Reconsidering Renunciation: Shifting Subjectivities and Models of Practice in the Biography of a Buddhist Woman

This article historicizes the study of initiated female Buddhist devotees (thilashin) in Myanmar through analysis of the 1982 biography of Daw Medhawati (1862–1932), founder of a Buddhist nunnery (khyaung) at the turn of the twentieth century. Attending to rhetorical models of practice that reveal the stakes of the historically specific and local social worlds in which thilashin have sought to establish and maintain institutional footholds, I reconsider the assumed predominance of tropes of renunciatory asceticism in the self-presentation of thilashin and propose a more closely calibrated understanding of thilashin as non-ordained but initiated women unevenly empowered by relationships and practices that enable their advancement on a Buddhist path to liberation. In particular, I focus on two models of practice that demonstrate how Medhawati occupies and navigates the gendered subjectivities of “sister” and “patron.” I argue that the biography's emplacement of its subject within a family system and within a patronage network indicates the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging and affiliation amidst the state-driven reorganization of Myanmar Buddhist institutions of the 1980s. Read intertextually with other contemporary, vernacular Burmese literature written by or about thilashin and their male monastic peers, Medhawati's life narrative and other thilashin biographies put forward new ways of thinking about the shifting subjectivities and forms of social relatedness that produce and authorize Buddhist institutions in and beyond contemporary Myanmar.

Introduction

In a 1976 interview with writer Saw Mon Nyin ( ),¹ Daw Nyanasari ( , 1897–1976), founder of the eponymous Yangon sathintaik ( ),² bemoaned what she saw as a detrimental disconnect between Buddhist lay women and initiated Buddhist women known as thilashin ( ):

I have found that today's women are losing touch with thilashin. Entering the frame of the sāsana ( ) to disconnect from the lokī³ ( ), many thilashin do not generally want to interfere much in the affairs of the laity. Thilashin are not often included in offerings of alms to monks. Therefore, today's lay women are not often brought together with thilashin. It seems that within the world of women, thilashin are distinct and segregated.

( 1976:499)

Unlike monks’ monasteries that are widespread throughout urban and rural Myanmar, thilashin and their residential and educational institutions are typically concentrated in higher density urban areas.⁴ Whereas most Theravada Buddhist families celebrate the initiation of young sons as temporary novices, a practice that encourages deep family involvement in monastic activities (Eberhardt 2006), it remains relatively rare for daughters to reside temporarily as thilashin.⁵ While monks are incorporated into the daily alms-giving practices of many lay Buddhists as well as larger scale donation and preaching events, thilashin are less integrated into broad-based, regular donation practices.

At the surface, the remoteness of thilashin from the social worlds of lay devotees might be seen as evidence of the intensity of their commitment to ascetic renunciation. However, attending to thilashin and their own rhetorical strategies of self-presentation, for example, in their biographical and autobiographical literature, suggests that women initiated as thilashin continue to conceive of themselves in terms of intimate attachments with kin, teachers, patrons, and devotees. The 1982 biography of thilashin Daw Medhawati ( , 1862–1932), founder of the Sagaing Hill Khemethaka Khyaung ( ), offers a deeply relational, fine-grained account of a thilashin navigating various positions in a Buddhist social hierarchy over the course of her life and career. In this article, I argue that Medhawati’s biography does not rely on renunciatory asceticism as the primary symbolic model of her religious vocation, but instead discloses the social, institutional, and devotional realities of thilashin qua thilashin: non-ordained but initiated women unevenly empowered by relationships and practices that enable their advancement on a Buddhist path to liberation.

Nyanasari’s perspective on the exclusion of thilashin from broader solidarity with lay devotees implies a dual calling to “disconnect from the lokī” and yet, to belong “within the world of women.” Nyanasari, who established her Yangon sathintaik precisely to reach out to the young women of this growing city, and who advanced a form of thilashin education that sought to balance scriptural study with practical skills required for missionary projects, is by no means representative of all thilashin in their attitudes toward social relatedness.⁶ However, her sense of the ambivalence of the social position of thilashin points out a basic assumption, held by many Myanmar Buddhists themselves that undergirds the typical scholarly generalization of thilashin as ambiguously “in-between,” that is, neither fully monastic, because they are barred from access to the rituals of higher ordination that produce monks, nor fully lay, because their celibate and alms-dependent lifestyle resembles the Buddhist ideal of renunciatory asceticism. When scholars reproduce this assessment of thilashin as “in-between,” what they really mean is that thilashin suffer as a result of an inability to occupy the same social location as either monks or women. We can see this assumption at work, for example, in Kawanami’s observation that women who remain unmarried, apyogyi ( ), “may feel more affinity towards the nuns than their married counterparts” (Kawanami 2020:101). Presumably, the source of this solidarity is that both apyogyi and thilashin have “renounced,” that is, chosen not to fulfill (or to derive satisfaction from), the womanly vocations of marriage and child rearing. While in Keeler’s (2017) logic, in which the symbolic force of autonomy gained through renunciatory remoteness reigns supreme, this abnegation of gendered attachments earns apyogyi and thilashin a degree of social prestige; nonetheless, both groups are rendered peripheral to the world of women, from which those drawn to the thilashin vocation are psychologically compelled to “escape” (Kawanami 2013:52).

The assumption that thilashin are not fully women, that initiation as a thilashin constitutes a rupture with gendered subjectivity, has two interconnected effects. First, it supports an undue emphasis on thilashin as renunciants who reject the social worlds of householders. Second, the emphasis on renunciation siloes the study of thilashin and other initiated female Buddhist devotees from the study of broader social institutions such as the family and the patronage network. In contrast, my analysis of Medhawati’s biography draws out two models of practice that illustrate how Medhawati occupies and navigates the gendered subjectivities of “sister” and “patron.” I approach these models as evidence of thilashin theorizing the family and the patronage network, that is, following bell hooks, “making sense out of what was happening” (hooks 1994:61) within the gendered and hierarchical, often painful and alienating, and occasionally restorative experience of these institutions. These rhetorical models not only demonstrate various ways in which thilashin deal with asymmetrical relations of mutual dependence as female devotees; they show that thilashin, in their pursuit and invention of places of belonging (again, paraphrasing hooks) and their critical reflections on suffering and self-transformation, are both practitioners and theorists of Buddhist and feminist liberation. Responding to recent calls for the decolonization of Burma Studies and Area Studies, and to pay sustained attention to local, vernacular theoretical contributions (Tharaphi Than 2021; Chu May Paing and Than Toe Aung 2021; Campbell 2019), this article puts forward thilashin biographical literature as a significant intellectual resource for understanding both the historical dynamics and possible futures of devotional and institutional forms of Buddhism in and beyond Myanmar.

Medhawati’s biography is the first of four⁷ biographical sketches ( ) compiled by her student and eventual successor, Daw Zanawati ( , 1904–?), in a biographical anthology published in 1982, the same year as the establishment of the State Sangha Maha Nayaka Committee. We might expect the text to reflect a mood of reform and reorganization aligned with nationalist sentiment and state-sponsored oversight of religious institutions attendant on MHN’s formation and establishment.⁸ However, amidst references to the wide reach of the khyaung’s internal demographics, drawing women from all over the nation of Myanmar, Medhawati’s biography presents evidence of much more intimate collectives of concern—kin networks and patronage collectives. Following Jacoby’s tenet that biographical literature is “propagandistic literature in the sense that its authors intended to persuade readers of something” (Jacoby 2014:18), alongside Zanawati’s expressed desire “to study and learn from the virtuous qualities” of her fore-runners ( 1982:iii), my analysis attends to the ways that Zanawati’s rendering of the founder’s life story creates compelling models of practice within Zanawati’s social world in late-twentieth-century Myanmar. This, I argue, indicates the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of affiliation amidst state-driven reorganization of religious institutions on a national scale, namely, the significance of close ties linking some thilashin to a select group of monastic benefactors associated with the small but influential Shwegyin-gaing ( ). In contrast with contemporary biographies produced by and about ordained monks that tend to exclude the personal, affective nature of donor relations and career trajectories, biographical writing about thilashin reveals a deep overlap in the operations of kinship and patronage, making possible a more intimate historical account of institutional ties in twentieth-century Myanmar.

Thilashin as Sister

In addition to Nyanasari’s desire to integrate thilashin “within the world of women,” my critical reconsideration of the centrality of renunciation to thilashin in their self-presentation is informed by an observation in Khin Myo Chit’s 1974 essay, “Women in Buddhism.” In her review of significant female disciples of the Buddha, Khin Myo Chit lingers on the life of Visakha, also known as Migāramāta, the chief female lay patron of the Buddha:

The story of Visakha lives today in the hearts of Buddhists, maybe because, it is a story of a laywoman closer to people than the Theris or nuns. Visakha is very much a woman like anyone else; she had marriage problems, social difficulties, and sometimes ran into awkward situations with government officials.

(Khin Myo Chit 1974:10)

Khin Myo Chit goes on to describe the ordained women whose stories are recorded in the Therīgāthā⁹ as “not as close to wordlings as Visakha . . . These nuns or Theris had laid down all social position and domestic happiness; they had lost their world, but in exchange, they won the status of an individual free from all fetters” (Khin Myo Chit 1974:11). Khin Myo Chit’s preference for Visakha suggests that she and her contemporaries interpret the ancient therīs’ pursuit of freedom by renunciation as alienating rather than inspiring; the stories of the Buddha’s ordained female followers are not relatable because they have “lost their world.” With this in mind, it makes sense that some thilashin would hesitate to identify with a mode of renunciatory asceticism that is neither implied by their initiated status, nor persuasive, in Jacoby’s sense, within the social world of their supporters. Instead, Medhawati’s biography dwells on conflict and solidarity within the relationship between Medhawati and her older sister.

This section focuses on the background narrative to Medhawati’s initiation as a thilashin and her early years of training prior to the establishment of the Khemethaka Khyaung in 1905. The biography unfolds this narrative through Medhawati’s conversations with members of her family. In particular, it highlights the point of view of Medhawati’s sister, May, who leaves behind her own children to take on the role of Medhawati’s primary supporter. Including May’s perspective humanizes Medhawati, tempering her personal aspirations with a dose of the sisterly combination of resentment and reverence. The model of practice that emerges from Medhawati’s early career as a thilashin is firmly embedded within a family system and hinges on her sister’s commitment, sacrifice, and labor, without which Medhawati’s life as a thilashin might never have proceeded.

Born in 1862, Medhawati grew up in a village near Nyaungbintha railway station, about thirty kilometers north of Taungoo. As a young child, at that time called by the name Sabeh ( ),¹⁰ she excelled in reading, writing, and math, accompanying her older brother to lessons with their mother’s brother, the head monk of the village monastery that was financed and donated by her parents. By age ten, however, Medhawati’s parents asked her to stop studying in order to contribute to the family’s trade business. When she was about thirteen, both of her parents passed away, and she went to live with her older sister, May, who had married, remained in Nyaungbintha, and assumed responsibility for the family business. Medhawati became an integral part of her sister’s household, responsible for cooking meals, and taking care of her nieces and nephew while May worked in the marketplace. Unsatisfied by this role, however, and seeking the chance to continue her education, Medhawati told her sister that she wanted to live as a thilashin and would leave for their uncle’s monastery:

Ma May stared at her younger sister and smacked her on the head. She gazed blankly for a while, thinking about the future. Then, speaking in a soft whisper, she pleaded with her younger sister,

“In married life, the troubles of a husband, the troubles of children, they are no small thing. With a son and two daughters, I have many mouths to feed. You know all of this. Now you are fifteen; you are still young. My mind is not at ease; business is not going well. Please just wait three years. At that point, our brother will have reached the age to take full ordination. If you still want to be a thilashin at that time, then of course we will do it.”

( 1982:3)

While May, testing her sister’s resolve, might have initially suspected Medhawati’s plan to be the product of a naïve whim, her response bears no objection to her sister’s desire to be a thilashin, a bias faced by many young women whose families do not approve of such a choice (Kawanami 2013:77). Rather, May’s frustration is directed toward the possibility of losing a skilled and reliable member of her household at a challenging time. In contrast to other thilashin initiation narratives, both biographical and fictional, in which young women become thilashin against their families’ wishes or self-initiate by running away and shearing off their own hair,¹¹ Zanawati’s depiction of Medhawati’s initiation emphasizes both Medhawati’s conviction and desire to live as a thilashin, as well as her dutiful deference to her family’s wishes.

Medhawati’s initiation as a thilashin and her trajectory from then on is represented as a family decision, made in terms of collective family needs and resources. Medhawati accepted her sister’s conditions and in 1880, at eighteen, received initiation from their uncle in the midst of her older brother’s ordination. At first, Medhawati sought to go directly to Taungoo after her initiation, in pursuit of scriptural studies. Her uncle persuaded her to wait again, to let the family’s finances recover following their sponsorship of rituals surrounding her brother’s ordination: “Of course, I can manage on my own,” he counseled, “but should you not consider their burden?” ( 1982:7). Staying in her uncle’s monastery—in many ways an extension of the family domain since it was donated by her parents—Medhawati remains under his supervision and instruction. After three years studying with him, Medhawati was then able to move to the Taungoo Myotaung Kyaung ( ), largely thanks to May, who accompanied her sister on the journey to Taungoo, entrusted her to the care of a few elderly thilashin living there, and left her with enough money to provide for her basic needs. Medhawati’s early days as a thilashin do not tell a story of the rejection of family life in pursuit of spiritual aims, the crux of the ideal of ascetic renunciation. Rather, the biography describes how Medhawati’s life as a young thilashin makes her even more dependent on the care and resources of a family.

Within this family unit, both May and Medhawati are subject to the family’s collective needs and aspirations that are not always aligned with their individual wishes. The idea of establishing a khyaung is initially presented as Medhawati’s uncle’s wish for her when she departs his monastery for Taungoo: “May you become a Sayagyi and thrive with many students” ( 1982:8) and might reflect the uncle’s entrepreneurial approach to the family’s future investments in religious property. When Medhawati finally resolved to leave Taungoo after five years of study at the Myotaung Kyaung, she sent a letter to May asking for her help. May sought guidance from their uncle and brother. Since May’s husband had recently died, and her eldest daughter was soon to be married, her uncle and brother thought it suitable for May to accompany Medhawati and support her, and they promised to help keep an eye on May’s younger children who would live with her newly married eldest daughter.

Inviting May’s perspective into important junctures in Medhawati’s early career makes clear the way the family continually reconstitutes itself around its members’ shifting subject positions, and how these altered arrangements affect their relationships to one another. Acquiescing to her uncle’s and brother’s advice, May went to meet Medhawati in Taungoo:

When Ma May saw her little sister she growled,

“Do not talk to me about suffering. My husband is dead. When I got your letter, I married off my eldest daughter. I cannot even describe how worried I was when I had to leave the younger children with her. Ever since mother and father died, I have had to look after you even more than my own children.”

( 1982:14)

Following May’s command, “Do not talk to me about suffering,” Medhawati’s attempt to preach advice seems to fall flat: “The troubles of the human world go without saying. Only if you try to be with the dhamma ( ) will the dhamma stay with you. Suffering will cease if you keep the dhamma in mind. Do not keep thinking back, sister. Listen to me. Be calm” ( 1982:14). May replies with irreverent resignation, “Yes, in the future all suffering will cease” ( 1982:14), undermining any immediate comfort to be taken from the laws of dhamma. May’s weariness is palpable. She is leaving behind her own children to look after a younger sister whose knowledge of suffering sounds rather abstract when compared with her own challenges. However, May’s departure from her children mirrors the death of her and Medhawati’s own parents, after which May, a newly married woman, became mother to her younger sister. The juxtaposition of scenes of loss suggests that Medhawati, also left without parents in the care of an older sister, understands the experience of May’s youngest children more deeply than May yet realizes. Medhawati’s plea to May, “Listen to me,” rings with new meaning when we keep in mind the sisters’ shared experience of loss behind Medhawati’s otherwise standard, sermonic advice.

May’s discontent may have been exacerbated by the fact that the project she was sent to support was still far from materializing. It was 1888 when May accompanied Medhawati north toward Sagaing to establish a khyaung. What was originally intended to be a temporary stopover at the East Withuddhayon Kyaung ( ) in Mandalay turned into a fifteen-year residence. May stayed with Medhawati the entire time, cooking for her, and walking her to and from the monastery for daily lessons. May continued on with Medhawati when she finally did move to Sagaing in 1904, where she established a khyaung of her own in 1905. May would not return home to their natal village to see her children until 1912, twenty-four years after her departure. Within three months of her return, May died of fever.

The biography’s deeply relational and affective account of the sisters’ shifting social locations exemplifies the Buddhist view of interdependence as “an ontological situation of tragic dependence that inevitably leads to great pain” (Langenberg 2018:19). As Jacoby (2014) observes in the autobiography of Tibetan female visionary Sera Khandro, conversations and arguments written in direct-speech dialogue reflect the intersubjective nature of a biographical subject and often reveal the stakes of the subject’s claims and decisions. While Medhawati’s life story is not an autobiography, it could reflect a core narrative related by Medhawati and then filtered through the author’s, Zanawati’s, own experience, imagination, and interpretation. Zanawati could not have drawn on May’s own personal narrative to piece together two sides of the sisters’ story because she did not join the Khemethaka Khyaung until seven years after May’s departure and death. Conversations that express May’s frustration and grief and direct those emotions toward Medhawati more likely reflect the self-recognition, whether Medhawati’s or Zanawati’s, of the familial ramifications of the decision to live as a thilashin, pursue a monastic education, and seek a place of belonging far from one’s natal home. These conversations highlight the ways that Medhawati’s position within her family changes throughout her life course and career, and yet the family system’s constitutive role in this example of the self-presentation of a thilashin as sister endures. By interweaving May’s point of view into Medhawati’s life story, Zanawati demonstrates that Medhawati remains, in Khin Myo Chit’s words, “very much a woman like anyone else,” and that this gendered experience of sisterhood is vital to the formation of the virtuous qualities for which she is remembered.

Biographies of Buddhist lineage leaders and meditation masters such as U Ba Khin ( , 1899–1971; see Houtman 1997) or of the hermit, U Khanti, ( , 1866–1948) discussed below, are laden with hagiographic tropes drawn from the life of the Buddha and tend to “spiritualize” their subjects by avoiding reference to human imperfections (Reynolds and Capps 1976:3). In contrast, the biography of Medhawati emphatically “humanizes” its subject, following the form of what Reynolds and Capps identify as a more contemporary “confessional” model of sacred biography that highlights “chronology, developmental patterns, and the process of self-realization” (Reynolds and Capps 1976:5). The biography’s rhetorical emphasis on ordinary, gendered human experience is distinct from strategies of figuring female devotees noted in other contexts. For example, Seeger’s (2018) study of several Thai mae chi focuses on attributions of saintliness and supernatural powers both during the lives of mae chi and in the hagiographical processes that developed following their deaths. Cook’s study of the life-story of Mae Chi Khun Yai argues that the subject “organizes her experiences in terms of ultimate, rather than relative, truth,” (Cook 2009:350) yielding a “non-gendered and asexual renunciatory narrative” (Cook 2009:354), highlighting a strategy of hagiographic narration in which gender is irrelevant to the subject’s spiritual trajectory. In contrast, by following Medhawati from childhood to adulthood and highlighting her significant, if fraught, relationship with her older sister, Medhawati’s biography suggests that the gendered nature of the mutual dependence of thilashin with kin is a vital aspect of some female devotees’ strategies of self-presentation and self-transformation.

Thilashin as Patron

The establishment of the Khemethaka Khyaung in 1905 marks a transition in Medhawati’s career, as she fulfills her uncle’s and her teachers’ wishes and becomes a Sayagyi ( ), the head of her own institution. Among the conditions that enable the khyaung’s establishment and development is a litany of monastic benefactors. Zanawati names these benefactors in the work’s introduction, an authorizing move that imbricates the Khemethaka Khyaung and its leaders within a particular collective of influential figures:

Since the Sayagyis follow the Sayadaws’ instructions on management and administration, they have maintained the thilashin who have come from all over Myanmar. In particular, they have adhered to the “Thilashin Upade”¹² ( ) put forward by Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw.¹³

Indeed. The Khemethaka Khyaung Sayagyis cleared the land and created the Khemethaka Khyaung following the instructions of consecutive Sayadaws, from Maha Ghandhayon Sayadawgyi Ashin Uttara to the well-known dhamma teacher Anisakhan Sayadaw.¹⁴ The Sayagyis have supervised all of this. They have looked after and developed everything from thilashin culture to their morals and proficiency in pariyatti ( ) literature. Because of those Sayagyis’ complete and persistent tenacity, the Khemethaka Khyaung, with more than one hundred thilashin, is now proudly one of the best known sathintaik in Myanmar.

Just as they followed the instructions of Sayadaws such as Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw and Anisakhan Sayadaw in succession, today, since we adhere to the instructions of Yadana Beikman Sayadaw,¹⁵ Pathama Gandhayon Sayadaw,¹⁶ Hanthagiri Sayadaw,¹⁷ and Thaddhamma Thitagu Khyaung Thaygone Sayadaw,¹⁸ our own virtue and the reputation of the sāsana are strictly managed and developed so that they do not fade.

( 1982:ii)

For any ordinary reader, this list of monastic teachers is enough to impress that the Khemethaka Khyaung is connected to leading monks and thus worthy of interest and support. This passage is also directed toward a more specific network of patrons for whom these particular male monastic leaders are well known. All of these monks, as well as the previously mentioned Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw, are notable members of the Shwegyin sect administration, an outspoken minority of Myanmar monks that, despite being far fewer in number than those of the predominant Thudhamma sect, have tended to take on highly public, nationally recognizable roles.

The close-knit nature of this group of monastic benefactors suggests that it was not by chance that Medhawati happened across sympathetic monks willing to train her. Rather, it is likely that, on the one hand, at least a subset of Shwegyin leaders explicitly, and perhaps collectively, sought to support, influence, and benefit from relationships with thilashin, and on the other, Medhawati and her family were already a part of these monks’ donor base. This section explores these two propositions by tracing how Medhawati’s biography embeds her within an intimate landscape of monastic teachers and their patrons that enables her to capitalize on preexisting relationships of connectivity and support. The passage above describes the intensive and creative efforts of the khyaung’s thilashin leaders while also demonstrating that they remain subject to the instruction and admonishment of male monastic benefactors. As one benefactor of the khyaung, Anisakhan Sayadaw, would warn, “It is well known by many that I look after your khyaung. You must not defame me” ( 1982:70).

This warning foregrounds the stakes of the “interlocking relationships” (Saruya 2020) that sustain a coherent, hierarchical social order within and across collectives. On one occasion, Medhawati was prescribed one month of strict ascetic practices ( ) by Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw upon return from her first pilgrimage to Sri Lanka and India in 1911. The Sayadaw deemed that she had been absent from the khyaung for longer than an appropriate amount of time. This punishment, however, is not simply a matter of the subordination of thilashin to male monastic authority; the reputations of the monks who serve as thilashin benefactors are also in play. This relationship of mutual, though asymmetrical, dependence reveals the ways that collectives of teachers, students, and patrons operate as units in which social location is deeply situational and not preconceived.

The case of Medhawati’s punishment by Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw also indicates that thilashin become involved in intra-monastic competition even at the micro level, within a Shwegyin network. Medhawati undertook her pilgrimage by joining the retinue of her teacher from the East Withuddhayon Kyaung in Mandalay. It may be that by reprimanding Medhawati, Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw sought to reassert his more recently established jurisdiction over her and the Khemethaka Khyaung.¹⁹ His harsh judgment of Medhawati’s pilgrimage as “traveling and wasting time” ( 1982:41) also suggests conflicting devotional priorities. Medhawati’s decision to go on pilgrimage is made at the expense of other practices such as textual study and meditation. Part of Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw’s admonishment required that Medhawati had to meditate at least one hour every day, demanding, “Your striving is enabled by staying only in the khyaung” ( 1982:41). A similar scenario plays out in Ashin Nandamala’s ( ) 1980 biography of thilashin Daw Malayi ( , 1880–1984), founder of the Sagaing Hill Thameiddhawdaya Sathintaik ( ).²⁰ An elderly donor convinced Malayi and her students to spend a few weeks of the hot summer season resting in the cooler hills east of Mandalay. When they returned to Sagaing, Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw admonished them saying that Malayi was “too young to stay apart from her teachers” ( 2010 [1980]:72). The Maha Gandhayon Sayadaw’s explanation of both Malayi’s and Medhawati’s misconduct suggests that the offense committed in both cases was to act without his prior approval, and the solution was to remain fixed in a space and routine determined by him.

Demonstrating the gravity of the Sayadaw’s admonishment, in the section immediately following Medhawati’s punishment, Medhawati chooses not to accompany her sister May on a return trip to their natal village. As noted previously, this decision would prove consequential as May died within three months of her return home. Only then did Medhawati request permission to travel to their natal village to manage the funeral arrangements and return immediately to Sagaing. The close juxtaposition of these scenes highlights the stakes of being subject to the instruction of one’s benefactors. Their support, which indexes Medhawati’s successful career as a thilashin, does not come without cost, another example of the biography’s close attention to the tragic nature of interdependence.

The biography brings texture and affect to the give and take of affiliation within a network of leaders, devotees, and patrons. For Medhawati, the center of this network is Taungoo, a significant Shwegyin stronghold at the turn of the twentieth century.²¹ Prior membership in a Taungoo-based Shwegyin donor network is made most explicit with respect to Medhawati’s partner and successor at Khemethaka Khyaung, Daw Konmari²² ( , 1866–1962), who Medhawati met upon her arrival to Taungoo Myotaung Kyaung. Konmari’s parents financed a monastery within the Taungoo Myotaung complex and were significant, regular supporters of Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw. Konmari herself sponsored the ordination of the monk who would become this Sayadaw’s successor. Even after fifteen years living at the East Withuddhayon Kyaung in Mandalay, the thilashin continue to identify themselves as “from Taungoo” in conversations with potential donors, an affiliation that seems to index more than just an expression of their natal region. On Medhawati’s first trip to Sagaing in 1904, accompanied by Konmari and young Ma Gunawati (Medhawati’s third successor), the thilashin encountered a group of female donors on the ferry who guessed, “Sayalay,²³ you must be from Taungoo, right? You are in the prime of life . . . You are so beautiful and refined. Sit by us” ( 1982:23). It is unclear what makes the group easily identifiable as “from Taungoo,”²⁴ but the donors’ assumption about their background, as well as their appealing countenance, are the initial characteristics that draw the two groups of women into intimate conversation, “still chatting when the boat docked at Sagaing Hill, just after six o’clock in the morning” ( 1982:23). That this encounter occurred by chance on Medhawati’s first visit to Sagaing emphasizes the ease with which Medhawati could connect to members of a dispersed network in the midst of the broad and transient flow of visitors to Sagaing Hill as a site of pilgrimage.

Beginning her reach toward Sagaing as a more permanent home, Medhawati projects a strong sense of the right time to move on from Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw’s domain:

When they had exhausted the course of study, Ma Medhawati said to Ma Konmari, “Sister, our course of learning here has come to end. It is about time we move to Sagaing. Living within the monastery, we are not free. Since we are always offering meals, our time to study is cut short. We are not making headway with our studies. Will you come with me?”

( 1982:13)

Medhawati acknowledges that as long she remains within a male monastic domain, she will be subject to constraints on her time such as the need to prepare meals to offer to the monks, a very typical act of service and devotion taken up by thilashin whether or not they live within a male monastic compound. Her freedom from this service, however, is still largely enabled by Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw who extends his support in directing them to the East Withoddhayon Kyaung in Mandalay with his recommendation:

Since you are going to Sagaing Hill, you must both strive to become khyaung Sayagyis. When you get to Mandalay, as you arrive at the station, ask for the East Withuddhayon Kyaung and tell them that you have come from Taungoo Myotaung Kyaung. Well then, on your way!

( 1982:16)

Like Medhawati’s uncle, who encouraged her capacity to lead an institution of her own to serve the family’s interests, Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw likely supported the two young thilashin because of their capacity to serve the interests of a Shwegyin collective. In both cases of departure, first from her uncle, and then from Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw, Medhawati’s aim is primarily to continue her studies. It is her monastic benefactors who encourage her to establish a khyaung of her own. Once the Khemethaka Khyaung was established in Sagaing, the biography lingers over the narratives of two significant donors responsible for expanding the compound of buildings, a family from Thayaing and a pilgrim from Pegu: two other early and important centers of Shwegyin activity. These subtle references to the map of Shwegyin strongholds indicate the significance of preexisting patronage networks to the establishment of the Khemethaka Khyaung.

From the start of her career as a thilashin, Medhawati was aware of other thilashin already operating in Sagaing Hills. However, neither she nor Konmari began their educational journeys in Sagaing. Rather, in my reading, Medhawati and Konmari understood the value of maximizing their affiliation with Taungoo Myotaung Sayadaw’s monastic network and donor base, of which they and their families were already a part. Prior attention to thilashin focuses almost exclusively on Sagaing and positions Sagaing Hill itself as a unique wellspring of thilashin institutional presence based on the legacy of two Mindon-era thilashin, Saya Kin ( , b. 1814) and May Nat Pe ( , b. 1804) (Kawanami 2013; 2018; Saruya 2020). An inward focus on Sagaing conceals vital and intimate connections to lay patrons and monastic teachers further afield yet closely linked within a Shwegyin-oriented collective. That Zanawati highlights these specific connections in Medhawati’s biography indicates that thilashin themselves and their audience of lay readers maintained a strong sense of the salience of personal and regional affiliations even amidst the state-driven reorganization of monastic institutions of the 1980s.

The affective nature of these personal networks is made explicit with regard to Gunawati, Khemethaka Khyaung’s third Sayagyi, just fourteen years old when she accompanied Medhawati on their first trip to Sagaing. After caring for her great-grandparents until their deaths, Gunawati and her young mother sought initiation as thilashin and went to her mother’s uncle, described as an elder forest monk intensely devoted to ascetic and meditative practice, for assistance. He had trained as a novice at the East Withuddhayon Kyaung, and “Although he originally planned to send them to Sagaing Hills, when he heard that there were thilashin living outside the East Withuddhayon Kyaung, he went there” ( 1982:21). The unnamed monk describes his duty toward his niece and her daughter as an opportunity to resolve a debt of gratitude for their care of his parents rather than a chance to pass along a burden of care: “Since I owe them so much because of their immense support, I brought them here” ( 1982: 21). After receiving his former student, the head monk asks Medhawati to initiate the women, explaining, “This monk has come to entrust them to us because we are familiar. We must help and watch over them for him” ( 1982:22). Zanawati’s presentation of the monk’s choice of the East Withuddhayon Kyaung over an unfamiliar place in Sagaing suggests that the duty of responsibility to family, even that of an ascetic forest monk, could be discharged with varying degrees of tenderness and attachment. This affective dimension of hierarchical interactions, felt in the flow of dialogue, goes unnoticed when social autonomy is taken for granted as the primary aim and symbolic idiom of monasticism.

Medhawati’s biography highlights the push and pull of recognition within a hierarchical network of institutions and student–teacher relationships in a way that complicates prior descriptions of monastic hierarchy. My approach to understanding the social worlds of thilashin at the individual and institutional level resonates with Salgado’s (2013) attention to what she calls the “renunciant everyday.” However, in Salgado’s elaboration of this concept, she emphasizes women’s capacity “to make and effectively carry out their own decisions” (Salgado 2013:227) free from the demands of others, in particular, of male monastics. I see this as an overcorrection that in fact sneaks back in some liberal feminist assumptions about how women’s agency ought to work and locks us out of opportunities to consider female devotees’ pursuit of recognition within established patterns of hierarchy and power. As Langenberg shows, contemporary female devotees often act as “agents of social change” expressly by training “a critical eye on the gendered representations and institutions of their own tradition while, at the same time, locating power and agency in the sincere and profound fulfillment of its ethical norms and respect for its structures of authority” (Langenberg 2018:21). Medhawati’s biography is unequivocal in its presentation of Medhawati as deeply dependent on male monastic benefactors who simultaneously enable educational and devotional accomplishments of thilashin, command their attention and deference, and depend on their service, devotion, and conduct. By asserting both the affective and material dependence of male monastic leaders on the support and partnership of their subordinates, by demonstrating Medhawati’s clear sense of the institutional conditions that best serve her vocation, and by signaling the enduring presence and influence of a coterie of patrons, the biography reveals the fraught experience of navigating the bonds that constitute a patronage network for all of its constituents.

Medhawati’s Own Models

I have addressed two rhetorical models of practice that emerge from the biography’s depiction of Medhawati as a sister and as a patron, navigating the overlapping demands of a complex social location within a family system and a patronage network. The question remains, to whom did Medhawati herself look for models of practice, and what can these models tell us about how she understood her own affinities and the possibilities of the thilashin vocation?

It is often taken for granted that the fully ordained bhikkhuni is the primary model for thilashin and other female devotees. For example, when discussing dasa sil mātā, non-ordained female devotees in Sri Lanka who keep ten precepts, Bartholomeusz asserts that they “invariably base themselves on models of female renunciation found in the canonical texts . . . the ancient ordained nun” (Bartholomeusz 1994:8). An unintended consequence of the deference to models of renunciation, canonical, or otherwise, is that vernacular models of practice chosen or produced by female devotees themselves go unnoticed or ignored. In this section, I amplify two figures that Medhawati takes as models for her devotional practice: the local model of the hermit, U Khanti, and the scriptural model of the Brahmin Suruci, ( ) a prior incarnation of Gotama Buddha. Neither of these figures is an ordained bhikkhu or bhikkhuni; neither is a woman. Medhawati adapts these models to suit the particular conditions of her position in which gender differentiation expresses itself as a basic social reality.

In 1910, Medhawati devised an alms-giving event following the story of the Brahmin Suruci that she came across while reading Atthasālinī-atthakathā.²⁵ As the story goes, Suruci was a prior incarnation of Gotama Buddha during the era of Mangala Buddha. Upon hearing a discourse by Mangala Buddha, Suruci desired to offer a meal to the Buddha and his retinue. As this meeting occurred during Mangala Buddha’s first assembly, there were ten million lakhs of monks in attendance. Confident that he could afford to feed and clothe the entire assembly, Suruci only worried that he would not have room for them all to sit down comfortably. Indra, sensing the opportunity to share in the merit of Suruci’s plan, disguised himself as a carpenter, appeared to Suruci, and conjured an immense hall of precious gemstones and bedecked with garlands and bells, fit for the Buddha and his massive retinue. As a form of payment to Indra for his work, Suruci extended his initial plan of one day of offerings to seven days and did so by offering a special food called gavapāna ( ). Medhawati resurrected the recipe for gavapāna from the Pali commentary and offered this food to an assembly of invited monks each year on her birthday, the fourth day of Pyatho ( ).

In deciphering the recipe for gavapāna from the commentary, Medhawati transforms the work of preparing and serving food to monks, a very typical act of service offered by thilashin, into a performance of textual mastery by demonstrating her skill in interpreting a less commonly understood Pali narrative. In case there was any doubt about the skill involved in her interpretive process, she also composed a poem, a lyrical combination of Burmese and Pali, with which her youngest thilashin students would greet the invited monks as they arrived to take part in the meal:

Rice, honey, sugar, and butter,Each portion is properly mixed and cooked,As the food of the Sālini treatise is described,I followed the example from the great book.Givers and recipients alike receive merit. Mark this special meal cooked for the first time in Sagaing. We invite you to gather at dawn on the fourth day,To eat this meal of gavapāna.Please do not stray, without fail, come to Khemethaka.

( 1982:39)

Suruci appears to be a well-calibrated model of generosity for thilashin. Unlike the usual paragon of the perfection of generosity, the royal Prince Vessantara, Suruci is an ordinary (if exceedingly wealthy) Brahmin. Vessantara’s generosity is indiscriminate; he offers anything and everything of value to him and does so to appease very unlikeable figures. Suruci’s mode of giving, while insatiable, is highly focused—he offers the monastic requisites and directs them toward the Buddha and his retinue. Likewise, the central objects of thilashin generosity are the Buddha and the san: ghā ( ).²⁶ Where Vessantara requires the intervention of Indra to stop him from giving away his own wife, Suruci’s desire to give beckons Indra to collaborate with him, offering the promise of sharing in the merit of giving alms to a Buddha. Instead of offering payment to Indra, Suruci resolves his debt by extending their joint offerings, thereby increasing the merit earned by their collaborative donation. Similarly, thilashin often absolve their sense of debt to their supporters by serving as conduits of giving whose effective guidance enables lay donors to maximize their offerings (Kawanami 2020). Adapting Suruci as a model of giving, Medhawati calibrates the quality of generosity, usually exemplified by Vessantara, to fit the specific location of thilashin. Were thilashin to take Vessantara as a model of generosity, it is possible that they would be seen as overstepping their position.²⁷ While Vessantara is the penultimate birth prior to the Buddha’s incarnation as Siddhartha Gotama, his incarnation as Suruci is more remote, which might suit the generally held understanding among Myanmar Buddhists that female bodies are further from the possibility of enlightenment than male bodies.

Medhawati models herself after Suruci’s insatiable appetite for giving. Her biography highlights a local saying from the time of Medhawati’s tenure as Sayagyi: “Medha is dāna” ( 1982:56) something of a tongue-twister in Burmese ( ). The biography continues,

When it came to making donations, Daw Medhawati did not like it when Daw Konmari did things according to precise calculations. She always said,

“You want to keep track of every expense. I do not want to do things like that. If there is something there, we eat; if there is nothing, that is just how it is. This is what it means to be a thilashin. We donate much, and when we only have a little then we must restrict ourselves. We do not begrudge any matters relating to Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha. As long as I am healthy and well, donating is not a burden.”

( 1982:57)

For Medhawati, “what it means to be a thilashin” is to be a conduit for anything in excess of what she needs to maintain her health. But despite Medhawati’s rhetorical emphasis on selfless magnanimity over precise accounting, the other figure after which she models herself, U Khanti, is more closely aligned with the style of giving she attributes to Konmari.

U Khanti oversaw various construction and restoration projects primarily around Mandalay Hill and also further afield. He lived as a hermit, a non-ordained religious specialist, on Mandalay Hill, after spending twelve years as an ordained, Shwegyin monk. In 1918, Daw Medhawati brought fifteen of her thilashin students on a pilgrimage to Mandalay to pay obeisance at pagodas throughout the city including those restored by U Khanti on Mandalay Hill and nearby Yankin Hill. Upon return to Sagaing, she expressed to her students, “When I saw the covered walkways made by the great hermit, U Khanti, it crossed my mind to build one on the path that goes up to the Ponyashin Pagoda ( ). I myself will solicit the donations. I will put out a collection box” ( 1982:49). Medhawati accomplished this project, and in addition to the staircase, she used the donations to commission copies of two wooden statues also put up by U Khanti that she found particularly powerful during the pilgrimage.

A contemporary of Medhawati, U Khanti earned a name for himself as a scrupulous financial manager. A 1996 biography of U Khanti remembers him as “a very strict disciplinarian” who “would personally record the amount of the donations received each day before safe-keeping” (Aye Maung 2010). He is also remembered as “a de facto accountant” who “once confided to his personal assistants that his preoccupation with financing his restoration work led to his self-imposed disrobing from the monkhood” (Aung Zaw and Nance 2002). Despite going against Medhawati’s earlier profession of selfless magnanimity, U Khanti constitutes a poignant model for her as a thilashin. He disrobed explicitly because he felt the prescriptions for conduct as an ordained monk would inhibit his involvement in projects undertaken in service of the sāsana. It was U Khanti’s non-ordained status as a hermit that enabled his impact on the religious landscape of Mandalay Hill and beyond.

Conclusion

When I use the language of “models,” I do not mean to suggest that the biography intends to make Medhawati into a generalizable model for all Buddhist women. Rather, drawing on Khandelwal’s study of contemporary female sannyasinis of the Hindu tradition in Northern India, I assert the necessity of learning from “actual women with particular histories” (Khandelwal 2004:8) without the pressure to synthesize them into the formation of an abstract category. Like Khandelwal, I find that “one of the few generalizations supported by my data” is that “Sannyasinis”—in my case thilashin—“are women, and they identify at least as much with their female counterparts in the home as they do with their male peers who have renounced householder life” (Khandelwal 2004:192). Thus, the sense of thilashin I propose in the introduction—non-ordained but initiated women unevenly empowered by relationships and practices that enable their advancement on a Buddhist path to liberation—is meant to acknowledge both the nonuniform nature of thilashin in their vocations and the varying levels of support they receive to pursue them. Most of all, this definition asserts their vital and mutual, if asymmetrical, dependency within broader social formations like the family and the patronage network, within which their identity as women is foundational. As we have seen, images of renunciatory asceticism are not as central to the self-presentation of thilashin as is commonly assumed, thus my preference for the term “initiated female devotees” and attendant avoidance of the catchall category, “female renunciants.” Models of practice that emerge from Medhawati’s biography show her navigating complex and overlapping social locations as a sister and as a patron, as a student and as the head of a thriving khyaung. The competing demands of these subjectivities shift over the course of her life and career, as do her aspirations and her means of pursuing them.

For scholars of Burma/Myanmar Studies and Buddhist Studies, our understanding of female devotees in Myanmar and in the broader context of Theravada Buddhist cultures is so far mostly informed by ethnographic projects.²⁸ We have far less understanding of the historical contexts and textual forms²⁹ in and through which thilashin and other initiated female devotees work to harness the social and material capital that enables individual livelihoods, the pursuit of educational opportunities, the establishment, expansion, and preservation of their residential and educational institutions, and the handling of other projects undertaken in service to the sāsana. Langenberg’s feminist invocation of Blackburn’s (2001) “textual communities” asserts the importance of amplifying the “socially grounded shared interpretive act[s]” (Langenberg 2018:19) through which women and girls continually adapt authoritative texts and discourses otherwise seen to subordinate or degrade them. Focusing on the biography of Daw Medhawati, the founder of a thilashin khyaung at the turn of the twentieth century, this article historicizes the study of thilashin by attending to rhetorical models of practice that reveal the stakes of the and locally and temporally specific social worlds in which thilashin have sought to establish and develop institutional footholds. Read intertextually with other contemporary, vernacular Burmese literature written by or about thilashin and their male monastic peers, Medhawati’s life narrative and other thilashin biographies offer an important contribution to illuminating understudied institutional forms of female Buddhist devotion in Myanmar. In their profound reflections on suffering, interdependence, self-transformation, and social change, these works put forward new ways of thinking about the shifting subjectivities and forms of social relatedness that produce and authorize Buddhist institutions in and beyond contemporary Myanmar.