ABSTRACT
This chapter is an attempt to make sense of a long-term, almost twenty-year, involvement with the monastic school system in Myanmar. On a personal level, this time has included a spiritual journey in which I have come to understand more about what makes me ‘tick’ as a development worker, as well as an exciting professional journey during which I have witnessed remarkable changes in a country that has come to be a second home. Over the many years I have lived and worked in Myanmar, I find that I have moved back and forth over many boundaries – geographical, religious, psychological, cultural and personal – and that these boundaries when crossed have sometimes been challenging and deeply upsetting and at other times immensely uplifting and motivating. I have found that often the simplest of boundaries can be highly complex. The very first time I crossed the border from Thailand to Burma in 1993, for example, I moved from Ranong to Kawthaung in the southern-most tip of Burma. The actual physical crossing was not hard. I stepped into a boat in Ranong, it sped across the water and arrived at its journey’s end. I stepped off in Kawthaung and suddenly I was in another land. But the ease with which this happened belied the complexity of what was going on. The staff from World Vision who had organised my visit had spent weeks talking to authorities on both sides to allow it to take place. To this day I am not sure how this was all negotiated: whether promises about one thing or another were made. And when I left and headed back to Ranong, endless questions, for clarifications and reports, were posed by the Burmese authorities to the World Vision staff in Kawthaung. I sometimes wonder how these documents travelled up the lines of authority through to the Immigration Department, the police, the Special Branch. One simple border crossing created a huge amount of interest. And so it is with other boundaries, in particular the ones that are not quite so obvious. These are some of the boundaries which will be discussed in this chapter. This chapter presents an analysis of my personal engagement with Buddhist education in Myanmar, as a nominal Christian working variously with a Christian NGO, a secular agency and the Buddhist monastic education development
group. It is structured in four parts: first, an introduction to monastic school education which will include briefly delving into its historical context and then a more detailed explanation of monastic education at the present time. Following this, a second section presents observations about the kinds of faith boundaries that exist for monastic schools and the issues and challenges faced in confronting them. I then take a small detour to identify myself in all of this, in a parallel narrative to what was going on around me. Finally, the chapter will draw some conclusions that may be more widely applicable in terms of both development practice and education. This chapter reports on a longitudinal study of the ‘ethnographic tradition’ (Taylor 2002), with reference to other quantitative research. The findings and deliberations presented are therefore by no means exhaustive, and cannot be claimed to be universally representative of all schools and individuals involved in monastic education, or of development agencies such as World Vision Myanmar. It is in many ways a story of my personal engagement with individuals and the cultural, religious and social realities in which they exist; in that sense it is an ‘autoethnography’, which can be defined as ‘The systematic study, analysis, and narrative description of one’s own experiences, interactions, culture, and identity’ (Tracy 2012). In the end, my main hope is that this makes interesting reading and helps us all to a better understanding of the role of religion in development, and in particular that of Buddhism in education in Myanmar, and the potential that this has for the creation of a more peaceful and understanding society.
