Reply to F. K. Lehman (F. K. L. Chit Hlaing)

This kind of debate is not new to Kris Lehman and me; we have been at it for several decades, and I think, most of it, to both our benefit. But we have kept it to ourselves much of the time until now.

In the current response to my article, Lehman focuses on one central theme: that the Myanmar Sangha was (and is) not a “unitary organization” and “not at all a unified body.” Although the nature of the Myanmar Sangha was not the topic of my article — only six out of 89 pages problematized the Sangha question while the rest dealt with the history of Sangha-State relations since the Pagan period — nonetheless, the issue is important to Myanmar Studies and needs more thorough discussion, especially problems of analysis, evidence, and interpretation.

They begin with Lehman’s framework of analysis which puts me in a straitjacket. Although he considers my use of the phrase “the Sangha” as a reference to the “mainstream” organization in Burmese history to be “not incorrect,” that is so only if I was referring to “an institution rather than a unitary organization.” Since I have always considered the Sangha to be an institution in this and other publications, that particular aspect is not at issue. But am I then also compelled to reject its “unitary” nature by default? And if I do not, am I “caught” in a “contradiction” not of my own making, but his?

More precisely (and problematic in terms of methodology), by contrasting “institution” with “unitary organization,” the issue has been placed within a binary as well as a synchronous framework of analysis, so that it requires not only an “either-or” choice (between “institution” and “unitary organization”), but also an answer that is static in nature: always true or always not true. In other words, the way the issue has been posed prevents both a multi-variant and a diachronic answer.

Using the terms “unitary” (organization) and “unified” (body) as if they are synonymous is another problem. A “unitary organization” refers to a singular organization, whereas a “unified body” describes a particular condition of that organization. By conflating the two, however, the existence of a “unitary organization” is disallowed unless it is absolutely “unified.” (I say “absolutely” since Lehman did not qualify the degree to which the Sangha is not a “unified body,” and so it becomes an issue of whether it was “unified,” not how “unified” or not it was.) In other words, Lehman tells us what the Myanmar Sangha is not, rather than what it is although I gather from his response that it is in line with the late John Ferguson’s view of the Sangha — namely, that it constitutes “all the Theravada monks who live in Burma” — more or less the working definition for most anthropologists who have studied it.

In contrast to this definition of the Myanmar Sangha as more or less everyone in saffron robes, I made clear in the article that I do recognize an official, “national” Myanmar Sangha, a mainstream organization (“unified” or not), recognized by state and society as the “national” church, as it were, which has been part of the country’s history since early times. At one level, then, both views are arbitrary and simply a matter of defining one’s terms, but at another level, it is a matter of historical fact: was, and is there empirical evidence for the existence of a “national” mainstream Sangha, a “unitary organization,” both de jure and de facto?

It is not difficult to prove that there is a “national” “unitary organization” in modern Myanmar. Leaving aside the acts by Parliament in the 1950s that legally recognized a national Sangha, and U Nu’s Sixth Buddhist Council meant for it, approximately 2,600 sayadaws elected from around the nation and representing over 95% of the country’s monasteries and monks, attended and contributed to the writing and amending of the Sangha Constitution at the two Congresses held in 1980 and 1985. Those events established what is in effect the present “national Sangha” (both...