Insight Myanmar

Meditating beyond the Benevolent Dictator

Episode #592: In this, the 7th installment of a series of discussions with Jonathan Crowley, a former longtime practitioner and assistant teacher in the Goenka Vipassana tradition, he reflects on his decades-long relationship with the Goenka Vipassana tradition. For many years he believed the technique was complete, consistent, and capable of carrying a diligent student all the way to liberation. The emotional rewards of early practice reinforced that certainty, and the culture’s strong discouragement of outside study made alternatives seem unnecessary. Only later did he realize how those conditions prevented him from seeing the limits built into the system itself. A turning point came when he started reading the suttas. He saw that key concepts—in particular, vedanā, saṅkhāra, jhāna—were taught in ways far narrower than their Canonical meanings. Vedanā was treated almost exclusively as physical sensation, rather than the full affective tone of experience. Saṅkhāra became a simple “reaction” rather than the broad field of conditioned formations. And jhāna, central to the Buddha’s description of the path, was omitted entirely. These gaps shaped the expectations of long-course students, who were told that deep meditation would unfold through patient observation of bodily sensations alone. Without strong samādhi, however, the clarity needed for deeper insight never develops. He links these doctrinal limitations to cultural ones: a spectrum of fundamentalist tendencies, discouragement of inquiry, fear of “confusion,” and a social environment where silence and equanimity become tools of conformity. Yet he also speaks with affection for what the practice gave him and hopes his reflections give others permission not to abandon the tradition, but to think more freely within and beyond it.

Ground Control

Episode #591: “The war may end, but for years and years, landmines indiscriminately will kill and maim people, quite often children, as well as farm animals, long after the act of fighting has ended.” Ken Maclean, a cultural anthropologist and human-rights fact-finder, traces Myanmar’s landmine crisis from early-2000s interviews with prisoners forced to walk ahead of soldiers through suspected minefields to the political obstacles that still prevent systematic clearance. His central concern is not only what mines do when planted, but what they continue to control after troops leave. During research in 2013–14, possible refugee return from Thailand exposed the lack of safe routes, reliable maps, or an agreed authority for mine action. Military units, ethnic armed groups, and villagers used different mines for battle lines, camp perimeters, resource sites, roads, and community protection. Lightweight devices shifted in rain and soil, old mines remained live, and armed groups sometimes dug up and reused them, leaving no side with a dependable record of contamination. Removing a device can cost hundreds of dollars or more, even when it cost only a few dollars to make. A low-cost tractor fitted with a spiked hedgehog roller cleared some flat farmland in Karen State, but formal standards, ceasefire fears, and rivalries prevented the experiment from expanding. Mine-risk education faced its own contradiction: material that taught civilians to recognize booby traps could also teach fighters how to build them. Maclean still argues that multilingual risk education should be broadcast nationwide as immediate harm reduction. Peace would not settle who controls clearance or owns the land made usable. A national mine-action center could centralize authority in ways ethnic organizations reject, while clearing profitable roads and towns first could favor elites over refugees and displaced families. With conflict now dispersed and contamination no longer confined to the borderlands, Maclean sees no logical place to begin. Even if fighting stopped, the mines would continue to shape movement, livelihood, and return for decades.

The Feminine Mystique

Episode #590: Chie Ikeya’s work on colonial Burma began almost by accident. Trained as a historian and originally planning to study the Japanese occupation, she found herself in Yangon waiting for archival access that never came. In the meantime, she read Burmese newspapers and periodicals from the early twentieth century, where the notion of the “modern woman” appeared again and again as a source of fascination, fear, hope, and moral panic. Her later work, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, follows that figure through education, print culture, nationalism, consumer desire, sexuality, Buddhism, and race. In colonial Burma, women’s education expanded sharply, especially through missionary schools, and opened paths into medicine, law, teaching, journalism, and public life. Yet those openings also made women symbolic terrain. Their clothing, schooling, work, marriages, sexuality, and public presence became ways for others to debate whether Burma was becoming modern, losing itself, resisting colonialism, or protecting the nation. Ikeya complicates the familiar claim that Burmese women traditionally enjoyed high status. Certain legal rights around property and marriage were real, but rights on paper did not erase domestic violence, social control, class inequality, or the difficulty of forcing law into practice. The claim that Burmese women needed no feminism also carried political force: it could defend Burma against colonial arguments for “uplift,” while feeding a wider ideology of Burmese Buddhist exceptionalism. That ideology later shaped debates over intermarriage, religious belonging, anti-Muslim politics, and the boundaries of the nation. Ikeya does not treat exclusion as only state propaganda. It is diffuse, historical, and embedded in ordinary assumptions about who belongs, who does not, and whose presence must be regulated. Yet she also refuses to make violence the whole record. “Burma has not always been like this,” she says. Alongside histories of estrangement, she asks historians to recover the quieter histories of affection, belonging, and difficult intimacy that rarely survive in the archive.

Port of No Return

Episode #589: The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners focused on Asia, with Burma emerging as a key topic amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, capturing a series of short, real-time conversations with participants and sharing these perspectives with a wider global audience. This is the second of a four part series, and features two guests. First up is Ponpavi Sangsurasdej, a Thai historian of modern Burma. She studies the years around independence not as the inevitable birth of a nation, but as a struggle among rival political futures, where communists, socialists, and ethnic minority leaders were all attempting to shape what a free Burma might become. The problem, she argues, is that later nationalist history flattened that contested moment into a far cleaner story than it was, since “we only focused decolonizing movement that were successful,” pushing other anti-colonial visions to the margins. In her telling, Burma’s history cannot be reduced to a single Burman-centered trajectory, especially given Rangoon’s role as a transnational hub of ideas, ideologies, and political networks, where categories like communism or decolonization carried unstable meanings across different actors and contexts. Rather than replacing one dominant narrative with another, she returns to sidelined figures and failed negotiations, asking who was excluded and how labels like collaborator or nationalist concealed deeper fractures. Those omissions, she suggests, continue to shape the distrust and fragmentation that define Burma today, where “there’s no easy, simple answer to it,” only the ongoing work of tracing how these narratives were formed and what was lost when one version prevailed. Next up is Wenxu Zhang, a historian of the Indian Ocean world. He examines Rangoon in the interwar period as a cosmopolitan port caught between global connection and social fracture, focusing on the 1930–31 riots to understand how Chinese diaspora communities experienced that instability. What began as labor conflict during the Great Depression escalated into broader violence, where anti-colonial sentiment, economic distress, and opportunistic attacks blurred together, leaving Chinese merchants increasingly vulnerable despite their partial cultural integration. Zhang resists reducing the events to a single narrative, showing how British, Burmese, and Chinese perspectives framed the same violence as revolution, nationalism, or banditry depending on position, while for those on the ground, the sense that society was becoming unstable remained the dominant reality. He situates this moment within a larger shift toward a more inward Burmese nationalism, where identity hardened and cosmopolitan fluidity receded, leaving behind traces still visible in Yangon today—a city that retains the physical remnants of its global past, even as the networks and vitality that sustained it have largely disappeared.

Missing, Presumed Extinct

Episode #588: Historian Douglas Ober began questioning the standard history of Indian Buddhism while traveling to Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, and other sacred sites in his twenties. The dates he found on buildings and inscriptions did not fit the familiar sequence in which Buddhism vanished, European scholars rediscovered it, Anagarika Dharmapala revived it, and B.R. Ambedkar restored it in 1956. His research led him to argue that “this idea around Buddhism’s disappearance from India is kind of a modern myth, and I call it a kind of useful fiction.” Ober does not deny the collapse of monasteries, patronage, and literary production after the thirteenth century. He instead recovers evidence that extinction language excludes: Buddhist images produced into the seventeenth century, manuscripts copied by devotees near Bodh Gaya, and continuing pilgrimage networks linking India with Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Chittagong, Arakan, and Burma. Colonial scholarship further narrowed the record by recognizing textual, monastic forms while treating yogis, borderland communities, and mixed traditions as doubtful or irrelevant. The Bay of Bengal becomes central to this longer history. Rakhine monks and patrons moved through Bengal and northern India; U Chandramani studied with Mahavir, helped establish a Buddhist rest house at Kushinagar, and later officiated Ambedkar’s mass conversion of Dalits at Nagpur. Ambedkar’s movement therefore emerged from a century of anti-caste Buddhist organizing and transregional monastic connections, even as his rationalist Navayana Buddhism transformed inherited doctrines around karma and rebirth. After independence, Nehru placed Buddhist symbols at the center of Indian statecraft through the dharma wheel on the flag, the Ashokan lion capital, and relic missions across Asia, including Burma. These objects carried genuine devotion and political purpose at once. Ober’s history leaves both forces intact: Buddhism survives not outside politics, but through people and institutions repeatedly deciding what it means, who may claim it, and what power can do in its name.