Buddhists who stand up

Maha Ghosananda

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
By Matthew Weiner
The International Herald Tribune

NEW YORK:
Westerners tend to think of Buddhism as a passive religion, focused on silent meditation and personal spiritual growth. The image of the Buddha seated with a smile sums it up.

So while the West is highly familiar with conflict and activism in other religions, the "saffron revolution" in Burma and the "high altitude revolt" in Tibet have come as a surprise to many.

In fact, there is a healthy tradition of Buddhist activism. Often called "engaged Buddhism," a term coined by Thich Nhant Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, it encourages a Buddhist critique of governmental and economic structures and other efforts to alleviate social suffering.

In Sri Lanka, the Sarvodaya Movement works in over a thousand villages to empower the poor. Maha Ghosanand, a revered Cambodian Buddhist monk, led thousands in peaceful walks through the "killing fields" to seek reconciliation with the Khmer Rouge. Nhant Hanh himself called on both North and South Vietnam to stop their bloodshed.

In Thailand, the "Forest Monk" Prachak "ordained" trees in the forest by wrapping monks' robes around them to save them from loggers. The Taiwan-based Tzu-Chi movement has thousands of volunteers who respond to natural and man-made disasters.

The Reverend Nakagaki of the New York Buddhist Church holds an annual service on the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. After 9/11, he recalled America's use of internment camps in World War II and called on all Buddhists to help Muslim citizens. Nakagaki is fond of showing an image of the Buddha who is standing up.

He says that Buddhism is about having a peaceful mind, but not just sitting there.

Buddhist activists cite Buddhist scriptures to argue that they say they are simply following what the Buddha taught. In one, the Buddha confronts a murderer who was on the verge of killing his mother; in another, he stopped a war between two tribes.

A third example is the idea of the Bodhisattva: a being who works tirelessly to save all other beings from suffering.

One source of the Western misunderstanding of Buddhism is our fascination with meditation. While meditation is as critical to Buddhism as prayer is to Christianty, Judaism and Islam, it does not preclude action, any more than prayer does.

In fact, the Buddhist focus on meditation emphasizes a state of mind that can lead to a particular kind of activism - walking meditation and nonviolent resistance - as demonstrated by the Maha Ghosandanda in Cambodia or the monks in Burma.

The misunderstandings continue with the term "Buddhist monk." "Monk" is a Christian term for religious ascetics who generally practice their faith in isolation from the world. The word comes from the Greek "monos," "alone."

But "Bikkhu," the Buddhist term for monk, translates literally as "beggar."

Bikkhus are required to teach and guide the lay community and to beg for their food. From their very inception in Buddhist practice, Bikkhus have had a deeply recriprocal relationship with the lay world - including the government - as teachers and spiritual models. They have always been active in the world.

Another notion that does not stand up under historic scrutiny is that all active Buddhists are peace activists; indeed, there are those who argue that there has never been a Buddhist war. But there are also unfortunate examples throughout history of Buddhist participation in government oppression and violence.

Yet it is the peaceful activism for which Buddhist monks are best known and most respected. That they have opposed injustice in Burma and Tibet should not be a surprise; that they have not met violence with violence should be commended.

Matthew Weiner is director of programs at the Interfaith Center of New York.

How Buddhism Became Force for Political Activism

Khmer Krom monks protest in Phnom Penh

Buddhist monks protesting in Yangon. Unlike Islam and Christianity, Buddhism has often tended to stand aloof from politics but in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, China and elsewhere in Asia, different strands of Buddhism are a powerful spur to political activism. In September, long-fraying bonds between Buddhist clergy and the generals who run Myanmar snapped when monks took the lead in anti-government protests. (Photo: AP)

MUSCULAR MONKS

From China to Myanmar, Once-Quiescent Creed Spurs New Campaigns

November 7, 2007
By ANDREW HIGGINS
Wall Street Journal

After evening prayers on Sept. 18, the abbot of a small monastery in Myanmar's largest city convened the roughly 30 Buddhist monks in his charge. The bonds between secular and religious authority had broken, the abbot said. Then he gave the monks his blessing to take to the streets in protest.

That meeting, one of many held in monasteries across Myanmar in mid-September, helped turn a sputtering campaign of dissent led by secular democracy activists into a mass movement led by Buddhist clergy. The country formerly known as Burma erupted in the biggest wave of antigovernment demonstrations in nearly 20 years.

"We wanted to stay out of politics," says U Zawtiga, a monk at the monastery in Yangon, formerly Rangoon. But "how can religion thrive when the country is so desperate?" Mr. Zawtiga, active in the protests, fled Yangon after the military started shooting protesters on Sept. 27. He is now in hiding along Myanmar's border with Thailand. His abbot, he says, has been arrested.

The vanguard role of monks in the Burmese protests underscores a curious turn for a creed often associated with quiet contemplation. Unlike Islam and Christianity, Buddhism offers no clear scriptural mandate for revolt against unjust rulers. Rooted in nonviolence, a belief in rebirth and a conviction that salvation lies in the conquest of worldly desires, it has no tradition of crusades or jihad in service of an almighty God.

Across wide swathes of Asia, however, Buddhism has emerged as a powerful spur to political activism. Motives differ from place to place. So, too, do the strands of Buddhism involved. But in each case, the faith has taken the lead in often noisy campaigns for change.

The phenomenon extends from Tibet, where Buddhist monks have doggedly resisted Chinese rule, to Myanmar and several other countries of Southeast Asia, where monks have become a significant political force. Monastic activism has taken on a sinister tone in some places, particularly in Sri Lanka, where hard-line nationalist monks have formed a political party that wants all-out war against rebels of the mostly-Hindu Tamil minority.

In China, meanwhile, a Buddhism-tinged group called Falun Gong has eclipsed a moribund pro-democracy movement as the Communist Party's most determined foe.

Buddhism should "not run away from society but reform society," says Sulak Sivaraksa, a prominent Thai champion of Buddhist activism against poverty and injustice. Focusing on just meditation and the next life, he says, is "not Buddhism but escapism." In 1989, Mr. Sivaraksa helped found the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, a group of Buddhist activists that includes some from Myanmar and also Tibet.

Shocks of Modernization

Christopher Queen, a Harvard University religion lecturer, says the trend began in the latter half of the last century, a time when the shocks of modernization and war prodded many faiths to become increasingly political. Some Roman Catholics embraced "liberation theology" and Muslims increasingly turned to political Islam. For Buddhists, though, activism has involved a fundamental re-reading of their generally quiescent creed.

Buddhism holds that an individual's lot in life is determined by actions -- or karma -- in previous lives. This offers hope that evil leaders will pay a price for their misdeeds in a future life but provides little impetus for immediate action. As a result, for much of its history Buddhism has tended to shore up the status quo.

But Myanmar's current plight demands action in the here and now, says Bo Hla Tint, a Buddhist and member of Myanmar's government-in-exile. "We can't wait," he says. He adds that military strongman Gen. Than Shwe will face further punishment later -- with rebirth as a stray dog or an animal raised for slaughter. Rebirth as a household pet, says Mr. Hla Tint, "is too good for him."

A big factor pushing Myanmar's monks onto the streets is their own economic pain. Dependent on donations of food from an increasingly impoverished populace, monks are going hungry as public almsgiving declines. "If people are starving, how can they give to us? If they suffer, we suffer," says U Kaw Thala, 48 years old, another Yangon monk now moving between safe houses in the Thai-Myanmar border zone.

In contrast to secular activists, who are often easily silenced by arrests and intimidation, these faith-fired Buddhist campaigners have demonstrated tremendous stamina. Such perseverance is often helped by the fact that monks and nuns usually have no spouses or children to worry about. Activists also benefit from a loose but durable support network provided by their faith.

Mr. Zawtiga, the Yangon monk, entered the monkhood at the age of 7. Now 39, he has lived in five different monasteries and has a network of contacts across the country. During the September protests, he traded information with old monastic friends and helped coordinate street protests. His parents are both dead. Two of his brothers are abbots.

When the military started raiding monasteries the night of Sept. 26, Mr. Zawtiga took refuge at the home of a devout Buddhist. The next day, accompanied by two other monks, he traveled by bus to the border with Thailand. Local Buddhists gave him shelter and a set of orange-colored robes to help him pass himself off as a Thai monk. Burmese monks wear burgundy. Mr. Zawtiga stays in touch with monks in Yangon and elsewhere by cellphone.

"Everybody knew the military would use violence," he says. "This was not unexpected. We are not afraid." Students and other pro-democracy forces, he says, have been severely weakened by years of repression but "the Sangha [Sanskrit for Buddhist clergy] is getting stronger and more organized." Last week, more than 100 monks took to the streets again in Pakokku, a town in the center of the country. They chanted a Buddhist prayer associated with the democracy cause.

One of the better-known demonstrations of stalwart Buddhist resistance is in Tibet, a Buddhist theocracy until China invaded in 1950. Its monks again defied Beijing last month by celebrating the U.S. Congress's decision to award its highest civilian honor to the exiled Dalai Lama. Clashes were reported in several towns between Chinese security forces and monks.

Persistence and organization are also hallmarks of China's banned Falun Gong movement, a blend of Buddhism, Chinese folk religions and pseudoscience founded in 1992. After initially tolerating the group, authorities cracked down hard in 1999, branding Falun Gong an "evil cult" and arresting thousands.

Since then, the movement has taken up politics with gusto, promoting a political tract called "The Nine Commentaries," a denunciation of communism written in 2004. Falun Gong has no monks or clergy but, through a web of motivated and well-organized lay followers in Hong Kong and elsewhere, it continues to needle Beijing. A TV station and radio network run out of the U.S. beam anticommunist messages into China.

Toughened Resolve

The head of China's state-controlled Buddhist Association denounced Falun Gong, but a few activist Buddhists rallied to defend the group. Among them was Xu Zhiqiang, a protest leader during China's 1989 democracy movement who, after being released from jail, joined a Buddhist monastery. Buddhism, he says, offered him a sanctuary and also toughened his resolve.

In 2004, Mr. Xu helped in a civil suit filed on behalf of an imprisoned Falun Gong follower. He says he doesn't support Falun Gong's reading of Buddhism but does support religious and political liberty. Last year, authorities booted Mr. Xu out of his monastery, accusing him of corruption and "improper relations" with three female Buddhists. He denies the allegations.

Though often wary of Falun Gong's sometimes cultlike behavior, secular Chinese dissidents voice admiration for its staying power. Democracy campaigner Wei Jingsheng, who spent 19 years in Chinese prisons and now lives in exile in the U.S., isn't a believer but sometimes attends Falun Gong events outside China to show solidarity. At a big July rally in Washington, he looked out on a sea of anti-communist banners and said his own dwindling band of secular democrats "could never get a crowd like this."

Buddhists have moved beyond cloistered contemplation before. In medieval Japan, a time of political turmoil, monasteries ran their own armies. China, too, had warrior monks. Starting in the 13th century, China saw periodic rebellions stirred up by the White Lotus, a Buddhist sect greatly feared by rulers as a symptom of dynastic decline.

Generally, though, Buddhism has tended to support established power. This pattern dates back more than 2,500 years to the religion's founder, Siddhartha Gautama, better known as Buddha or the "enlightened one." A north India aristocrat, he found spiritual liberation -- Nirvana -- through meditation under a tree. Unlike Jesus and Muhammad, he didn't challenge ruling elites.

Roughly two centuries after Siddhartha Gautama's death, King Asoka of India declared Buddhism a state religion. Since then, Asian rulers through the centuries have sought to emulate his example, supporting monasteries in return for the clergy's blessing of their rule.

Washington, struggling to beat back communism in Asia, also saw Buddhism as a potential force for stability. But in 1963, a Vietnamese monk set himself on fire to protest the anti-Buddhist bias of South Vietnam's U.S.-backed Roman Catholic president, Ngo Dinh Diem. Eager to calm Buddhist anger, the U.S. helped topple President Diem.

Even fanatical atheists have cloaked their rule in symbolism borrowed from Buddhism. In May 1975, shortly after their conquest of Cambodia, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot and his lieutenants retired to a Buddhist sanctuary, the Silver Pagoda, to plot a murderous program that would result in an estimated 1.6 million deaths and include the slaughter of many monks. Pol Pot slept on a raised dais previously used to display a statue of Buddha.

Burma, as Myanmar was known until 1989, has a particularly deep Buddhist heritage. According to Burmese tradition, the faith was first brought to the country by a mission sent by King Asoka in the third century B.C. When Britain seized Burma in the 19th century, loyalty to Buddhism helped rally resistance.

Since independence in 1948, Burmese leaders have all sought to revive the ancient model of close bonds between monastic and state power. More than 80% of the population is Buddhist. U Nu, the country's first prime minister, rebuilt temples and monasteries and, in imitation of King Asoka, held a Buddhist Council that brought together faithful from across Asia. After a 1962 coup brought the military to power, dictator Ne Win, a Buddhist inspired by Marx and Stalin, built two huge new pagodas -- but also purged the clergy of monks suspected of disloyalty.

Democrats tapped Buddhism, too. When students took to the streets in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democracy cause, visited Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda to call for an end to military rule. Monks joined the movement, which mushroomed into a peaceful mass uprising. In September 1988, the military crushed the protests. As many as 3,000 people died. Nine months later, on June 4, 1989, similar scenes played out in China, Burma's closest ally. Hundreds and possibly many more died when the army launched an assault on Tiananmen Square to end student-led protests.

In both China and Myanmar, democracy activists went into hiding, fled abroad or were jailed. In both countries, various strains of Buddhism helped fill the void as a vehicle for dissent.

China worked hard to shore up the Buddhist bona fides of its increasingly beleaguered allies in Myanmar. Starting in the mid-1990s, it arranged several times to have Buddha's tooth -- a relic greatly revered by Buddhists -- sent from China to Myanmar for display. Myanmar's generals built a special sanctuary to house the tooth and invested in other Buddhism-related construction projects.

The lavish spending on temples won over some monks but in general, ties between the state and the clergy continued to fray. Dissident monks set up the All Burma Young Monks Union to organize resistance to the junta. Ms. Suu Kyi, the opposition leader, reached out to elderly abbots and, while in detention, calmed her nerves by reading a book on the "liberation teachings" of Buddha.

The deepening economic crisis of recent years hit monasteries hard, pushing even apolitical monks toward activism, says Mr. Kaw Thala, the Yangon monk now in hiding. He says he used to collect small donations of rice and other food from around 20 people each week. The number of almsgivers, he says, had dwindled to a handful by this summer.

Meanwhile, soaring unemployment drove many jobless men to seek shelter in monasteries. At a monastery in the hills above Myawaddy, a town on the border with Thailand, a 44-year-old former professional kick boxer explained that he grew too old to practice his martial skills and couldn't find another job. He decided six months ago to become a monk.

Recent Protests

Myanmar's recent protests were initially triggered by an abrupt hike in the price of fuel on Aug. 15. Veteran political activists, mostly former student leaders from 1988, organized a series of small marches and delivered fiery speeches. Most were promptly arrested. The protests died down.

In early September, security forces threw gasoline on the dying embers by manhandling a group of monks in Pakokku, the central Myanmar town where monks marched again last week. Rumors quickly spread of a bloodbath. Senior monks demanded an apology from the military. Officials ignored the plea.

When a mid-September deadline set by monks for an official apology for the Pakokku incident passed, monastic anger bubbled over. At meetings in monasteries across the country, monks denounced the military's failure to apologize and called for action.

Mr. Zawtiga, the monk from Yangon who is now on the run, says discussion of the Pakokku episode dominated the meeting held at his own monastery on Sept. 18. The military "insulted our religion," he says. "We can't tolerate that."

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com

Political Cartoon: Domino in Asia

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Buddhism and its values have inspired a tradition of non-violent protest more powerful than secularists understand

The Burmese monks' spiritual strength proves religion has a role in politics

Buddhism and its values have inspired a tradition of non-violent protest more powerful than secularists understand

Monday October 1, 2007
Pankaj Mishra
The Guardian (UK)

In recent months, militant atheists have tried to convince us religion ought to be expelled from public as well as private life. It is not hard to imagine how their salon wisdom would have fared last week in the streets of Rangoon, where ordinary Burmese protesting against a military dictatorship rallied behind Buddhist monks - the "highly revered moral core", as the New York Times put it, of Burmese society.

If the images of saffron-robed mendicants braving police brutality seem oddly familiar, it is because Buddhist monks left their monasteries and led protests against political repression frequently in the 20th century. So great and prolonged was the suffering of war in Indochina that the Buddhist attempt to alleviate it may seem a distant memory. But it was the self-immolation of a monk in Saigon in June 1963 - rather, pictures of him serenely meditating as flames devoured his body - that first troubled America's conscience about what was then an obscure war.

Thich Nhat Hanh, another Vietnamese monk, was a prominent figure in the anti-war movement in the US who eventually persuaded Martin Luther King to pit his voice against the destruction of Vietnam. In Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge killed almost all the 60,000 monks, the Buddhist monk Maha Ghosananda became a major figure in the reconstruction of his country.

In September 1987 Buddhist monks and nuns began the first major political demonstration in Tibet in years by unfurling the Tibetan flag in central Lhasa. They were arrested and severely beaten, sparking off clashes between Tibetans and police that provoked Hu Jintao, now China's president and then the Chinese administrator in Tibet, to declare martial law.

How did a supposedly meditative tradition produce political protesters? If "religion is a poison", as Mao Zedong informed the Dalai Lama - a sentiment echoed by the secularists of our time - why then has Buddhism proved such an effective means of mass mobilisation against tyranny?

The Buddha himself was no political theorist or activist. He preferred to address the question of what constitutes the ruler's right to rule. Unlike the theorists of ancient India who claimed divine sanction for kingship, the Buddha did not find the ruler's legitimacy in some transcendent realm. As the many stories about ideal kings in the Jataka Tales - a compendium of Buddhist stories - attest, righteousness is the only proper basis for the ruler's authority.

The Buddha preferred small political communities in which all members shared the power of decision-making. In his lifetime, however, he witnessed the emergence of large states. Aware that these impersonal regimes exposed many people to a sense of powerlessness and insecurity, he hoped that the Buddhist sangha, or monastic order, would base itself near urban centres and help give newly uprooted people a sense of spiritual community and tradition.

Thus Buddhist monks, living not in forests but in retreats close to populated settlements, are traditionally bound to laymen by an ethic of social responsibility. Not surprisingly, in Tibet and Burma, where a modern, militarised state tyrannises a largely pre-modern and unorganised population, monasteries have been exalted as alternative centres of moral and political authority, and monks and nuns have come to spearhead resistance to unrighteous regimes.

Certainly, Buddhists are not immune to ideological delusions. In early 20th-century Japan, and in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and 90s, many Buddhist monks succumbed to the lure of nationalism and militarism. Nevertheless, with its absence of dogma and emphasis on intellectual and spiritual vigilance, Buddhism has proved to be less vulnerable to fanatical zeal than not only other major religions, but also such modern ideologies as nationalism and secularism. As Nhat Hanh exhorts, echoing a major theme of the Buddha: "Do not be idolatrous about, or bound to, any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth."

It helps, too, that Buddhist political methods aim, relatively modestly, at dialogue and moral conversion rather than total revolution. Writing to Martin Luther King in 1965, after another Buddhist self-immolation in Vietnam, Nhat Hanh explained that "the monks who burned themselves did not aim at the death of the oppressors, but only at a change in their policy. Their enemies are not man. They are intolerance, fanaticism, dictatorship, cupidity, hatred and discrimination which lie within the heart of man."

Maha Ghosananda, who lost his entire family in the Cambodian killing fields, insisted on including the Khmer Rouge at UN-sponsored talks on the future of Cambodia, claiming that he wanted an end to antagonism, not to antagonists. (Such practical wisdom traditionally preserved peace in Afghanistan's tribal society, and the country's current president, Hamid Karzai, appears to have embraced it by offering a seat in his cabinet to the Taliban.) Similarly, Samdhong Rinpoche, the monk prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile in India, claims he opposes the injustice and violence of Chinese rule rather than the Chinese people or state. Calling for a Gandhian-style campaign of satyagraha, or non-violent resistance, Samdhong Rinpoche asks Tibetans to actively reject Chinese rule through non-cooperation and disobedience, without hating or harming any Chinese. Both he and the Dalai Lama have reservations about even an economic boycott, which they believe hurts ordinary people more than it damages governments.

Living through a worldwide upsurge of violence, most of us may find it hard to conceive of Buddhist principles as politically efficacious. Nevertheless, the history of the modern world furnishes many examples of political victories achieved through moral persuasion and spiritual strength: national self-determination in colonised countries, the civil rights movement in the US, the velvet revolutions in Russia and eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, and the gradual spread of parliamentary democracy around the world.

Today the Burmese generals confront the "authentic, enduring power" of people, before which, as Hannah Arendt presciently wrote in her analysis of the Prague Spring of 1968, a repressive regime eventually surrenders. The Buddhist monks chanting on the streets of Rangoon may look naive and defenceless when you consider the power of the political-military institutions of the modern, secular era that they are up against: heavily armed nation-states with hyper-competitive capitalist economies. Certainly, the Burmese generals know the way the world works. Apparently isolated, they play shrewdly the game of international realpolitik, buying the silence of their two rising and needy neighbours, democratic India as well as authoritarian China, with oil, gas and timber. However, to such a ruthlessly amoral politics, based on purely rational self-interest, the moral and spiritual values of religion can and often do pose a challenge.

No doubt devotees of science and rationality will continue to call for a religion-free politics. But what the Burmese demonstrators prove is that, as Gandhi said, "those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion nor politics".

Pankaj Mishra is the author of Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond

kannauj@gmail.com

Engaged Buddhism

A Buddhist monk uses a megaphone as thousands march in protest in Yangon, Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2007, despite stern warnings from Myanmar's junta against the anti-government protests. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)

Mad Monks In Myanmar

Protesting Buddhist Monks Defy Peaceful, Passive Stereotype

Sept. 30, 2007
by Andrew Lam
The Nation

If you think that Buddhist monks in Myanmar currently waging protests against the military powers are passive and peace-loving, think again. After a monthlong protest, hundreds have been arrested while dozens of others have died or sustained serious injuries since the Burmese junta began its crackdown.

(After the crackdown on demonstrators in Yangon - which left at least nine dead and resulted in the arrest of hundreds of monks - Independent Television News reported today that monks have largely disappeared from the streets.)

The monks' protest is not surprising in Southeast Asia, where Buddhist clerics and intellectuals have traditionally played important roles far beyond the spiritual life. Given the deepening poverty and an economic crisis that left many Burmese on the brink of starvation, including the monks who depend solely on alms to survive, it's surprising that it took them this long before taking action.

"Engaged Buddhism" - a term coined by Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh - has long been the practice in the region. In Vietnam, the ruling class knows each time a Buddhist monk sets himself ablaze they'd better watch out. That was certainly true in 1963 when a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc immolated himself in downtown Saigon to protest a crackdown on Buddhism. Unrest grew as civilian fear turned into anger, and Ngo Dinh Diem's regime fell soon afterward.

Buddhism through a Western lens can appear rosy for its messages of compassion, inner peace, and self-cultivation. In Asian societies Buddhism as an institution has a much broader political impact, comparable to those of Jesuit priests. Thich Nhat Hanh, taking his cue from Zen Buddhism (where Japanese Buddhist monks apply mindfulness to every action, be it drinking tea, shooting an arrow, or arranging flowers) saw engagement and activism as part of their Buddhist practice.

The prominent Thai social critic and activist Sulak Sivaraksa, author of Socially Engaged Buddhism, agreed with Hanh. "In making Buddhism more relevant for the contemporary world, it is important not to compromise on the essentials, such as the ethical precepts (sila)," he noted. "However, these ethical precepts need to be rethought in order to make sense of life in contemporary societies. Buddhists traditionally have lived in rather simple societies, largely agrarian."

But, when the society becomes much more complex, these simple interpretations of ethical norms don't work so well, he observed. "Social reality in the modern world has become much more complex and interconnected. We have to ask questions like these: Do we allow our tax money to go for armaments? Do we keep ourselves separate from the political realm and not challenge the government? Should we breed animals for consumption? If your society is unjust, exploitative, and violent, how do you respond?"

In northern Thailand a decade ago I witnessed Buddhist monks trying to save a forest, by tying sacred scarves around trees so that loggers (themselves devout Buddhists) wouldn't cut them down. It was the first time that I saw Buddhism as part of a grassroots environmental movement.

In Sri Lanka, some Buddhist monks have responded to the long civil war by forming a political party. They now hold seats in parliament and advocate military solutions to the Tamil Tigers insurgency. The Tamils are the largest minority and are Hindus and Christians in a largely Buddhist country. When a New York Times reporter asked Venerable Athuraliye Rathana, the monk who leads the National Heritage Party in Parliament, about Buddhist engagement in politics, he snapped: "Is politics polluted? Was Mao Zedong polluted? Was Mahatma Gandhi polluted?"

Engaged Buddhism continues to be the norm in Vietnam, where stepped-up arrests of outspoken Buddhist monks (and priests) were reported after President Bush visited the country and lifted it from the "country of particular concern" list. Today, Venerable Thich Quang Do, the leader of the outlawed Buddhist church - Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV) - has been under house arrest for, among other things, trying to help flood victims in the Mekong Delta. In a country where 80 percent of the population remains Buddhist, the communist party intends on keeping the lid on the one power center it sees as rivaling its own.

Unlike Vietnam, where wars have a way of disrupting religious lives, in Myanmar Buddhism has continued to thrive despite a junta that claims a communist ideology and a strong alliance to Communist China. Cracking down on pro-democracy protesters has been routine in Myanmar, but crackdowns on monks have been relatively rare.

A dozen years ago it was a serious crime to own a fax machine but these days monks can text-message one another and synchronize their protests and marches in Myanmar's major cities. Foreign media, too, are no longer kept outside of the borders, nor is Myanmar as isolated as it once was during the Cold War. China, considered the puppet leader of Myanmar is more vulnerable to foreign criticism now with its integrated foreign markets and its high stake in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing - which the pro-democracy movement and Buddhist activists are pushing to boycott.

The generals who run that country are themselves reportedly deeply religious, or at least superstitious, many having spent quite a bit of money to renovate temples and build new Buddha statues to accrue good karma. But Burmese monks recently refused to take alms from them and their families, turning their bowls upside down. For it is not Buddhism that is under threat in Myanmar, after all, but the ruling junta.