Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia

The Biography of Modern Burmese Buddhist Meditation Master U Ba Khin: Life before the Cradle and past the Grave

310 The Biography of Modern Burmese Buddhist Meditation Master U Ba Khin: Life before the Cradle and past the Grave Gustaaf Houtman With the rise of individualism during the early eighteenth century, writers became more interested in the uniqueness of persons and biography came to signify the story of the life of an individual human being.1 Biography has a long history going back at least as far as the Egyptian tomb stones and early oral history. Yet biography also has a short history in that it has been subject to relatively recent trends. Kindall found that the word biography was first employed in the seventeenth century to mean a literary tradition used “to create a separate identity for this type of writing.”2 Today “biography” is a dedicated Western literary genre with strict rules of classification. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica biographical literature is defined as seeking “to recreate in words the life of a human being, that of the writer himself or of another person, drawing upon the resources, memory and all available evidences—written, oral, pictorial.”3 Derived from Greek bio- (life) plus graphy (writing), the term suggests three distinct orders of meaning, extending from “life-course of a living (usu. human) being,” “written life of a person,” to “a branch of literature dealing with persons’ lives.”4 Yet not everyone understands “biography” in quite such a restricted sense. Sometimes the term is used to mean something much wider in scope, namely the record of the life of any life process, ranging from the life of an insect to a geological process, or even of an organization.5 At-htokpat -tí,6 the Burmese term for biography, has such “dispersed” quality as it goes beyond events pertaining to a human life and may include events pertaining to any object, whether animate or inanimate: for example, it may concern variously an animal, a spirit, an institution, a mountain, a dictionary , or a human being.7 Indeed, the concept for “biography” may have many other uses in the vernacular apart from a literary “genre”: in everyday Burmese the term is used to mean variously “facts,” “events,” “a statement of fact,” and “narration of events.” The Burmese concept therefore carves out a larger and less circumscribed field of meaning than our literary sense of “biography” allows for, and includes additionally what we might call variously “story,” “history,” or “fable.” Often several different, sometimes contradictory notions of biography compete side by side within the same culture. For example, influenced by secular education and socialist thought, contemporary Burmese authors are apt to interpret biography in terms of the much narrower range of meanings provided by its Western secular-literary equivalent concept. This has been fostered by the centralized Burmese government with a strong tendency toward censorship over the last few decades.8 With this essay I have two aims. The first is to present the biography of a meditation teacher and accountant-general of Burma, U Ba Khin (1899–1971). This biography must be understood in the context of the increased popularity of Buddhist meditational practice since British colonial rule began in Burma in the early nineteenth century. It was King Mindon (r. 1853–1878) who first incorporated insight contemplation into royal discipline in the 1840s–1850s. However, it was at that time very much an aristocratic technique intended for the royal court and the monks, and the first-known wí-pat-tha-na (P. vipassanâ) insight contemplation center for the masses was not dedicated until 1911 in Myó Hlá, where the Mìn-gùn Hsaya -daw taught. Since then, some one-thousand meditation centers have emerged all over Burma, but also many abroad, which advocate a Buddhism of personal practice.9 These centers, which range from converted monasteries and factories to centers newly built for the purpose, are a major national service industry. U Ba Khin, the subject of this biography, is an unordained individual who played his part in this movement. In the run-up to 1948 National Independence and the reorganization of the colonial civil service, he rediscovers meditation as the core message of Buddhism and seeks to have his office, the Burmese civil service, and the foreigner take an interest in it. The Biography of  311 Master U Ba Khin The second aim of this essay is to look (from a Western secular-literary angle) at the “fuzziness” of traditional Burmese Buddhist biography with respect to...