Insight Myanmar

A Course in Progress

Episode #594: “We fumble through life a little bit, and we end up doing different kind of things.” Arthur Nichols uses this modest explanation for a life that has now been shaped by Vipassana for fifty years. At eighty-three, he has spent four decades conducting courses in the tradition of S. N. Goenka and helped establish the practice across Latin America. Yet he refuses to describe his path as heroic, carefully planned, or inherently wiser than the lives other people build. Nichols was teaching at a university in Atlanta when he took leave in 1975 and traveled overland to India. A book by Jiddu Krishnamurti opened his interest in living differently, and travelers later directed him toward a vipassana meditation course in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He soon joined the first students at the newly opened Dhamma Giri center in Igatpuri, visited U Ba Khin’s International Meditation Centre in Rangoon, sat long courses, and was appointed one of the very first assistant teachers in 1986. Although he repeatedly considered returning to academic work, conducting courses and maintaining twice-daily practice gradually became his full-time life. Beginning in Venezuela in 1994, Nichols worked across Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and much of Latin America, often conducting retreats in temporary rented sites before permanent centers existed. He learned Spanish and Portuguese for the courses and watched small local groups develop into a regional network that has held thousands of retreats. He credits neither persuasion nor personal leadership for that growth, but the pāramīs (or spiritual potential) that he believes draw people toward practice when their time ripens. Nichols also resists presenting total dedication to meditation as a prescription. A monk, a parent, a professional, and a course server may each follow a different path. And in Burma, where war and displacement are now making sustained practice all but impossible, he offers no easy spiritual answer to abject physical suffering. At eighty-three, he continues to meditate, answer questions, and travel where courses need him. The work has expanded across continents, but his own measure remains deliberately small: practicing sīla, following right speech, and staying dedicated to this path.

Most Favored Regime

Episode #593: “Why are values included in international trade?” Arianna Bondi’s research begins with that question, but Myanmar turns it into a problem of limits. A PhD candidate at McGill University studying international political economy, Bondi examined how the European Union tried to promote human rights through trade policy, focusing on Myanmar’s place in the EU’s Generalized System of Preferences. Her study, completed in 2020 at Johns Hopkins SAIS in Bologna, looks at the period before the 2021 coup. That timing matters; Myanmar had been brought back into the EU’s Everything ButArms trade scheme in 2013 after preferences were withdrawn in 1997 over forced labor concerns. The policy was supposed to support development while encouraging respect for international standards. Bondi found that this created two different tools: positive conditionality, through engagement and market access, and negative conditionality, through the threat or use of withdrawal. Her interviewees saw little evidence that withdrawal had produced human rights change. Negative conditionality could send a signal, but it risked punishing workers while failing to reach the military structures responsible for the gravest abuses. Positive conditionality seemed more promising, especially in the garment sector, where EU-linked trade could improve wages, standards, and opportunities for largely female workers. But that success remained narrow. It could touch factory floors more easily than constitutional power, military violence, or the Rohingya crisis. Bondi’s account keeps returning to mechanism. Human rights cannot be treated as one broad category that trade either improves or fails to improve. The question has to be which right, which sector, which actor, and which channel. EU policy also carried other motives: business access, regional influence, concern over China, and member-state interests. That makes the application of values uneven. Myanmar leaves the trade instrument under pressure. A tariff preference may help workers, a withdrawal may make a statement, and neither may reach the institution doing the most harm.

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.