Insight Myanmar

Reckoning with the Dhamma

Episode #490: Matt Walton, a political theorist and scholar of Buddhism and politics in Myanmar, and author the acclaimed Buddhism, Politics and Political Thought in Myanmar, argues that Burmese political life cannot be understood through secular or Western democratic frameworks alone. He contends that struggles over democracy, authority, nationalism, and pluralism in the country unfold within a shared Theravāda Buddhist moral universe whose internal logics remain consistent even as they produce sharply divergent political outcomes. Ethical life, political legitimacy, and social order are deeply embedded in Buddhist moral reasoning, shaping how political ideas are articulated and contested. In his undergraduate years, he developed an interest in meditation, which took shape during his first visit to Myanmar. Initially going as a backpacker, he joined a demanding 21-day vipassanāretreat in the Mahāsi lineage in the Sagaing Hills. That retreat proved pivotal for him both as practitioner and professionally, sparking his interest how embodied Burmese Buddhism plays out in social, cultural and political spheres. Subsequent travels through Myanmar helped crystalize his awareness that democratic aspirations and rights discourse in the region operate within Buddhist concepts of causality, responsibility, and ethical conduct rather than liberal political theory. He devoted himself to the study of Burmese language, Buddhist philosophy, and political thought. Central to Walton’s analysis is the relationship between lokī, the mundane sphere, and lokuttara, the supramundane orientation toward insight and liberation. These are not opposing realms but relational categories that structure political reasoning. Burmese discourse recognizes that ethical practice depends on material conditions, while also warning that excessive supramundane focus can undermine worldly governance. Political legitimacy emerges from negotiating this tension. Walton shows how Buddhist texts can generate competing political interpretations, supporting both hierarchical authority and participatory responsibility. Across history—from U Nu and Aung San to Ledi Sayadaw, Buddhist nationalism, and contemporary pluralist debates—Walton emphasizes that the same moral universe underlies empowerment and violence alike. Understanding this coherence, he insists, does not imply moral endorsement but is essential for grappling with Myanmar’s political crisis and imagining more inclusive futures. Walton cautions against assuming secularism would offer a neutral alternative, noting that secular governance elsewhere remains shaped by Christian histories, and instead calls for explicit, critical engagement with Buddhist moral reasoning to identify resources for genuinely inclusive coexistence.

Choosing the Red Pill

Episode #489: Neo grew up in Yangon, living a simple life—running a small convenience store, taking remote jobs, and spending his nights with friends, music, and beer. “I work and I play and I drink. Life was good, but things change,” he says. On the night of January 31, 2021, as he finished a hip hop track mocking junta supporters, the internet went dark. “They cut off every connection,” he recalls. “Telephone lines, internet, everything; yet my Wi-Fi didn’t get cut. Maybe they forgot that service.” Through that one fragile signal, Neo confirmed the truth: “They really did a coup.” His father gave him a choice—leave the country or fight. “I immediately answered, ‘I’m going to fight back.’” Soon after, Neo left Yangon for Myawaddy and joined the resistance. At the jungle camp, life was stripped bare: “We were not well prepared, except our mental. We only had our spirit.” Between training drills, he wrote lyrics. “Some days I got four or eight bars; somedays I got the whole verse.” His songs—Pinkies vs. Guns and Nonprofit Soldier—became battle anthems of defiance. Frontline life hardened him. “If we had something to eat in the kitchen, we didn’t have to go hunt,” he says. “That’s the killing part.” Yet amidst the brutality, he found unity. “If you’reBuddhist, Christian, Muslim—that doesn’t matter. Everyone’s the same.” Neo insists their fight isn’t about revenge. “It’s not about how many you kill, it’s about how many you save.” War changed him. “I can’t say I’m a good man, but I can say I am trying not to be bad.” His name—taken from the protagonist of The Matrix—became both a shield and a vow: no going back. “I think I’ve already chosen the pill,” he says quietly. “So there’s no going back.”

Enemy of the State

Episode #488: Veteran journalist and human rights advocate Chris Gunness describes Myanmar as “an extraordinarily fascinating country,” one that shaped both his early reporting career and his later work on international justice. Following events from London in the mid-1980s, he saw a nation marked by colonial legacies, ethnic fragmentation and civil war, yet so closed that major crises went unnoticed abroad. By 1986, Myanmar had become the center of his reporting as he tracked growing instability. In spite of his inexperience, he was sent undercover by the BBC to report from the country in the buildup to the 1988 uprising. Ordered to report openly, he filed news dispatches from a dilapidated Rangoon hotel. A day later, a hidden message from student leaders—coordinated by a prominent human rights lawyer—summoned him to a secret meeting. Blindfolded and taken to a safe house, he recorded interviews with organizers, a banker and a soldier. These tapes, smuggled out through diplomatic channels, were broadcast by the BBC on 6 August 1988. One interview inadvertently announced the precise moment protests would begin. At 8:08 a.m. on 8 August, millions marched across the country. The entire Burmese populace was informed ahead of time as a direct result of this reporting. Deported to Dhaka as a result, Gunness continued reporting, producing dispatches that became Myanmar’s primary source of national information during the uprising. Though he rejects credit for sparking the movement—calling the Burmese people “the real heroes”—the experience taught him how shared information empowers political action. Gunness later founded the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP), using universal jurisdiction to pursue legal cases against junta leaders in Turkey, the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor-Leste. He also challenges junta attempts to gain legitimacy abroad, including a current case in the UK. Despite deep skepticism toward international justice and the UN’s failures in Myanmar, Gunness believes accountability efforts can preserve evidence, empower victims and reinforce the illegitimacy of military rule. Ultimately, however, he argues that Myanmar’s hope rests with its people, whose resilience he describes as “the indomitability of the Burmese spirit.”

The Right To Belong

Episode #487: Noor Azizah, a Rohingya genocide survivor and the founder and leader of the Rohingya Maìyafuìnor Collaborative Network, argues that violence against the Rohingya is still an ongoing reality shaped by military force, armed groups, legal exclusion, and regional inaction. She insists that Rohingya rights must be central to any future political settlement involving Myanmar, rather than treated as a secondary or humanitarian issue. Azizah places Rohingya persecution within a long historical trajectory beginning in 1942, when Japanese forces exacerbated tensions between Rohingya Muslims and ethnic Rakhine; before that, Rohingya and Rakhine communities had lived peacefully side by side. Following Myanmar’s 1962 military coup, anti-Rohingya violence intensified, causing a large and growing displacement, mostly towards Bangladesh, which now hosts more than one million Rohingya refugees. The 1982 citizenship law was another defining moment, rendering the Rohingya stateless and imposing severe restrictions on movement, education, and healthcare. Finally, the 2017 military “clearance operations” represented the most extreme escalation, forcing more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee as villages were burned, civilians killed, and mass rape used as a weapon of terror. Azizah emphasizes that propaganda and hate speech have played a central role in this violence. Coordinated campaigns have portrayed Rohingya as illegal migrants and existential threats, amplified through Facebook and extremist Buddhist networks. She adds that economic interests, including infrastructure projects in Rakhine State, continued alongside mass violence. She discusses the International Court of Justice case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar as a landmark effort to enforce the Genocide Convention and stresses the failure of regional bodies such as ASEAN to protect Rohingya. Azizah concludes by describing the work of RMCN, a women-led organization providing humanitarian aid and advocacy, and reiterates that Rohingya rights are non-negotiable, and essential to Myanmar’s future.

The Erasure of Mindfulness

Episode #486: Daniel M. Stuart, a Buddhist studies scholar and vipassana practitioner, rejoins the podcast to describe his growing interest in Dr. Leon Edward Wright, a Black Christian theologian whose brief but potent connection with Burmese meditation master U Ba Khin has been nearly erased from histories of modern Buddhism and mindfulness. Stuart uses Wright’s story to illuminate a world where meditation, anti-colonial politics, ritual therapeutics, and visionary experience intertwined—far from the later scientific and universalist framing of the Goenka lineage. He situates Wright within Asia’s anti-colonial landscape, where independence movements fostered solidarity across communities. These movements influenced Black intellectuals in the United States, and Wright, already thinking about race, empire, and religion, saw global traditions as resources for liberation. Part of his time to Burma thus appears as part of a broader search for tools to support oppressed communities. Stuart highlights how Wright’s experiences fit within Burmese cosmology shaped by Ledi Sayadaw, in which modern medicine coexisted with protective chanting and ritual healing. U Ba Khin adapted this framework, diagnosing afflictions through elemental imbalances and energetic blockages. Wright’s visionary experiences—light, fire, a hand offering a yellow rose—made sense to him through Christian symbolism, and Stuart notes that “it's not at all surprising if he had some of those experiences, that he would interpret them through the lens of his own tradition.” In contrast, Goenka leans publicly on a secular presentation, but his lineage emerged from a lineage whose earlier layers were steeped in an esoteric cosmology. Ledi framed meditation, healing, and protection within a universe populated by unseen beings, karmically charged diseases, elemental obstructions, and the ritual power of chanting—what he called methods for “warding off” afflictions. U Ba Khin adapted that worldview into a system that treated ailments through energetic diagnoses in addition to teaching meditation. Goenka, however, reframed phenomena once explained through cosmological forces as natural law, and teacher-mediated energetic work was eliminated in favor of promoting the concept of a “non-sectarian” technique. Yet the tradition’s underlying course structure—chanting, the teacher’s position, the atmosphere of protection—still reflects its origins. For Stuart, Wright exemplifies cross-racial and cross-religious solidarity: a Black diplomat and cultural attaché in newly independent Burma bringing meditation back to Black communities in the U.S. He concludes that “I do think he's an important figure that deserves more attention,” not only for his own story but for what it reveals about the complex origins of modern mindfulness.