Description:
"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.
Source/publisher:
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
Date of Publication:
2015-07-26
Date of entry:
2015-08-10
Grouping:
- Individual Documents
Category:
Language:
English
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Format:
pdf
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711.04 KB