What is Old is New Again: Buddhist Pigments and Brushstrokes in the Amarapūra Mahāgandhāyon’s Political Programme

Tony Scott compares the writing of Ashin Janakābhivaṃsa to the work of contemporary modernist painters.

As the crest of the wave of decolonization that spread across Asia and Africa in the wake of World War II, the country then known as “Burma” became the independent “Union of Burma” on January 4^th, 1948. The dawn of Burmese independence was a watershed moment for mainland Southeast Asia, an historical conjuncture that offers an opportunity to explore how intellectuals in Southeast Asia drew from the vernacular, raw materials of their political and cultural reservoirs to reimagine a postcolonial future. My focus in this short, figurative piece is on the Burmese text, the Future of the Affairs of the Sāsanā (အနာဂတ်သာသနာရေး) (Fig. 1) (hereafter the Future of the Sāsanā), composed by Ashin Janakābhivaṃsa (အရှင် ဇနကာဘိဝံသ), the first Amarapūra Mahāgandhāyon Sayadaw (အမရပူရ မဟာဂန္ဓာရုံ ဆရာတော်, 1900-1977) (hereafter the Mahāgandhāyon). A scholar monk, strident nationalist,¹ and proponent of strict adherence to the monastic code (P. Vinaya), the Mahāgandhāyon espoused extensive reforms for and the purification of the monastic community (P. saṅgha) in his numerous writings and lectures. Yet in his Future of the Sāsana, the twelfth of sixty-three publications by the Mahāgandāyon, the aim was not just to reform the saṅgha, but to outline a pathway for how the newly independent country might develop, or more to the point of this piece—modernize.  

What kind of modernization did this project entail? While I try to tackle this question in a more “disciplined” way in my academic work in progress,² in what follows, I will compare the Mahāgandhāyon’s project to movements in the world of painting in Mandalay and Yangon in the twentieth century. Although it has a radically different grammar and means of expression than texts or philosophical argument, painting is a helpful point of comparison since it deals with many of the same themes and concerns, doing so in perhaps a less restricted and more open fashion. I thus find this comparative approach productive not because the Mahāgandhāyon was influenced by these movements or vice versa, but because artists such as U Kin Maung (c. 1908-1983), U Ba Yin Galay (1915-88), U Bagyi Aung Soe (c. 1924-90), and U Ba Kyi (1912-2000) struggled with some of the same questions faced by the Mahāgandhāyon, operating at the interface of tradition and modernity before and after independence. Art Historian Nyan Shein sums up this situation in his 2000 work, On Burmese Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, writing that “[m]odern painting [in Burma] embodies the illustration of new and radical ideas and thoughts in new color texture. But it must be based on cultural and traditional norms and the rudiments of painting. Creation must be different than destruction.”³

At the heart of this struggle is thus what Paik Nak-Chung calls the double project of modernity, namely, “simultaneously adapting to and overcoming modernity,”⁴ a fraught and existential paradox necessitated by the total global fact of colonial violence and the onset of the Cold War that disrupted independence movements across the Global South. To perform my figurative comparative work around this double project, I draw from both the Mahāgandhāyon’s Future of the Sāsana and the profile of artists and interpretations of their work from Andrew Ranard’s Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (2009) (Fig. 2). This latter book, despite a questionable first chapter that tries to “encompass the entire pre-modern era,”⁵ is one of the first surveys of contemporary Burmese art in a European language,⁶ drawing as it does from several vernacular sources translated at the request of the author.

Ranard’s work thus provides an invaluable glimpse into a vibrant and evolving art scene in Burma, filtered through the insights of local interlocutors like Ludu Daw Amar (Fig. 3) and Nyan Shein, and buffeted by Ranard’s own creative readings of Burmese art in conversation with movements across the Asian continent.

Figure 3: Photo of Ludu Daw Amar, Burmese writer, publisher, journalist, activist, and dissident (1915-2008). Source: The Irrawaddy (Ludu Daw Amar: Speaking Truth to Power (irrawaddy.com)

Future of the Sāsana and People in Search of Peace

In his Future of the Sāsana, the Mahāgandhāyon emphasizes the importance of deploying Pali textual tropes and Theravada ethical principles in order to develop the nation materially and culturally. My entrance into the work of the Mahāgandhāyon came through the 2007 dissertation of Thi Thi Mya, from the University of Yangon. In her dissertation, titled “The Philosophical Teaching of Shin Janakābhivaṃsa,” Thi Thi Mya presents a sophisticated reading of the Mahāgandhāyon as a political philosopher and social reformer. The Mahāgandhāyon, according to Thi Thi Mya, focused his reforms on the level of the individual, on the monastery, the village, through to the level of the nation vis-à-vis the world community (Fig. 4). Thi Thi Mya explains that according to his political programme, primarily outlined in the Future of the Sāsana but explored in other texts and sermons by the Mahāgandhāyon over his teaching and writing career, there are several key factors to development. These include the call for lay Buddhists  to work to strengthen the military, to boycott foreign-made products, and to redirect their donations away from the monastic order for the national good. This last stipulation is crucial, because to the Mahāgandhāyon, the saṅgha, with its encouragement of over-zealous donations by the laity, culture of elaborate pagoda festivals, and convention of opulent funerals for elite monks, was a drain on the resources of a country then on the verge of economic collapse after more than sixty years of colonial occupation. Conversely, if lay devotees learned to curb such misguided donations to the saṅgha, and if scarce resources were directed towards reinforcing the nation’s defenses and schools instead, the Mahāgandhāyon argued that the Union of Burma would be able to compete with its larger neighbors. The political programme articulated in the Future of the Sāsana was thus meant to realign the merit economy of the Union of Burma that existed between the saṅgha and the laity towards a model of development in which a reformed citizenry acted as a socioeconomic and cultural resource for the future prosperity of the people; at the same time, the saṅgha could thenact as a source of educational reform and economic stability while preaching restraint to the lay community.

The impetus for the Mahāgandhāyon’s political programme was the independence of Burma on January 4^th, 1948. Indeed, the Mahāgandhāyon finished the first draft of the Future of the Sāsana the night before this watershed event,⁷ adding the titular concluding section after the fragile first year of independence. Hence at this particular juncture in time, it was the dawn of independence that seized the moral imaginations of intellectuals like the Mahāgandhāyon. This moment was full of expansive possibilities and equally fraught anxieties, unleashed by the promise and threat of independence under a new world order brought about by the Second World War and the crumbling (read “transitioning”) of Euro-American imperialism. What makes this programme a critical vector for better understanding the relationship between Theravada Buddhism, politics, and society in Southeast Asia is that the Mahāgandhāyon is not only seeking material support and protection from the state, but is holding up Buddhist principles as a material and moral support for the nation as a whole. That is, the sāsana as the encapsulation of the Buddha’s teachings is not just a passive object in need of protection, but a dynamic source of change and reform.

I suggest that the same kind of culturally existential weight was put on Theravada Buddhism in the paintings of Burmese artists at roughly the same time in the middle of the last century. These artists, like the Mahāgandhāyon, were steeped in the motifs, techniques, texts, and worldview of the Theravada. U Ba Yin Galay (1915-88), considered a “peripheral” artist in the “Post-war Mandalay School,” is one such example.⁸ A devout and unapologetic leftist, Ba Yin Galay was experimenting with impressionism in the 1950s, incorporating Western techniques with decidedly Burmese cultural subjects. One paradigmatic example is the oil painting, Mahamuni Pagoda (Fig. 5) from 1953. Going beyond his more traditionally oriented mentors with this broadly abstract piece, Ba Yin Galay offers us in this “narrow range of colors” a vivid “study of browns, a little red and black,” which demonstrates the “subtlety of his process,” amounting to a “struggle” on the canvas “to perceive what illusory application of shadowed line would create [in terms of] greater power and depth.”⁹ I offer this painting as a point of reference for the work of a more decidedly forward-looking artist, U Kin Maung (c. 1908-1983), considered one of the progenitors of “modernist painting in Burma.”¹⁰ Nyan Shein says about Kin Maung that his “abstract paintings were found to be in accord with [his age] that demanded new creations. His paintings did not go beyond basic aesthetic assumptions. Moreover, his creations apparently reflected Burmese culture and thoughts.”¹¹ One of the Burmese cultural reservoirs from which he drew was Theravada Buddhism, although often this influence was subtle and kept in the background.

Although it comes well after the initial fervor of independence, one of Kin Maung’s abstract paintings that “reflects Burmese culture and thoughts” while being in accord with the creative spirit of his age is People in Search of Peace from 1969 (Fig. 6). According to Ranard, with its “Mondrian-like geometry,” this piece aims at articulating “the underlying abstract form of the temple-painting genre in Burma.”¹² Indeed, the obscured but ultimately enlightened archway of People in Search of Peace is redolent of Ba Yin Galay’s Mahamuni Pagoda above, with its syncopated architecture pulling the viewer’s gaze layer by layer towards an indeterminate but illuminated end-goal. Appealing “more to the intellect than to the emotions,” part of its modernist logic,¹³ the promise of People in Search of Peace is precisely the inchoate hopes offered by independence itself, the peace and prosperity that had been obscured by the late sixties after two military coups, the emerging realpolitik of the Cold War, and the anemic socialist economic realism imposed upon the people. Yet what we see is that this promise, indeed, the very path to the prospect of peace, is framed by Theravada Buddhism, in this case, both the temple as institution and the teleology of of (a collective) nirvana that shines through as a sliver at the end of the Buddhist path. Thus, despite the new abstract technique deployed by Kin Maung, the end goal was still religious; Buddhism defined the elusive peace.

According to Ranard, “it was not easy for a modernist painter in those times.”¹⁴ The problem that faced someone like Kin Maung was “how to adapt modern techniques of painting to Burma’s older traditions in art.”¹⁵ For our present purposes, we might ask, how did these artists position their paintings vis-à-vis the past and with an eye towards the future? Did they set out to reform painting according to contemporary exigencies, or did they wish to fashion the modern according to traditional motifs? As the above two pictures show, much of this issue revolved around the role of Buddhism as a subject and source of inspiration. In that sense, the same sort of questions, at least structurally, confront the Mahāgandhāyon and his political programme: is Buddhism to be reformed according to the economic and political reality of independence, or is independence to be approached through the pigments and brushstrokes offered by Buddhism? To offer something in the way of answers for such questions, I suggest we put the Mahāgandhāyon in conversation with two artists who represent opposing but complementary approaches to modernist painting: Kin Maung and Ba Kyi (1912-2000).     

20th Century Pagan and The Illustrated History of Buddhism

Kin Maung and Ba Kyi each represent different approaches to “modern” painting in Burma. On the one hand, Ranard explains that Kin Maung sought with his work to “generate a movement in modernist painting, while retaining aspects of Tradition.”¹⁶ The paradigmatic example is 20^th Century Pagan (Fig. 7), what Ranard calls “an impressionistic capsule of Burmese art.”¹⁷ In this piece, Kin Maung combines traditional techniques, like the chapter border on the top right reminiscent of 17^th– to 19^th-century temple murals, and the flat color of the Pagan-era architectural shapes, with European elements, like the naturalistic figures spread out at the bottom of the page in a linear progression.¹⁸ The scene, of course, represents an imagined space born of the vantage point of the modern conceit, a condensed mosaic of Burmese Buddhist history, demonstrating decidedly modernist techniques of abstraction and perspective while drawing on quintessential Burmese materials and motifs. In this way, Kin Maung both “thrust[s] Burmese painting forward” with his 20^th Century Pagan while “reach[ing] backwards simultaneously, to its beginnings.”¹⁹ In other words, this is Nak-Chung’s double project of modernity made manifest in oil on canvas.

Ba Kyi, in contrast, “was a Neo-Traditionalist: he wanted to revive Traditional Burmese painting through modernizing it; he was submersed in ancient, conservative tradition, and his sentiments were with the past.”²⁰ An extended example of this Neo-Traditionalist approach is his survey of scenes in the Illustrated History of Buddhism. In an approach of which the Mahāgandhāyon would surely have approved,²¹ Ba Kyi’s biographer, Maung Lu Zaw, recounts how the painter took up meditation and other religious penances before setting out on this project as a way to purify his heart-mind for the task.²² In this set of “five dozen watercolors,” Ba Kyi “swathed himself in the Traditional heritage, in bold, flat contrasts of color and the black Pagan-like outlines of figures, with minimal shading and no sfumato.”²³ Yet in using Western elements of perspective and “fluid, sweeping lines,” Ba Kyi broke with certain millennia-old rules of iconic Buddhist paintings,²⁴ where the Buddha is usually depicted straight on, as almost a fixed part of background, like a rock that rigidly absorbs the angst of those in attendance but without being moved by it. As per these rules, paintings of the Buddha mimic the stiffness and devotional perspective of a statue to be worshipped. In contrast, the Buddha is depicted in Ba Kyi’s series by “gentle, seductive lines, and considerable femininity,”²⁵ where the Buddha is not necessarily affectively engaged but offers a degree of dynamic response and animation. A clear example of this “sense of movement and light”²⁶ is the scene where Kisagotami asks the Buddha to bring her son back to life (Fig. 8). In this painting, the Buddha is still self-composed but angled ever-so-slightly towards the viewer and Kisagotami, his nimbus sovereign but his larger aura delicately embracing Kisagotami’s, who is allowed to entreat on the Buddha’s immanence and receive instruction. What this stylized yet fluid line work does is to mark in aesthetic terms a sort of reanimation of the Buddha and his teachings for a contemporary audience. This is a neo-traditionalist move insofar as it “fused past pictorial heritage with the modern aesthetic language of art.” In Ranard’s words, Ba Kyi, painting in the Independence Era, “offered […] a resurrected Burmese sense of moral order.”²⁷ To return back to Nak-Chung’s double project, Ba Kyi is not so much “adapting to and overcoming modernity,” but adapting modernity to Buddhist ideals, subjugating modern political realities to the unfolding of Buddhist history which he has brought back to life in the lightness and vivaciousness of watercolor.

The Mahāgandhāyon’s Mind-Perspective

Let us now return to the Mahāgandhāyon and his political programme. At the heart of this project, I argue, was an effort to reform and remake the subjective formations of the Buddhist dāyaka and dāyikā, male and female supporters of the saṅgha. The focus on the lay donor is important here because, as Matthew Walton highlights, a tension existed in the metanarrative of “progress” in Theravāda societies like Burma insofar as the lay citizen— inherently desire-driven and ruled by their destructive sense of self—makes development and deliberative democracy practical if not impossible.²⁸ The kind of inner turmoil caused by the sense of the self is immanently captured in the paintings of U Bagyi Aung Soe (c. 1924-90), considered alongside Kin Maung as one of the “father[s] of modernist Burmese painting.”²⁹ Enigmatic and self-tortured in his personal life, Bagyi Aung Soe’s Women, Snakes, Lizards and Ogres (Fig. 9) is an example of a “cataclysmic” work, where amidst the inchoate shadows and hellfire reds and blacks emerges a “violent rupture of Burmese painting.”³⁰

Indeed, in this painting, it is difficult to distinguish where the woman begins and the ogre and beasts end. This disturbing existential fusion is meant to “capture[s] the terror and hell that exist in the unconscious life of every individual,”³¹ a characteristic of human nature fundamental to the Theravada project as a whole. Such a view of human nature forms the bedrock of the Mahāgandhāyon’s developmentalism, but there is a flipside to this pessimism: given the existence of the Buddha’s sāsana and its manifestation in texts, institutions, and monastic bodies, “humans are capable of controlling and even overcoming their enslavement to desire, living morally worthy lives and (for a select few) stepping completely out of the cycle of suffering and continued existence.”³² Hence while the Mahāgandhāyon admits that the citizen is part ogre, she is also part saint. The key is for the state to ensure the conditions such that the citizen can train to overcome their ogre-like nature. As such, the Mahāgandhāyon called for a “moral-rearmament campaign,”³³ premised on the training and disciplining of the mind.

A core concept of the Theravada, this trope of mental training is embodied in U Saw Maung’s (1900-69) Taming the Elephant (Fig. 10), which according to Ranard “lean[s] towards the surreal.”³⁴ Invoking the pervasive Theravada allegory for the power and unruliness of the human mind, the elephant here “is stylized in a Traditional manner, and monstrous, and intentionally disproportioned,” exemplifying the traditional Burmese technique of mind-perspective.³⁵ The technique of mind-perspective involves foregrounding an image or subject beyond its actual proportions and is thus a form of “non-scientific Burmese tradition[alism]” in contrast to the “Renaissance principles of scientific realism” found in early modern and modern European artistic trends.³⁶ Yet this “mind-perspective” is an apt metaphor for understanding the project of the Mahāgandhāyon and the logic of his Future of the Sāsana. He is not using Buddhist principles as a way to tweak or adjust scientific notions of the individual or liberal concepts of the citizen; rather, the axioms with which he starts are firmly and unapologetically Buddhist, and he is merely updating or dusting off such axioms for deployment in a decidedly different domestic and geopolitical context, an unavoidable but ultimately contingent context when compared to the history of Buddhism and its future in Burma. In a sense, then, he is deploying his own technique of mind-perspective: augmenting beyond its realist proportions the power of the individual mind, not just of the monastic, but of the ordinary lay citizen, who alone wields the power to destroy or uplift the nascent state like a wild elephant let loose in a bustling city street.

In conclusion, let us return once more to the two diametric painters, Kin Maung and Ba Kyi, as a way to articulate some sort of answer to the question driving this piece: was the Mahāgandhāyon a Buddhist modernist or a neo-traditionalist in his Future of the Sāsana? After the above exercise, it is apparent that of the two, it is more accurate to call the Mahāgandhāyon a neo-traditionalist in the vein of a Ba Kyi as opposed to a modernist in the vein of a Kin Maung. It is not that the Mahāgandhāyon put forth a primitivist political programme meant to push the new nation back into the rubble of Pagan, but instead, he wanted to hew those medieval stones anew and use them as the building blocks of the postcolonial nation state. Like Ba Gyi and his fluid and feminine iconography, the Mahāgandhāyon’s task was one of reanimating Buddhism and bringing the centuries-old cultural history, institutions, and moral order of the Theravada in Burma to bear on the present. His techniques and motifs were thus decidedly Buddhist and his dynamic brushstrokes steeped in tradition, even if he adopted a Western-style political perspective at the end of colonialism and the onset of the Cold War. The ultimate aim of the Mahāgandhāyon, it seems, was to ensure the continued future of the religion in Burma by reaching back into and resurrecting its past.  

This piece is an outcome of the workshop, “Plural Pasts for Collective Futures in Burma/Myanmar: Histories of Belonging and Identities (Re)Imagined,” hosted by York University in 2023. Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connection grant, the 2-day workshop invited 12 Burma Studies scholars who are based in Japan or Canada to engage in fruitful, interactive discussions and strengthen the scholarly network more internationally to think about Myanmar’s future.  

Tony Scott is a scholar of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. He focuses on the interplay between Pali literature, post-colonial politics, and meditation movements in Burma/Myanmar. Tony’s current project pushes the boundaries of Buddhist Studies by exploring the role of Buddhist activists, ethics, and political principles in the project(s) of deimperialization unfolding across Asia during the Cold War. His broader research profile includes projects on modern Pali commentary, the visual aesthetics of Buddhist saints in twentieth-century Burma, and the settler-colonial metanarratives underlying the history of palaeontology in his natal home, the Alberta badlands.”

References

¹ Htet Min Lwin, “Religious Inclusion in the Not-Too-Far Past, as Understood by Mahāgandhārum Sayadaw,” Independent Journal of Burmese Scholarship 1 (2021): 81.

² Tony Scott, “Disciplining the Postcolonial Subject: The Future of the Sāsana on the Eve of Burmese Independence,” Journal of Buddhist Philosophy 10: Forthcoming.

³ Qtd. in Andrew Ranard, Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2009), 219.

⁴ Paik Nak-Chung, “The Double Project of Modernity,” New Left Review 95 (2015): 68.

⁵ Donald Stadtner, “Review of Burmese Paining: A Linear and Lateral History,” Journal of the Siam Society 99 (2011): 332.

⁶ Cf. Khin Maung Nyunt, U Sein Myo Myint, and Ma Thanegi. Myanmar Painting: From Worship to Self-Imaging (Ho Chi Minh City: Education Publishing House, 2006); John B. Glass, “Artistic Legacy: Modern Burmese Painting and Graphics in Their Historical Context,” PhD diss., (SOAS London, 2009).  

⁷ Ashin Janakābhivaṃsa, Autobiography, trans. Than Tun (Amarapura: Mahāgandhāruṁ Monastic Establishment, 2000), 153.

⁸ Ranard, Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History, 169.

⁹ Ranard, 184.

¹⁰ Ranard, 218.

¹¹ qtd. in Ranard, 219.

¹² Ranard, 221.

¹³ Ranard, 222.

¹⁴ Ranard, 219.

¹⁵ Ranard, 219.

¹⁶ Ranard, 219; emphasis in original.

¹⁷ Ranard, 224.

¹⁸ Ranard, 224.

¹⁹ Ranard, 222.

²⁰ Ranard, 219; emphasis in original.

²¹ qtd. in Ranard, 207–8.

²² Ranard, 207.

²³ Ranard, 207.

²⁴ Ranard, 207.

²⁵ Ranard, 207.

²⁶ Hamid Keshmirshekan, “The Discourse of Neo-traditionalism: Reflecting the Past into the Present,” In The Art of Iran in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries: Tracing the Modern and the Contemporary. Edinburgh University Press, 2003: 83, https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474488648.001.0001.  

²⁷ Ranard, 213.

²⁸ Matthew J. Walton, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 96.

²⁹ Ranard, 240.

³⁰ Ranard, 254.

³¹ Ranard, 254.

³² Walton, 96.

³³ Thi Thi Mya, “The Philosophical Teaching of Shin Janakābhivaṃsa” (PhD Dissertation, Yangon, Myanmar, University of Yangon, 2007), 181.

³⁴ Ranard, 83.

³⁵ Ranard, 83.

³⁶ Ranard, 222.