"For those who have observed Burmese religious life long enough, one striking evolution of the last decades has been the growing place of Buddhist preaching in the practice of many monks and in the public space . While until the late eighties dhamma predication was hardly to be seen on the public scene, from the beginning of the nineties onward, it started to become more and more visible. Traditional ly monks were requested to preach on private or communal ritual occasions such as funerals, noviciation or offerings made at the monastery at the end of the rain retreat season (kahteinbwe). The large public performance of «dhamma talks» by monks invited by laypeople independently of any ritual occasion contrasts sharply with these previous practices. They are c alled in Burmese taya bwe, the ?feast of Law”, they are held at night and usually last around an hour, or more. As stated by Mahinda Deegalle in his study on Sri Lanka (2006), the development of public predication, known as the bana tradition in that context, particularly from the beginning of the eighteen th century onward, corresponds to the will of consolidating Buddhist communities through popularization of Buddhist teachings. In Burma, resorting to mass preaching to educate the public at large has its own genealogy starting in the early nineteenth century with the famous addresses of Thingaza Hsayadaw and those not less famous of Ledi Hsayadaw towards the end of the nineteenth century. Mass preaching had its heyday in the 1920s, when it was used as a tool to initiate reform among the public and contest the colonial rule by young activist monks such as Ottama and Wisara. It had continued until the 1960 s when it drastically decreased, after Ne Win?s military coup, because expressions of religious life then tended to be relegated to the p rivate sphere. The large public dhamma talks were to re-emerge only in the 1990s, at the joint initiative of local communities and the authorities, to become the highly popular events prevailing today...".....Paper delivered at the International Conference on Burma/Myanmar Studies: Burma/Myanmar in Transition: Connectivity, Changes and Challenges: University Academic Service Centre (UNISERV), Chiang Mai University, Thailand, 24-­26 July 2015.