‘For women there are two nirvanas’: risk and freedom in Myanmar’s contemporary Buddhist revival movement

In 2015, Myanmar’s parliament passed four controversial ‘protection of race and religion’ laws that many believe discriminate against women and non-Buddhists, particularly Muslims. To date, academic and activist discussion of the laws has focused on how the ruling military government may have used this package of legislation, and religio-nationalist rhetoric more generally, to maintain power in the face of mounting political pressure. Simultaneously, the active participation of Buddhist monks in the promulgation of the laws, many of whom operated collectively under the mantel ‘the Committee for the Protection of Race and Religion’, known by its Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha, unsettled longstanding assumptions about the nature of radicalism and religious conflict. Neither hypothesis adequately accounts for the far-reaching grassroots support the legislation, Ma Ba Tha, and the violent, exclusionary ideologies represented therein, enjoyed across the country. Nor do the assumptions which underly such analyses help to make sense of or why it is that Buddhist nuns and laywomen continue to be some of the most vocal and dedicated supporters of the laws, and the movement which originated them. Building from nearly two years of extended fieldwork with members of Ma Ba Tha, this thesis examines the participation of women in the movement as a means of understanding how certain forms of discourse, particularly those involved in the construction of risk and reciprocal duty regimes, create opportunities for otherwise marginalised figures to participate in socio-moral world building. It examines the degree to which the women of Ma Ba Tha espouse an explicitly gendered consciousness, and what their participation means for the movement’s social, cultural, or political impact more broadly. It will demonstrate that the drive many women feel to engage in Ma Ba Tha – the group, and its ideology – stems not from a love (or revulsion) of a single political party, a lack of education, or obeisance to charismatic monks. Rather, many lay and ordained Buddhist women participate in Ma Ba Tha because they perceive it to be the best possible means by which they can achieve two critical objectives. First, Ma Ba Tha women hope to improve the gendered conditions of possibility which constrain them, particularly as they pertain to ethical self-making. Second, they hope to revitalise Buddhism and secure its place and its sociocultural values within Myanmar’s changing political and economic environment. These two desires are intersecting and overlapping, but nevertheless clearly articulated and reflexively rationalised.