite as far as we understand it, because, you know, we've only got transcriptions of some of them, but a lot of them are moderately political. So I want to say moderately political. A thing that he says an awful lot, that he really hammers home about colonialism, is they will come for you with the Bible and. They will come for you with the Gatling gun. In other words, the machine gun. They will come for you with the whiskey bottle. Yeah. So that's pretty in your face. That's not pulling punches, and that's quite an analysis of colonialism. So religious power, and, of course, the schools and so on that go with it, military power and conquest, and then the sort of cultural destruction represented by the whiskey trade or the opium trade and so on and so forth. That kind of very, very destructive thing. Now you've got to say, as you say, he really challenges Christian missionaries. Why does he do this? Because if you stand up publicly and say, not just the Empire is violent, but we should get rid of the British Empire. That is treason. Yeah, yeah, that is potentially a hanging offense in Ireland, as in Burma. I said before that, you know, the third Anglo Burman war, as the British call it the conquest of central Burma. Had it only finished in 1885 there's counter insurgency after that, and all sorts of atrocities, yeah, like horrific, horrific stuff in defeating that counter insurgency, which they are, you know, they photograph some of these atrocities. So they are very prepared to be violent if they need to. And that means that it's one thing to say, Empire is violent. It's another thing to say, get rid of empire. But as a Buddhist monk, you can absolutely argue back against Christians, because, remember, this empire is supposed to be religiously neutral, but everybody understands that it's not so if Christians come and argue against Buddhism, then as a Buddhist monk, who actually knows the Christian Bible very well. You can argue back against Christian missionaries, and if you do it well, everybody knows what's going on. And there's this very characteristic story where a journalist observes him on a ferry across the Ganges in India, as it then was. And there is an Indian guy, Indian Christian convert, who is giving out these pamphlets, or selling these Christian pamphlets. And he runs into damaloka, and first off, he's blown away. It's like, who are you? Where are you from? And you know, I'm Irish and I'm a Buddhist monk. Well, if you're Irish, you can't be Buddhist, because all Sahibs so European white gentlemen are Christians. So there's a shock there. But on this ferry, there's an awful lot of Burmese pilgrims and Arakanese and Chittagong in and so on. And they're all watching this and grinning. And damaloka argues with this guy about his pamphlets. He argues with him about the Bible. He knows it very well. He wins the argument. The Christian convert at a certain point, pretends that he can't speak English anymore, and damaloka carries on the argument in what the journalist calls Hindustani, so Hindi, Urdu. And you know, all the burbese, arakades chitagodd grinning, because, you know, this is not just about Buddhism and Christianity. This is a bigger thing that's being played out in a safe and moderately legitimate way. Yeah, the Empire cannot, in fact, say, We're sorry, you're a Buddhist monk. You're not allowed to defend the principles of your religion. 

Host 1:09:21 

But eventually they do find a way to go after him. They do that twice, and you heard that before. So tell us about the literal and figurative ways that he's put on trial.  

Laurence Cox  1:09:39 

So, right, he gives a talk in or I think three Evening Talks in moong in late 1910, and Mun is it is a bit of a tense place, perhaps. So there. Is an Irish Christian school, clearly, St Patrick's, where there is, I think, a Buddhist Student Association. I'd say they're not very happy about that, because their idea, of course, is, we give you education and you become Christian and speak English and loyal Imperial supporters and so on. There is a Baptist missionary who is later done for the Institute for the Blind that he runs is quite an abusive place, so you know, and that the challenge to that is brought by local people, so it's quite a tense place, and they send somebody into his talks to take notes on what he said. Now, there's been a lot of this the year before in Ceylon, where Dharmapala, who is, of course, on the very radical end of Buddhist nationalism, anti colonialism at the time, has brought him on this. It's a real kind of rock star tour, and you it's like kind of a heavy metal Tour in, I don't know, the Bible Belt of the states in the 1970s some of the tension around it like it's in the media every day. The missionaries are giving counter lectures to his lectures. People send tom tom drummers into each other's talks. There are police watching. Apparently, they eventually change the law so that you're not allowed to preach about Buddhism in public, these kinds of things. So it's all got very tense, and this is partly because in India, Gandhi has started the boycott movement so around cloth and around salt. So Empire is Empire is not doing too well in 1910 they're a lot more nervous than they were, and they decide to try and make an example out of damaloka. And in fact, the way this goes becomes that particular paragraph about seditious libel, which is a very weird phrase, is then used to criminalize all sorts of anti colonial activists in the years that follow. So he's put on trial in Moe mie, and there is so much popular support for him, they have to put it off, so they cancel that trial. They put him on trial the next week. He's convicted. And this was probably a big mistake on the part of the local authorities. Legally, they should have got permission from the central authorities in Rangoon for doing this. And you can imagine maybe the central authorities are going, Look, these missionaries may be your friends, but this was really stupid. Please don't do this to us. But there you go. They put up so he's been convicted in Mong, he appeals, and that's going to be held in the trap that the appeal hearing is going to be in the central court, right on in the very center of Yangon, close to the Suu pagoda, and Well, when they put him on trial, he is pulled by traditionalist Buddhists, and there's going to be a lot of bhikkhus there as well. He's pulled in a cart as if he was a senior Sayadaw or a member of the royal family. So they pull them in a cart through the streets. And it's not just the Burmese Buddhist population that comes out. So the Chinese Bazaar, his monastery is in Chinatown. The Chinese bazaar shuts down. Remember his ordination, sponsored by a Chinese businessman. They all come with him, the Indian Bazaar, and this is now the Indian, mostly Muslim bazaar that shuts down. They come with him. Why is that? Because the person who's collecting money for his Defense Fund is a very close ally of Gandhi, who is organizing Indian Muslim dock workers and runs this radical newspaper, United Burma that I talked about, the one we can't find. And dama lokas, defense attorney W chit Hlaing is going to go on to become a. Nationalist figure. So pretty much the whole of colonial Burmais there in the streets to support him. Yeah, it's quite a dramatic moment. And then the judge, so the judge is Irish, right? The judge is used to colonial trials, the judge knows just as much as damaloca does. Don't make a martyr out of people, but they also can't back down. They can't, you know, slap their man in Moe Yang down and say, Well, this was wrong. You know, clearly damaloka is allowed to say whatever he likes, because that would be backing down. So they give him the smallest possible punishment. They bind him over to keep the peace. They say you have to be a good boy now, so you have been convicted, but you know you're not going to go to jail or anything like that. You're not a martyr. And you see in a moment like that, oh, wow, this is and Alicia might talk more about this, but you have this absolutely multi ethnic Alliance on the streets, and that's not good news for them. If they're nervous about what's happening in India or what's happened in salon or whatever, that's not what they want to see. 

Host  1:16:25 

That's quite a moment for his, you know, looking it's this nexus of, again, this political, religious, social, all these implications happening in the form of this trial and and so then he, as you reference, he's given something of a slap on the wrist and with a kind of implicit understanding to be a good boy. And so in those words, is he a good boy? When he gets released? 

Laurence Cox  1:16:56 

Is he a good boy? Well, do you know what's weird? So this thing lasts for a year. And the way it works is his friends have to put up a bond, and if he misbehaves, they can forfeit that bond, right? And that doesn't seem to be a problem, but the day it expires, he leaves Burma and he never comes back. And we are going, okay, you know, have people threatened him, you know, with legal or indeed, other kind of ramifications. What's going on there? We don't know. Now he is not only, I have to say, in Burma and in Ceylon. So he's got his own mission in Singapore. He has a mission in Bangkok. He's also active in Penang and elsewhere in what today is Malaysia. He's, you know, he is around Asia. He claims to have been in Nepal. Maybe he was, maybe hewasn't. He was certainly in Japan and probably in China, maybe in Cambodia, we don't know. So it's not that Burma is the only place where he's active, but it's certainly, you know, it's his monastery, and it is one of the places where he has started his own lineage, yeah, because, like Anand and Mattea, there is a lineage of monks then, who are some of them European, some of them what's described as Eurasian, which can mean different things in this period, but they are doing the same kind of work that he's doing, and they're setting up schools, they're giving talks, hosting events, and so on and so forth. So yeah, he goes to Australia, and this letter comes back, supposedly written by somebody who runs a temperance hotel, so a non drinking hotel, saying there's this rather weird guy, a Buddhist monk, who died here. And if somebody sends me an address, I can send you on his effects. Okay, so now the it's a fake name, and you know it'snot true. We know it's not true. So the only way of making sense of that really is this is damaloka faking his death from Australia to try and put them off the center or whatever, and there's this kind of extradition request. Then that goes from the railway police to the Australian police. And the thing about the railway police is, well. And they are certainly responsible for potentially criminal activity, like sending seditious literature through the mail, because that would go on trains, but it is also where the political police so what will eventually become Special Branch operate from they are at this period. And we only discovered this recently, they go that they are a sub office of the railway police. So they sent this thing to Australia, going, have you seen this guy? To know about him. So, you know, there is something going on there, and we do not know what it is. Yeah, we looked in some political police reports, couldn't find it. There may be other sources that we haven't found. But then a few months later, he turns up. He comes into a newspaper office in Singapore, you know. And he's like granny wether wax in Terry Pratchett are not dead. Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, so we do not know what was going on. There something was going on, yeah. And there we see him in Singapore, uh, apparently he goes to Bangkok for a bit where he has another mission. He comes back. He meets Dharmapala again briefly in October 1913 and then he disappears. And you know, maybe they did catch up with him. You know, maybe he was left face down in a ditch, or, you know, maybe he disrobed, he changed his name. He went somewhere else to do something else. Maybe he came back to Ireland. Or, you know, maybe he did, in fact, go somewhere quiet, somewhere rural indeed. Perhaps somewhere like Thailand or Cambodia, outside the British Empire, and settle down there. We just don't know. So, yeah, he just disappears, right? 

Host  1:22:15 

That's and that, that's emblematic of his life as well, and just how hard it then to track him. And it's also hearing this you're describing, you've painted this picture over the last number of minutes that we've talked of, reminding us of this kind of pan Buddhist world that, strangely enough, I think we don't really see today, that it feels like nationalism has taken over this pan Buddhist sense, and there's many examples of how it manifested before. I'm just thinking of we had a series of conversations with Sunda Khin, who was the daughter of Wu chan Tun, who, among many other things, Wu chan Tun was also the head of the World fellowship of Buddhists for some time. And in Eugene Ford's fascinating books, Cold War monks, he talks about the force that the world fellowship of Buddhists were, particularly in his cold war monks, as the title indicates in the post world war two Cold War era, and the kind of influence that they had. And so as there's a question forming of where all these influences come together, you have, you know, the wFB that is operating in the Cold War era, as described in that book. But then I'm also thinking of like the work of Lady Sayadaw, and it seems that even though the lifetimes of Lady and damaloca would have obviously been around the same era, it seems that lady wasn't so much taking more of a public role until some decades, maybe a decade or two after dama loco was on the scene in the early 20th century, and but certainly the role that lady Sayadaw had in not just promoting Buddhism, but kind of bringing trying to pump up Burmese Buddhism as something that was not inferior to Christianity, and trying to speak about religions and the faith of Burmese Buddhism in a way that using the same language and the same concepts that Westerners and Christians could understand. And so that was also having something of a globalization different than the globalization we might see in our lifetimes and how we understand it, but certainly some kind of outreach. And so as you place the motivations of damaloca the context and the political reality of his day, which again precedes and predates, some of the things that we're looking at with wFB and with Lady Sayadaw, and we can. Even bringing here what was happening in Sri Lanka and India with the Mahabodhi project and Dharmapala. Where do you see this? His, his role, Dhamma lokas, role in being this agent of spreading Buddhism, of presenting Buddhism as something that was on an equal level, and being able to converse with Christianity not inferior, as well as this pan Buddhist sense, because you're also painting this picture that he's not just a Western monk who has esconced himself in Burma, which is more what you find today that you, in my experience, you have practitioners that this person knows Japanese Buddhism, and this person has set themselves up in the Tibetan tradition, and even in Thailand and Burma. And I don't know that many Western practitioners and monks who are equally familiar with Thai and Burmese context, as similar as they are, they this kind of pan Buddhism is not something we see so much today. And so in looking at dama Lucas life and work and an agency, where do you see him as, and what he was doing at that time is then flowing into these other characters and other time eras that that would pick up these themes and run with them in different ways, but along a similar trajectory. 

Laurence Cox  1:26:22 

Wow. So, I mean, I think one, one useful way in is to think that a lot of what he does, maybe most of what he does, is really to be a front man. So, you know, that's what these senior sayadoors, who are part of the ordination, want him to be. Yeah, they want him to be their man who will go and do these things on behalf of the Dhamma. And you know, it's not very different for anagadh. He wants the same kind of thing he's bringing this, you know, well known foreign celebrity, not so that he can give him a platform, but so that he will do the kinds of things and say the kinds of things that Dharmapala wants him to say, right? And in Singapore, then he works with a different Chinese Buddhist, not actually Buddhist, I think even not always, because there's a family of them. But he works with Chinese donors who are interested in kind of modernizing Singapore. He does bring together, actually a pan Buddhist wessac celebration in I think 1905 does damaloka with all the different Buddhist groups that are present in what's obviously an insanely multi ethnic place, but it is part of this project of what should Singapore be in the future? And you see the same kind of thing in Bangkok or with the Japanese groups that he engages with. Indeed, you know, later on in Burma, a lot of the groups that he works for or with, they are very happyto have him. Possibly, they're quite happy to have him for a little while to, you know, bring the attention to help boost membership, to build the network, and so on and so forth. So he's not he'snot simply trying to build a celebrity brand in the way that we might expect today. He does understand himself as part of something bigger. And, you know, I want to say that, you know, hopefully we're at the end of a trajectory where that internationalism actually became more and more closed. So, you know, I was talking about this idea of a pan Asian Buddhism, and that'ssomething that a lot of people, not only Buddhists in Asia, are asking themselves in the early 20th century. Well, what comes after empire? What comes after being part of a multinational empire ruled from the other end of the world. And you know, Pan Buddhist, pan asian, Buddhism isn't the only answer people give. So there's a pan Islamic answer, which, you know, is still around in some forms. There is a communist answer, or a socialist answer or an anarchist answer, there is an answer which is kind of rational and scientific, you know, which very modern in tone, in some ways, is saying, Well, you know, science and modern medicine. And education and law, and perhaps the English language, or even Esperanto, will enable us all to engage with each other, kind of without really looking at where we are. It'll just be sort of Universalist, a kind of like tech bro vision, almost, and it's not clear in somewhere like Burma in 1900 that actually what you're going to get after Empire is a world of nation states. Because there, you know, there aren't many nation states outside of the Americas. Most of Europe isn't nation states, yeah, and you know, most of Africa and Asia are not nation states. So this process where what you actually get, particularly in the 30s and the 40s in a lot of Asian countries, of this future national elite, of people who have been educated with a Western education, even if sometimes in Buddhist schools, who's who are very often in these middle class jobs, who are kind of like an elite in waiting. That's, it's not so obvious in 1900 that that's what's going to win out. And then when it does, you know, there are, you know, as you say, it's the Cold War. So there are communist or socialist versions of this. There are more Western oriented versions of this. There's the attempt with Bandung and so on, to have a neutral, non aligned version. People ask themselves, Well, what would Adamic socialism look like, or whatever? But it becomes more and more framed within a national context as the years go on, and then, of course, as the idea of that the state is really going to help national development fades away. What you're left with, quite often, is, is the fundamentalism, is the intolerance is sort of ethnic supremacism and in Buddhism as well. You know, a kind of world of brands where, you know, I mean, you know, there was a period, of course, when there was, you know, people, Western converts would be, you know, well, I'm very much into Zen. I'm very much into Tibetan Buddhism. But then we have more and more kind of branded versions, organizations within even each of these as it's more available. And in a lot of countries, you find that, like, say, in Ireland, there's not an awful lot of conversation between Buddhists of different groups. There's a lot of interest in what's happening in their particular sect. So that kind of sectarianism, and then the nationalism, which, you know, both of those in some ways let people down, because the world is more complicated. You know, as we have seen in Burma or in Ireland, than you know your dominant ethnic group, but also in, certainly in, you know, most people who come to Buddhism, they're not initially looking for a brand that's what's available, but you know, it's not, you know, I don't want to say that's not the Dhamma, that's not the Master's message, but you know that there is that tendency, isn't there to let's kind of capture people, let's treat them as a market. And I think, you know, obviously any good organization tries to counter that, tries not to be sectarian, tries to say, yep, there are also these other things. There may bebeneficial things in them. You should, you know, pay attention, but you know, there's a lot of forces pushing against that. 

Host  1:34:27 

So the last point I want to discuss with you, and have you shared to our audience, because it's so fascinating and really presents a valuable contrast to damaloka is Ananda metia Alan Bennett, who studied with Aleister Crowley the Order of the Golden Dawn. It's such an interesting contrast, because, again, this goes to kind of speaking personally, my naive way of looking back at this history early on, when I saw it without nuance. And just thought of, oh, other other Westerners like me, who got interested in Burmese Buddhism and took a plunge, and this kind of, you know, we're all in this together, happy way of exploring the Dhamma together. And one would think, stepping back, that there would be so much beautiful synergy and camaraderie between these different Westerners who are finding Buddhism in their own way, and maybe even if they, if they come into the monkhood through different pathways that they once they're there, they join hands and seeing how they can practice and spread the Dharma, which is obviously not the case. I mean, just going from the basic backgrounds, Alan Bennett was educated in middle class and not a international labor and wobbly. But if you can just go into more of Alan Bennett and Andy metia, who he was and how he came to the Dhamma, what his Burma experience was, and then how he clashed and contrasted, really so violently, with the example of of and what that tells us, what, what that contrast then tells us about the the different experiences that are possible, of how Westerners are coming into contact with Buddhism in very, very different ways. 

Laurence Cox  1:36:18 

Okay, right. So look, I'm going to say, first off, Alicia knows a lot more about Ananda Mattea than I do. And there is also a new biography by Liz Harris and John Crowe, who have done a lot of new work on, kind of making him less of a sort of stuck in the mud figure, yeah, and you know that there's a certain degree of, kind of, like, you know, good humored academic arguing there, because In our book, we, you know, very much kind of play up those differences. And you know, where in the past, people would have said, Oh, Ananda Mattea, he was educated, he was respectable, he was a good English Buddhist. Now a bit more inclined to go, well, actually, it's not entirely true, right? So, you know, which is good, because these are, you know, we're talking in both cases and in this period, I think for most Europeans who became Buddhists in Asia, it was a huge, huge effort. It we can't underestimate just what a personal effort that was for the people concerned. And you know, we do have to give them respect for a lot of difficulties that we don't maybe fully understand, or that they wouldn't have written about it that comes out incredibly powerfully, I should say, in the case of a slightly later Irish Buddhist who is Michael Dillon Lobsang jeevaka, who is the first actually trans man in the world by plastic surgery, and becomes a Buddhist novice in Ladakh. First he's Mahabodhi novice, and then he becomes ordained as a Buddhist novice in Ladakh. And because of how he writes, then in the mid 20th century, in his memoir, you get a really powerful picture of just you know how difficult this was, and you come away with a lot more respect than you would necessarily just by reading what they said in the third person. Because people in this period, you know, we don't have many Buddhist autobiographies of Western Buddhists of this period, let's say it's not what they write about. SoAnand and Mattea, as you say, he's Alan Bennett, and he is English rather than Irish. So that makes a big difference. You know, he is not opposed to Empire. In that sense, he is educated, and he comes to Buddhism in a third way, which is not unusual for the period, which is to think of it as a form of magic. So, you know, I'd said most western Buddhists, they're interested in the ethical example of the life of the Buddha. They're interested in kind of the Orientalism, digging up the past. They're interested in the texts and Anand and Mattea. There's a bit of all of that. But actually, what gets him into it is he's come through the sort of theosophical Golden Dawn op. Cultist strand. And Buddhism is a form of magic, and that's actually there in the very first meditation manual that's available in English, which comes from the Buddhist Lodge, which had been theosophical. And you read it and you think, this is a manual of Practical Magic. This is not a meditation handbook, as you and I would expect to find it today, but you know, to be fair to him, he does understand that it isn't so he moves away from Crowley, who he is an associate with. He takes himself to Asia. He goes looking for what he imagines to be the most authentic Buddhism. I have the impression, and I won't swear to this, but I think he is one of several people who initially go to Ceylon and go and talk to Sumangala and get sent to Burma because Burmese bhikkhus are willing to ordain people, willing to ordain Westerners. The sort of caste issues that apply in Sri Lanka and Buddhism are not as significant or that then, you know, it doesn't work that way. So Burmese bhikkhus are willing to ordain Westerners. So he winds up there, and yeah, he does really struggle with it. Now, his health isn't great, but also he is much more of a gentleman. So he kind of rewrites the vineyard a bit to suit himself, you know, says, Oh, these things aren't so important. And he gets himself there is an older Burmese lady who's very wealthy who sponsors him. And he starts publishing this illustrated quarterly, which is an extraordinarily expensive thing. Yeah, so an illustrated magazine in the early 20th century is more or less contemporary with dama loca but you can see that that is aiming at a very, very different audience. You know, most of dama locas people, they can't afford this. You know, whether they're Asian or poor whites, they're not. You know, they can't afford this. And he turns his sights increasingly towards Europe, which damaloka never does. You know, dama loka is certainly happy to ordain Westerners in Asia, but he's not trying to set up his franchise in Europe, which Ananda Mattea does. So he goes on a preaching tour to London in maybe 1907 1908 he's supporters set up what is then the Buddhist Society of Great Britain and Ireland. And so there is this kind of very international organization that he's running, and in that space, in particular in the European Space, there's quite a bit of competition between him and damaloka. They're very different people, as you said, in class terms, in political terms, and also in what they think it is to be a Buddhist monk, yeah, because he absolutely wants to talk about the correct understanding of the Dhamma. And to, in a sense, set himself up as I'm, you know, I'm an educated Englishman, and I have read the books, and I can tell you, this is the true meaning of the Buddha words, which is maybe, let's say, a little bit obscured by some aspects of folk Buddhism. He's not always very impressed by things that actual Burmese Buddhists actually do. He doesn't think they're, you know, quite what the texts say. And damaloka is the opposite of that. You know, dama loka is like I practice the Vinaya. I live in an actual monastery, you know, not something that's been built for me to allow me to operate my own personal video in and you know, if I go and speak to Burmese peasants or Sri Lankan peasants, they recognize me as a bhikkhu, and they come and give down it in the traditional way, and they're happy to hear me preach like that. So there's a big difference of style, and maybe the fairest way to say it is there's a different idea of what is it that Buddhism should be in this period? Yeah, so that's the real argument that goes beyond maybe the interpersonal stuff, which is there as well.  

Host  1:45:01 

Yeah, that's such a fascinating thing to end on what what Buddhism should be. Because I would say what Buddhism should be.dot.to, the Western monk practitioner who comes in Burma to pick it up, because that is something that you can very much see a trajectory played out for the next 100, 150 years among Buddhist scholars being, I mean, from Western countries, Westerners who are writing about Buddhism and academia, their how it's playing out in their writing, what they're understanding, misunderstanding, this conflict and tension between what the texts say things should be, and then how much they're willing to see how they actually are, and then among the Buddhist practitioner community, and the whole aspect of Orientalism as well, in terms of to what degree you're really interacting with the and giving respect to the way People are actually holding the faith, and to what degree you're coming in with a sense of how things should be, how the texts say they are, and how you need to reform as an outsider, reform how people are actually experiencing and enacting their faith in their own countries. And so this, this is something that that's just incredible, and seeing how this dynamic and this tension really is getting played out by foreign actors in the coming decades, for long to come, really, 

Laurence Cox  1:46:32 

absolutely, and it's a very strange space, because of course, then, as now, there are far fewer Western Buddhists, but their voices are amplified in all sorts of strange and less strange ways. The only thing I want to add to what you say is that, of course, and you know this much better than me, we shouldn't imagine that all Asian Buddhists, or all Burmese Buddhists or whatever, all think the same thing, because in 1900 just as in 2024 they are also faced with the question of, well, what should we be doing? What is it to be a Buddhist today, and even more so, of course, if you are, you know, if you're ordaining, if you're a teacher, if you're running an organization, what is our responsibility? What? What is the thing that we should be doing? And people have very, very different answers to that question or change change their answers. So I think it can be helpful to step out of our own immediate time and place, because that helps us to be a little bit more open about this, and to say, yeah, that is a genuine question. And of course, we've got to come up with an answer for now that satisfies us and that we can act from. But we shouldn't imagine that it's not a question. We shouldn't imagine that there's just, like, a very obvious answer that everybody sees, because when we look around us, we can see that other people don't give the same answer that we do.  

Host  1:48:22 

And what's so fascinating as well, and in the study of these two characters, damaloka and metea, is that you have you also have a tension between their own personal lives and the decisions that they're making, to want to seek some kind of spiritual liberation and their own spiritual path, and then what they represent. And this is not accidental, because they're, they're making very intentional actions that are, that they are becoming something greater than who they are in their own lives. And so they're, they're not just, they're not just acting as individual agents seeking their own spiritual liberation, but they are also something by their own design. They are also coming to represent something much greater, and a force that is symbolizing something more, and then are being used by communities to further those advances. And we see that playing out as we follow along the lives of actors that would come along decades later. Of course, I'm thinking of locananta, the Italian monk who we've done a couple of episodes on as well. You're looking at the mid 20th century, the role that he plays in telling those stories. And I should also mention lesser known but stories that we're working on on this platform. If you look at, if you place looking at that in the mid 20th century, and the role that he played, we are just beginning to release a series of many interviews that were done with free. Guard Lotter Moser. She was a German woman who just recently passed away. She lived in Burma from 1959 to 1971 Her story is almost largely unknown. We recorded 40 hours of interviews with her on the condition that we could not release any of them until she passed away, and we are just preparing to release our first one, and then looking beyond her episodes that we're looking to do, and wanting to explore the lives of the likes of jagra and Greg Kleiman, whose stories go through like the 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond. And so it's very interesting to look at this trajectory of of these different Western practitioners who've been motivated for different reasons according to their time and context, but then, in addition to their own personal lives that they're they're leading with their own choices and their own spiritual designs and desires, how they're also continuing to represent something more and something beyond that, which is a story that continues to play out beyond the individual level, still today, in terms of the themes that are being debated and discussed. 

Laurence Cox  1:51:16 

Absolutely And you know, in some ways, this is absolutely basic Buddhism, because what the Buddha does say to those first 60 disciples is, you know, go forth in the world for the benefit of the many, for the happiness of the many, and you cannot be a monk, At least in Theravada, without the relationship with the laity. Yeah, you don't exist in isolation. You exist in a monastery, in a sangha with you know, the people who feed you, the people who come to listen to you. You have a responsibility which is obviously very, very different in different kinds of situations. But the idea that it's only about you is, let's say it's a narrow understanding, at least you know, and that kind of wider responsibility is obviously something that you know so many in some ways, this is why people become well known monks, is because people see them taking on that responsibility and not just eating and meditating. 

Host  1:52:38 

And that is a beautiful thing. I want to reference because I don't know how many Western monks and nuns I've spoken to meditators as well, as well as my own learning trajectory in Burma, of going to Burma with the designs, of wanting, of just imagining yourself in a months long retreat, Silent Retreat, in a cave, in silence, and, You know, in a living living this, this ascetic lifestyle, and then when, and then ultimately realizing it's from the people and the culture and the monastery and the environment that you learn just as much, if not more, of that than the silent retreat and intensive practice, that this holds as much value and beauty in the transformation process and and still has this to offer us. 

Laurence Cox  1:53:24 

Yeah, you want to see the arising as well of gratitude and the arising of a desire to to help, to give something back. You know, those, those are quite, you know, healthy emotional responses, maybe the first thing somebody needs to do is a lot of meditation, but that might not be the last thing they need to do. 

Host  1:53:50 

Great. I also want to ask you, you know, as I was reading and learning more about this figure of dhammaloka, through the Irish Buddhist I of course, it was impossible to read this without thinking of myself, my peers, people who came before me, that that I learned from and knew about, and try to understand, try to think about this trajectory, what what is. And in some ways this was a sense of further coming out of my naive misconceptions and imposing things assumptions that I hadn't really unpacked before I came to Burma, that my 15 years in Burma had started to kind of unpack and uncover anyway. And this just took it to a further degree. And in some ways for me, it was a journey of coming back into oh well, maybe we're not so different, after all, as I start to go even deeper into this, but I'm wondering, from your perspective of seeing the of knowing how Westerners gravitate towards Burma and the wider Southeast Asia today, what brings them there? There's obvious differences, in contrast with the late. The 19th century, early 20th century, that you flesh out, but in returning to this question of trajectory, are there, is there common ground and similarities that you find converging on this story that can show us where their beginnings still have relevance and assimilation towards what we might find as the theWestern Sanghas and spiritual seekers today? 

Laurence Cox  1:55:30 

Well, there's a lot there. So let me give you three, three different answers, because these are such good questions. Yeah, there's just so much to say about them. I think one thing that is very clear and very important maybe in dama locas life is the so we, you know, we use the word renunciation, let's say, but is the giving up, the letting go of something that he had been or somebody that he had been And doing that without necessarily having a safety net. So it's that moment of real, you know, courage, stepping into the unknown. And of course, you know, he's doing that a lot in his own life, from the, you know, from leaving home at age 14. How much did he know about the world that he was going into not very much, but that, that kind of openness and courage and not going, Oh well, you know, I can always just go back home and, you know, have a nice job or whatever, that real throwing yourself into the world. I think that's, inevitably, that's a part of that, that's a part of the most kind of powerful personal stories of Buddhist converts that we come across other people, where it's not just an add on to something else, but they are really throwing themselves into the world that they encounter, and some of That is definitely this real challenge that comes with throwing yourself into another culture and trying to do so without without privilege. So you know, if I say without privilege, I mean, for example, learning the local language and doing things through that yeah, or genuinely being dependent on local people rather than on having brought money with you, or people respecting you because you're something or or other. So you know, we know that in interpersonal relationships, is that genuine kind of like openness to the other, not holding back. But also, you know, when we step out of whatever culture we've grown up in and step into something else to there's both the letting go, but there's also that kind of, you know, falling in love with another culture. However, that works, and it's so different for different people, you know, in the same way that human relationships are different. But if we don't do that, then, in a sense, how much are we really listening? You know, if we just want other people to live up to either our expectations of what we think they should be, or if we want them to be in a way that makes us feel comfortable, then you know that there's something lost there. Suppose the other thing about it, which gives me a huge amount of hope is, you know, looking at the world we're in at the moment. So looking at, you know, absolutely horrific wars that don't seem to have an end in sight. You know, looking at the rise of authoritarianism in so many different forms, looking at climate collapse, it's very easy to despair. It's so, so easy to despair and just to go, you know, you know, we. In the last days. And the thing about thinking back to before independence, before decolonization, is that you know a world without empire. You know, it, it seemed so far away at that point. Yeah, it seemed like, you know that this thing, this empire, that the world never sets on, the sun never sets on, you know that that's just how it is, yeah. And you look at some of those buildings today, and they really have the, you know, the colonial buildings, they've really bring this message. This is how things are, yeah, classical, very powerful sort of, this is the physical structure of things. And all of that was washed away, yeah, you know, you could live through the whole of the British Empire in Mandalay as an adult, you'd have been an old adult in 1948 but you could actually have been, let's say, 16 in 1885 and you'd still be going in 1948 and that empire would have come and gone. So and like I was saying earlier, with, you know, this idea of a pan Asian Buddhism that then vanishes, nobody knew what was going to come next, and all of this stuff that dama loka is doing, it's such a strange world we have to kind of like explain the details, because it is so, so different to the world that we now live in. But it's just a generation before independence. You know, in some ways, things have changed so dramatically. So there's some you know, you could say hope, if you wanted to say, Well, is it about hope and despair, or optimism versus pessimism? But you could also say, you know, maybe from a more ethical point of view, the things that we do here and now, the choices that we make, they matter, even if we can't always foresee how they matter. It matters that we do them. 

Host  2:02:24 

That's beautiful. And I'd like to close with just one last question, a personal one, because you have spent all these years of your life writing about dhammaloka and writing this book titled The Irish Buddhist. You are an Irish Buddhist who is learning about life of your countrymen so many years ago that found this faith and this belief and this liberating practice that you are also a practitioner of today, not as you have explained before, not just a scholar or an academic or a researcher, but a practitioner and so looking taking your academic hat off and putting your practitioner hat on, and looking at looking at how you personally have and spiritually even have benefited from absorbing so much of this story from an earlier era. In what ways would you say this has affected your practice, or the way you look at the practice, or the way you situate yourself as a practitioner, and in what way would you say you've grown as someone who meditates and who welcomes this path of the Buddhist teachings? 

Laurence Cox  2:03:41 

Well, that's a small question, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. I should say that I wrote a book good few years back now, on Buddhism and Ireland, and really at the core of the book was a series of biographies of Irish Buddhist practitioners of different kinds. And at the time, we were only really just starting research on dhammaloka, so he's in there, but then we did so much more on him, and, you know, more research on some other figures as well. I suppose part of it is about seeing a bigger picture, which is also about maturing, and it's about our relationship to skill. So, you know, maybe one thing is, you know, to learn how to respond to hindrances in meditation, let's say, and it's not that that problem goes away, but it becomes a different kind. Kind of challenge. If you are teaching meditation, as I did for a while, a long time back, and you're trying to say something useful to the people you're talking to, and you realize that their minds are not all the same, the thing that made perfect sense to you that was really, really helpful to you, is actually kind of irrelevant to them, or they are having experiences that you haven't had, you know, which is quite a reality. Check, yeah, to be teaching somebody who's actually having more dramatic meditation experiences. So there's a growing there. There's a building on what comes before, and a stepping out, and then the same with this question of, well, what does Buddhism mean for Irish people? So, you know, I'm, I'm in Ireland. You know, I'm not. Many of the people that I looked at were Irish people in Asia, but I'm in Ireland. What does Buddhism mean in Ireland? And how has that changed? Because when I started, it was very counter cultural, very minority thing in an intensely, fundamentally Catholic country where people had just, you know, massively voted to write a ban on abortion into the Constitution. And, you know, we're now in a very different Ireland. So understanding how people's engagement with other ways of being, people's engagement with different cultures, their rethinking of religion, their abandoning of religion, all of that has been part of how Ireland has remade itself to be a better place. Yeah, in terms of, you know, gender, sexuality, tolerance, openness. You know, so much of the abusive institutions of the past have been washed away. That's fantastic. So there's a growing and then there's a new growing, which is large scale. Immigration in Ireland only really started in the later 1990s on a large scale. Yeah, so the children who were born in Ireland are now our undergraduates, you know, really only in the last few years, and increasingly, as well, our post graduates and our colleagues and Buddhism in Ireland has historically been led by converts. It's been organized by converts, even when Asian teachers have been brought over, and the significant number of Asian Buddhists in Ireland, with a very few exceptions, like Soko GA Kyi, have not had places to go to of their own, that started to change a bit. There's now a bit more support, say, for Thai Buddhism. But really, you know, wanting to see what people make of that, how the second and third generation of Asian Buddhists whose parents or grandparents came to Ireland, what do they do with that? What does it mean for them in terms of building community, in terms of articulating who they want to be, you know. And of course, we know from, say, really good research in America and the voices of Asian American Buddhists. It's a whole other story. It's a very powerful story, a very important story. And it also needs, of course, researchers who are themselves, Asian. And Irish, who have the languages, who have the family connections, who really understand how this works, and can speak to it and articulate that. And of course, that's a new level of maturing again, you know, is to go, okay, you know this thing, it no longer belongs. It's no longer organized mostly by Irish or European or white people. In Ireland, there's actually going to be at least as much Asian Buddhism in Ireland in the future. And, you know, how can, how can that come to the fore? More, you know, so, yeah, as as we get older, you know, as our own trajectories develop, to see more and looking back at these other histories and these other lives and trying to make sense of what are they doing. It is a really good way of I find anyway, trying to make sense of well, who am I?  

Host  2:10:07 

Well, thank you so much. Thank you for that answer, and thank you for taking all the time with us to talk about this, this incredible story, incredible life, and all the ways that it continues to be relevant today for I'm sure, listeners coming in with all of their own diverse backgrounds are taking this knowledge and interacting in their own particular way and how they orient towards it, which is just wonderful and wonderful to get this story out there more and be able to hear more about how people are taking it in. So I thank you for being so generous with your time to spend it sharing in this kind of detail. 

Laurence Cox  2:10:42 

You know, in 2021 I was, you know, on Twitter as was, and suddenly so many Burmese people came onto Twitter and were using it, were, you know, trying to write in English, were trying to let the world know what was happening, and they were sending photos of themselves from all of these little places, as well as some of the big places that we'd been covering in the book. And you know, on the other side of the world, that's just such an extraordinary experience. It's a harrowing experience knowing what's happening to people. It's one that really raises the question of, well, you know, I've been writing about these places in the past. Where are we now? So, you know, just that sense of, is there any way in which this story can be at all helpful, inspiring, or, you know, even just send, you know, that very classic message, everything is impermanent. All conditioned things are impermanent And thank goodness they are. 

Host 2:12:20 

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