Burmese Buddhist Responses to the Sāsana’s Decline

The first half of the twentieth century can be seen as the high point for the formation of lay Buddhist associations whose primary aim was to strengthen the sāsana throughout Burma.Footnote ² Among these associations were those dedicated to one or more sorcerer-saints (weizzā). These weizzā, like the one we saw in the story above, are individuals who have transformed themselves into semi-divine beings through practices of alchemy, meditation, spells, or sacred diagrams and who use their supernatural abilities to protect the Buddha's sāsana from a host of threatening forces that will be discussed below.Footnote ³ Groups of weizzā devotees that have advanced to some degree of institutionalization are referred to as gaing, a word that has a range of synonymous meanings that include “community,” “congregation,” and “association.”Footnote ⁴ They are often exclusive associations, organized around a set of tenets, headed by a charismatic leader, and with devotion centered upon one or more weizzā saints. Members are given esoteric teachings aimed at developing supernatural powers through the practices of meditation, alchemy, reciting of mantras and magical incantations, ingesting sacred diagrams, and studying cabbalistic squares. These associations are often made up of members who came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Merchants, office workers, taxi cab drivers, booksellers, housewives, and monastics all joined these gaing to varying degrees of involvement and engaged in activities that included pagoda construction, healing ceremonies, sermonizing, and general Buddhist missionary work throughout the country, all of which were understood by members to be part of strengthening the sāsana. Regardless of the weizzā affiliation of these associations, and the activities they chose to focus on, they all had one thing in common: to defend and propagate, at all costs, the Buddha sāsana.

What was this concern about defending the sāsana in response to? And why was the sāsana seen as something so important as to justify the large amounts of time and effort that associations put into defending it? Protecting and maintaining the sāsana was important because it presented the potentiality of people who came into contact with it to attain nibbāna, that is, escape from the rounds of perpetual rebirth. Of course, the number of Buddhists who were actually intent on achieving such a goal in the immediate future was small, but the belief that the Buddha sāsana was the means for such an ambition was “a powerful impetus for preserving it in the present” (Carbine Reference Carbine2011, 170). If the sāsana presented the only gateway to Buddhist salvation, then one can easily imagine how crucial it was for Buddhists to protect and propagate it.

Secondly, for the vast majority of Buddhists who did not wish to attain enlightenment in their current or proximate lifetimes, as is the case for many weizzā devotees, the sāsana offered a means for improving their lives as they traversed the cycle of rebirths. As Carbine (Reference Carbine2011, 170) rightly points out, in addition to enlightenment, the sāsana offered “various kinds of action conducive to better rebirth,” which, in turn, would help to further sustain the sāsana because those beings reborn into better lives would be more likely inclined to support and carry out activities related to the sāsana.

What had happened to the sāsana in the years prior that inspired such large numbers of people to take up the charge as vanguards of the sāsana? Historians of Burmese Buddhism have shown how Buddhists, both monastic and lay alike, found it increasingly difficult to sustain the sāsana during the unstable period of British colonial rule, especially after the British dissolved the monarchy in 1885. Kings in Burma and throughout South and Southeast Asia had long acted as promoters of the Buddhist faith in order to justify their rule (Cady Reference Cady1958, 8). In Burmese royal coronation ceremonies for example, kings were asked whether they would protect Buddhism (D. Smith Reference Smith1965, 21). Carbine (Reference Carbine2011, 86) notes that with the British's dissolution of the monarchy, legal authority of the state-supported head of the monastic community, and monastic-based educational system, among other things, Burmese Buddhists perceived the British to be undermining “the stability of certain kinds of communal activity long connected to the persistence of the sāsana” and thus hastening the sāsana’s decline.Footnote ⁵

The deposition of the Burmese Buddhist King Thibaw by the British in 1885 required Buddhists to quickly think of new and innovative ways for protecting and promoting the sāsana. One of the main ways Burmese went about accomplishing this task was to come together and take responsibility for the Buddha sāsana by forming Buddhist associations. Through these associations, Buddhists carried out programs for educational, moral, and religious reform with the idea that a renewed enthusiasm and devotion among Buddhists could counter the erosion of the Buddha's sāsana. Turner (Reference Turner2009, 213) proposes that “projects of Buddhist associations offered a means to approach the changes Burmese could feel but could not quite describe … [while offering] a language to conceive of the seismic shifts that came with the colonial condition, a means of understanding how the ground was shifting under their feet.”

We see, then, that a strong awareness of social turmoil and the fragility of the sāsana mobilized the wider Buddhist public with much intensity. For instance, the sharp and terrifying rise in alcoholism, and the damaging mental and physical illnesses that resulted from it, were tangible examples understood by the Burmese to be consequences resulting from the deterioration of the Buddha sāsana under colonial rule.Footnote ⁶ An increase in young peoples' involvement in gambling and wearing British-styled clothing, a growing lack of respect for Buddhism and the elderly, and other negative influences of British culture were all perceived to have caused Burmese to turn away from, or lessen their preoccupation with, Buddhism, which led to a decline in the sāsana’s vitality.Footnote ⁷ As historians of Buddhism in Burma have noted, large segments of the Buddhist population decided very soon after the fall of the monarchy that the most efficient way to combat such societal ills was to band together and engage in activities and that would renew the power of the sāsana. Erik Braun (Reference Braun2013) has shown how the activities of the monk Ledi Sayadaw in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries spurred laypeople to engage in large movements of studying Buddhist philosophical systems and participate in mass meditation practice—all as attempts to bolster the strength of the sāsana. Turner (Reference Turner2014), focusing especially on the lay segments of the Burmese Buddhist population, similarly shows how groups of religious lay organizations sprung up all across the country during the colonial era to participate in widespread Buddhist propagation activities to improve the populations' moral discipline, which would lead to a stronger sāsana. Bolstering the sāsana through Buddhist means, therefore, quickly became a rallying cause of solidarity; it was an organizing principle for Burmese Buddhists from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds to get behind and work together to explicitly strengthen the sāsana while challenging the colonial regime and its degenerative legacies.

For such Buddhist associations, the task of combating the erosion of traditional values and institutions became intimately tied with national individuality and cultural heritage (Maung Reference Maung Maung1980, xv). While initial focus was placed primarily on religious and cultural issues, by 1920 Buddhist groups, such as the Young Men's Buddhist Association (YMBA) and the General Council of Burmese Associations (GCBA), made a deliberate move to orient themselves around issues of ethnicity and the nation (Turner Reference Turner2014, 138). Many young nationalists were drawn to the YMBA's message of “To be Burmese is to be Buddhist,” for instance.

Thus, in early parts of the twentieth century, with a new sense of participation, the weight of the responsibility for the sāsana shifted down the social hierarchy to the broad base of the Buddhist laity (see Braun Reference Braun2013; Jordt Reference Jordt2007; Turner Reference Turner2014).Footnote ⁸ As individual Buddhists became united by their participation in this collective body responsible for the sāsana, they could take on new duties and modes of preserving the teachings that, with the absence of a king, fell to the laity at large. Drawing upon longstanding projects to preserve the sāsana, “guardian associations” (B. gopaka ahpwe), or lay voluntary institutions, made up of members who had shared invested interests in “doing sāsana work” (B. thathana aloke), developed throughout the country as laypeople's self-conscious efforts to reverse a supposed decay in the sāsana. This concern created waves of Buddhist publishing, preaching, and organizing, and led Buddhist laypeople in towns across the country to found hundreds of associations.

Weizzā Associations as “Salvation Armies”

Sorcerer-saint associations had their own means for adapting to the changes taking place around them and ideas about how best to bolster the strength of the sāsana. Whereas the YMBA and the GCBA stressed more orthodox forms of Buddhist practices centered around morality, meditation, and scriptural study, weizzā associations attempted to harness the powers of esoteric rituals, teachings, and spells to attain their political and religious goals. Such weizzā groups were a natural outgrowth of other lay Buddhist associations, and many of their members, such as the well-known Saya San, were members of both kinds of associations. As an affiliate with the GCBA, Saya San chaired a commission in the 1920s that investigated peasant grievances against colonial tax collectors (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin2011, 4). He eventually left the GCBA and began recruiting members for his own association, one that bore characteristics of the gaing congregations discussed above. Saya San issued membership cards, amulets, incantations, and tattoos and assured members that such objects would protect them from bullets and other forms of British aggression. Influenced by nationalist discourse and preaching manuals of the time (Harris Reference Harris and McMahan2012, 181) and deeply troubled by the destruction of the Burmese economy, values, and institutions, Saya San and members of his congregation were convinced that expelling the British would restore the authority of the Burmese monarchy and revive the Buddhist religion, thus ensuring that the sāsana remained strong in Burma. In fact, during his trial for sedition, Saya San stressed that his anti-colonial mission was primarily for the “interest of the religion [sāsana] of Our Lord [the Buddha]” (Mendelson Reference Mendelson1975, 208).

Small bands of diverse, loosely connected networks of weizzā gaing continued to form throughout the country in the 1930s and 1940s, many of them professing anti-colonial, nationalist agendas similar to that of Saya San's group. None of these groups, however, were as systematically organized or influential as other lay Buddhist associations, like the YMBA or the GCBA. This most likely had to do with the British criminalizing gaing activities by associating them with rebellious activities.Footnote ⁹ It is, therefore, not surprising that we find the systematization of large-scale weizzā groups immediately after independence in 1948. What separated weizzā associations from other Buddhist associations, however, was the strong emphasis they placed on not only saving the sāsana, but also saving all human beings from around the world by exposing them to this sāsana. Because of the missionary zeal of so many of these weizzā associations, I have come to refer to them as “salvation armies.”

Now what do I mean when I use the term “salvation army” to describe these weizzā associations? Firstly, on an organizational level, like the Protestant Christian Salvation Army, these associations were made up of a hierarchical chain of command.Footnote ¹⁰ Just short of using military titles, although they did employ royal terminology and some of the associations' subcommittees referred to their members as “Buddha's soldiers” (B. hpaya sittha), many of these associations printed command hierarchy charts, complete with profile pictures and indicating a senior member's station or rank, and inserted them into handbooks read by new recruits.Footnote ¹¹ Often these associations used the term “army” (B. tap) in their descriptions. While some endorsed and practiced actual physical paramilitary activities, these armies were not overtly militaristic in nature, but acted more as reserve groups who united to carry out, with warlike zeal, the task of defending and propagating the sāsana.Footnote ¹² Accordingly, they constituted an army seeking to conquer the entire world to bring it under the dominion of a Buddhist world emperor and Buddhist norms and values (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 150). “Burma and the rest of the world is going through a time of great unrest. Many people are suffering. Everyone is hoping for peace,” wrote the editor of a magazine published in 1948 by a weizzā association, before going on to condemn the use of weapons and violence: “We have seen many people suffer from the dangers of weapons. While nowadays it is trendy to talk about rebelling against the establishment and to use weapons to help usher in peace … this goes against Buddhism. One cannot be a Buddhist soldier using weapons for peace. Only through loving-kindness can we be free from dangers” (Pathamam taya maggajaṅ'ʺ 1948, 5). According to these critics, weizzā associations' battles against perceived threats to the sāsana were fought to save Buddhism from a feared extinction.

Like the Christian Salvation Army, these weizzā associations adapted Anglo-American temperance pledges reminiscent of those required by members of the Christian association. Identical to the Protestant Salvation Army's opposition to alcohol and frequenting brothels, weizzā associations, like the Manoseitopad and Shweyinkyaw Associations, required all members to take an oath to refrain from drinking alcohol and engaging in sexual misconduct. As social and religious fraternal orders (like the Freemasons) expanded rapidly in Europe and North America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so too did they take root in Burma as the number of colonial officials residing in the country grew.Footnote ¹³ Many of these orders were strong proponents of promoting temperance and engaging in other kinds of moralist campaigns. With its establishment in Burma in 1915, the Salvation Army, as well as organizations like it, must have had at least a nominal influence on Buddhist lay associations during this time.Footnote ¹⁴

Lastly, I use the term “salvation army” because such associations were fully committed to defend and propagate the sāsana for the literal collective salvation of all humanity. These Burmese religious groups saw it as their duty to missionize the teaching of the Buddha as taught to them by the weizzā throughout the world. Manuals for associations like that of the Mano-maya-iddhi, as well as published books about the life and teachings of the weizzā Bo Min Gaung, all contain descriptions of providing salvation for fellow humans who come into contact with the sāsana.

It is the quasi-militaristic aspects of these salvation armies that I would like to focus on here. Drawing upon techniques and technologies employed by Buddhist and non-Buddhist lay associations from the 1920s to the 1930s (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin2011, 18), weizzā associations incorporated similar kinds of paramilitary elements into their organizational structures and missionary activities. Those associations with more nationalistic agendas, such as the Arīya Weizzā Association, engaged in spiritual exercises that, they contended, caused actual physical violence against external forces that threatened the sāsana and the country (more on this below). Their slogan, taken from that of the Burmese Independence Army of the 1930s, was that members of their weizzā association should be united under “one blood, one voice, one command” (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2016, 208).

Other organizations, such as the Pathamam Association, rejected violence (supernatural or otherwise) but still adopted martial terminology and ways of structuring their ever-expanding networks of members.Footnote ¹⁵ Beginning in 1948, this association published a monthly journal dedicated to doing sāsana missionary work. In the preface to the first issue, the editor explained that his association decided to embark on publishing a monthly journal of this sort because “the Buddha's sāsana, which nourishes followers with the medicine of the dhamma, has reached its halfway point” and as such, needs protection at this crucial juncture.” (Pathamam taya maggajaṅ'ʺ 1948, 2). Those entrusted with the protection and dissemination of the sāsana included the Weizzā and Master Committee, the Buddha King Sāsana Propagation Committee, and the Royal Emperor Committee. Together, they formed the “Ultimate Army” (B. Pathamam Tap Oo), one of many “armies” of the period that I referred to above as “salvation armies.” Each of the association's subcommittees was charged with carrying out certain tasks: the Weizzā and Master Committee was in charge of management, the Buddha King Committee's role was that of propagation, while the Royal Emperor committee was in charge of security.Footnote ¹⁶ Together, they wrote up a set of “sāsana regulations” that were rules for this particular association's success in disseminating its message and activities not only in Burma, but to the entire world. To this end, the association dedicated itself to carrying out its mission until resurgence in the power of the Buddha sāsana and an overall interest in the weizzā path throughout the world occurred. The editor warned his readers that members of his salvation army would be on the frontline in the battle to carry out sāsana propagation works, and that to be “successful in our missions” members must be endowed with intelligence and kindness, as well as a strong resolve for doing sāsana work and gaining new members.

Weizzā Executive Council

Weizzā associations saw themselves as continuing to carry out the mission that the legendary, original “weizzā association” began in 1888, the significance of which will be shown below. Referred to as the “First and Foremost Sāsana Propagation Committee” (B. pathamam thathana-pyu ahpwe) or the “Great Weizzā Committee on Sāsana Propagation” (B. Thathana-pyu Weizzā-dho Ahpwe-gyi), the details of this association and the reasons for its development were to be found in oral accounts spreading across the country during the colonial era, along with various other stories and prophecies about supernatural figures helping to guard the sāsana while the country was under colonial rule. Perhaps the first written account of this weizzā association's gathering is to be found in a 1952 hagiographic account of the weizzā, Bo Min Gaung. This bestselling book about the life and times of the weizzā was widely circulated at the time and is still in print as of 2015 (Poʻ Ūʺ Reference Poʻ Ūʺ1952). The author writes that, after the annexation of Upper Burma in 1885, Bo Min Gaung “became alarmed that the Buddha's sāsana would vanish” and therefore organized a “Buddhist Missionary Sorcerer-Saint Committee,” made up of the most powerful weizzā, to devise a plan to keep the sāsana from disappearing under their watch. Their goal was to defend and propagate the Buddha sāsana without using violence against the British occupiers but instead through peaceful means in line with the Buddha's teachings.

This secret, high-level meeting of weizzā saints continues to play an influential role in the minds of Burmese weizzā devotees in how they understand the sāsana to have fared in Burma and how they take part in maintaining it. One of the most popular ways of depicting this “historic” event has been through paintings and drawings that are laminated and sold at pagoda stalls or shops selling religious accouterments, or even appearing on the covers of popular religious magazines (see figures 1, 2, and 3). Related to both the convening of this first weizzā association and to this particular genre of its representation are pictures that, although not directly portraying the 1888 meeting, call to mind the event with its inclusion of the full pantheon of weizzā saints that belong to the “Supreme Weizzā Council.” Reminiscent of elementary school graduating class photos, the structures of these committees most likely reflected the organizational structure of lay Buddhist associations of the early 1900s. These associations were organized in administrative ways similar to the bureaucratic structure of colonial governmental and economic bodies of the time. Formal and rule-driven, these associations held frequent meetings and compiled detailed agendas (Turner Reference Turner2014, 79–80).

Figure 1.

“First Sāsana Propagation Committee.” From the author's collection.

Figure 2.

One of the more popular pictorial representations of the weizzā committee. The names of each of the members and where they are placed in the picture are noted at the top. From the author's collection.

Figure 3.

A computer-generated version that places the weizzā in accordance to their importance. For example, according to the text below the image, Hermit U Khanti, Bo Min Gaung, Bo Bo Aung, and Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw are in the front row. An alchemical “dhat-lone,” or “philosopher's stone,” hovers in the foreground. A separate photo of Bo Min Gaung is added to the right side. Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw, the monk in the front row to the far right and wearing glasses, is the monk featured in the story that opened this article. From the author's collection.

The accounts of such “supreme weizzā councils” and the pictures that depict their members serve the specific function of making associations between individuals of different time periods and between persons that may never have even existed. Such groupings and legends create a new, imagined lineage back to which the various, often competing, weizzā associations can trace their own congregations. One of the strategies used by authors to establish their credibility and expertise in magic and healing practices was to trace their lineages through famous monks and other religious figures (Pranke Reference Pranke2010, 12). And borrowing ideas from Anne Blackburn's work on the vitalization of Buddhist space by linking it to Sakyamuni Buddha, weizzā congregations did something similar by evoking their connections to religious virtuosi from various time periods and “imbuing new and restored environments with temporal depth and instinctive authority” (Blackburn Reference Blackburn2010, 336). Such connections to idealized past models are crucial, especially given the elaborate detail with which weizzā saints and their devotees attempt to recount their karmic connections with one another and even connect themselves with great kings, queens, and religious authorities of the past. When I pointed out to a modern-day member of a weizzā association that the convener of this meeting, Bo Min Gaung, would have been about eight years old at the time of this 1888 meeting, he replied that “weizzā are powerful and unlike normal humans. Sometimes they migrate from one time period to another. Bo Min Gaung, in particular, was thought to have been involved in guarding the sāsana in various time periods stretching back hundreds of years.”Footnote ¹⁷ Such narratives allow devotees to read the text backwards and insert their associations' imagined interventions for slowing the decline of the sāsana.

While my informants may not have thought of these connections in such terms, if nothing else, these pictorial representations also help to portray a weizzā united front against any forces that pose a threat to the sāsana and the country and “share in one another's prestige and partially create it, each for the others” (McDaniel Reference McDaniel2011, 200).Footnote ¹⁸ Devotees enjoy imagining this group acting as a kind of security council or league of indigenous superheroes watching over those in need and intervening whenever the sāsana, country, or devotees are in trouble. This “council of weizzā,” as many of my informants expressed it, are “guiding Burma to transform it into a peaceful and prosperous land where the teachings of the Buddha will shine throughout the country,” one Bo Min Gaung devotee explained to me when he saw me observing such a laminated picture on his weizzā shrine.Footnote ¹⁹ Another devotee of the weizzā saint Yatkansin Taung Sayadaw told me that “these members belong to what is called the ‘Supreme Council of Sāsana-pyu Weizzā’ who protect and promote the Buddha's teachings not only in Burma, but throughout the world.”Footnote ²⁰ Other devotees, such as the editors of the recently published journal Weizzā Essence Magazine, who wrote an op-ed article on this supreme council, maintain that there is a core group of eight weizzā who form the “executive committee” of the council. This group, known as “The Eight Great Powerful Ones” (B. maha-iddhi shit-ba), are those weizzā saints who “guard the sāsana by keeping people who are part of the Buddha sāsana away from dangers.”Footnote ²¹ The editors go on to write that other sāsana works done by this committee include “providing knowledge and wisdom to those meditators engaged in meditation so that they remain on the right track; making sure requisite donations arrive to those monks engaged in religious works; and helping pagodas and monasteries to be built” (Vijjā Rasa Con’ maggajaṅ'ʺ 2009).

“Liberation Era” and a New World Order

As noted above, weizzā associations began to proliferate and increase their missionary activities immediately after Burmese independence in 1948, especially as British forces were no longer in authority to outlaw such groups and their practices. However, we see a different set of concerns for why these groups believed the sāsana to be in decline when examining weizzā-related sources from this postcolonial era. With the British gone, members of weizzā associations looked to the current political and religious state of affairs of their time and read into them, with the help of prophetic literature, information about what was to come and how to act. Books and magazine articles related to the weizzā that began appearing in 1948 contained little to no vitriolic rhetoric targeted at the British (or Japanese) nor any mention of exactly how colonization was thought to have directly hastened the sāsana’s demise. In place of the British and their lack of sāsana patronage, weizzā associations worried about other issues that could threaten an already weakened sāsana. The monk and weizzā devotee U Jotipala, for instance, complained about the proliferation of socialists and communists in the world and the suffering they caused the people of their respective countries because their ideologies were opposed to Buddhism (Jotipala Reference Jotipala1952, 13).

Other weizzā-related publications looked to the Rangoon newspapers for evidence of a world that was in its final days. This period in Burmese history was a tumultuous one, marked by waves of insurgencies by communist factions, rebel army groups, and ethnic minorities (M. Smith Reference Smith1991). A popular weizzā monograph focused on local newspaper reports of Kareni soldiers killing 900 people in the town of Pyin Oo Lwin, communist forces entering Mandalay (Poʻ Ūʺ Reference Poʻ Ūʺ1949, 69); the rise of violent crimes and debilitating poverty throughout the country (103); rebels killing monks and laypeople on a daily basis (109); and ethnic groups like the Shan, Kachin, and Chin peoples constantly quarreling due to their adherences to false and heretical ideologies (143–44). All of this, coupled with similar political and societal unrest around the world, was evidence to weizzā association members that the sāsana had reached an all-time low. It was not all doom and gloom, however, as these events were also taken as signs that Burma was on the threshold of a new and better future.

What exactly did weizzā associations envision this future to be? To help us with this question, we must first understand the overarching narrative of sāsana decline that informed their present and future worldviews. The Buddhist temporal scheme for the life of the sāsana is comprised of cyclical progressions of eons of decline, destruction, and renewal. Some eons have buddhas while others do not, but for those eons fortunate enough to have a buddha, this buddha puts forth teachings that will endure for a finite period of time before they disappear from the world, at which time a new eon will commence. These teachings, and the institutions and practices that support their flourishing, are what is meant here by “sāsana.” For example, the period of time for the flourishing of the current buddha's sāsana (5,000 years) is the temporal scheme that has been informing Buddhists' conceptions of duration of the sāsana and with it, the eon in which they live and into which they will be reborn.

While Buddhist sources offer a variety of schemas for sāsana decline and disappearance, the one proposed by the fifth-century Buddhist commentator Buddhaghosa was the one that became normative for Buddhists in Burma. Buddhaghosa (1956) details a five-fold sequence through which the sāsana will disappear over the course of a 5,000-year period beginning with the demise of Gotama Buddha. The following five components that contribute to the life of the sāsana will take place—each corresponding to a 1,000-year time span: inability to attain insight, monks no longer living in accordance with monastic discipline, loss of textual knowledge, lack of adherence to the ascetic life, and finally the disappearance of the Buddha's relics.Footnote ²²

Jan Nattier (Reference Nattier1991, 119) has pointed out that Buddhist texts from both the Theravāda and the Mahayana traditions say little about whether human intervention has an impact on the decline of the sāsana: “In a number of narrative texts where the effects of human actions are the center of attention, we find specific timetables for the duration of the Dharma. Yet the very existence of these timetables suggests that the lifespan of the Dharma is fixed, and thus not subject to human intervention.”Footnote ²³ Such ambivalence has allowed Burmese in the colonial and postcolonial eras to allow diverse readings that were, as we now see, determined by the conditions of the time (Frasch Reference Frasch2013; Turner Reference Turner2014).

One such reading was to be found amongst weizzā association members in the mid-twentieth century. A popular belief that had spread through Burma around this time was that as the halfway point of the Buddha's sāsana was approaching, the country would soon be entering into what was to be known as the “Vimutti Yuga Khit,” or “Liberation Era.” This notion of a Liberation Era—a time of prosperity and relative ease in making progress along the Buddhist path to nibbāna—was widespread, most likely brought on by a powerful sense of optimism experienced by Burmese in light of the country's newly gained independence, proliferation of lay associations working to strengthen the sāsana, and Prime Minister U Nu's Buddhist revivalist plans (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 202).Footnote ²⁴

This view of a coming “Liberation Era” was part of a sāsana temporal scheme that differed from the one put forth by Buddhaghosa, who postulated that the sāsana would endure for 5,000 years but that its deterioration would take place in five 1,000-year increments starting from the moment of the Buddha's death and continue to gradually decay until it vanished completely from the world.Footnote ²⁵ While such a theory had provided the Burmese Buddhists with a basis for how to make sense of the fall of the monarchy and subsequent social ills that were brought about by colonialism, for instance, it was not adequate for weizzā associations to explain how the sāsana was to survive once the colonial power left and Burma was granted independence in 1948. However, an alternative chronological scheme addressed this.

With the colonial powers gone, weizzā associations could now focus on restoring the Buddha sāsana to its earlier, albeit imagined, splendor. Not on their watch was the sāsana to disappear from their country, and with lots of hard work, they could counteract the negative effects that had been wrought on the sāsana, stabilize it, and then propel its power into the future—a future that weizzā association members believed would be a liberated one. Foxeus (Reference Foxeus2011, 202) emphasizes the importance placed on notions of this “Liberation Era” among weizzā groups by showing how the cyclical scheme of decline was central to their mission of strengthening and propagating the sāsana. Like the decline theory found in the commentaries noted above, the waning of the sāsana was believed to take place in two 2,500-year phases. This theory differed in that, instead of a long, sustained decline lasting 5,000 years, the sāsana would decline for 2,500 years, renew itself, and go through another decline until it disappeared completely from the world. Foxeus (Reference Foxeus2011, 202) explains this complex theory well:

The weizzā-related source material, therefore, placed the Donation Era during the years of colonial rule, and held that at the point when the Donation Era reached its lowest, “the cycle would all of a sudden shift to the highest point of the first phase, the Liberation Era” (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 203). According to most sources, the Liberation Era would recommence sometime in the 1950s (see, e.g., Poʻ Ūʺ Reference Poʻ Ūʺ1949, 63).Footnote ²⁷

Along with this idea of the arrival of a golden era of the sāsana, we also see prophecies spreading of a messianic Buddhist king appearing in Burma during this exact time period. Two well-known prophetic sayings at this time were: “at the midway point of the sāsana, a virtuous king will shine”Footnote ²⁸ and “at the midway point of the sāsana, a virtuous king will carry on [the sāsana into the new era].”Footnote ²⁹ This, no doubt, added a sense of urgency to weizzā associations' missions. This period during the 1950s happened to coincide with a historical moment characterized by millennial beliefs in the Theravāda world about the approaching midpoint of the Buddhist dispensation and the imminent arrival of a Universal Monarch whose reign would bring prosperity. Such beliefs were linked to notions of religious decline and revival by way of a messianic figure that was often associated with the buddha Metteyya, who was prophesied to appear in a future time and restore the Buddha's teachings and monastic community (Frasch Reference Frasch2013). One weizzā monograph even went so far as to make the claim that this messianic figure was none other than Hitler (see figure 4). Drawing from the widespread belief that a legendary, nineteenth-century weizzā named Bo Bo Aung would one day reappear in the world as a universal monarch, the book, Bo Bo Aung and Hitler, made the argument that Hitler was this savior who had appeared in Europe to unite the world in peace.Footnote ³⁰ Members of some weizzā associations believed that the royal savior would possess a powerful, supernatural wheeled weapon akin to a boomerang (something I always imagined to resemble the magical, five-pointed throwing weapon from the 1983 movie Krull).Footnote ³¹ The author of the book, a Buddhist monk, posited that Hitler did, indeed, wield his version of this weapon; the swastika. Not only did they also make the obvious connection that the swastika was a symbol of the Buddha, but there were segments of the Burmese population during the late 1930s and early 1940s that believed Hitler to be a saint due to his alleged vegetarianism and abstention from alcohol, qualities often associated with Buddhist saints (Zöllner Reference Zöllner2010, 7).

Figure 4.

Cover of the 1939 book, Bo Bo Aung and Hitler (Ñāṇa Reference Ñāṇa1939).

Still other authors of weizzā publications proclaimed that the country was on the threshold of a new era—an era governed by the weizzā—and provided step-by-step instructions for what members needed to accomplish so that a weizzā emperor could arise to unite all the continents under Buddhist rule (Pathamam taya maggajaṅ'ʺ 1949a, 15; 1949b, 14; 1949c, 16) and “usher in an era of peace and prosperity in the world” (Poʻ Ūʺ Reference Poʻ Ūʺ1949, 4).Footnote ³² “There are all sorts of news and rumors going around these days about weizzā appearing soon to protect the sāsana and country,” a leading figure from one of the weizzā associations of this period writes. “Some even believe that Bo Min Gaung is [this king] coming to protect the sāsana and country at the halfway point of the sāsana’s dispensation” (Pathamam taya maggajaṅ'ʺ 1948).Footnote ³³

Much of this activity and religious fervor are reflected in, and no doubt heightened by, the convening of the Sixth Buddhist Council and its preoccupation with how to protect, sustain, and propagate the sāsana. The Sixth Buddhist Council held in Rangoon from 1954 to 1956 was, according to Jordt (Reference Jordt2007, 30), “the most visible and renowned effort” of the government and ecclesiastical authorities to revitalize the sāsana in Burma and was “seen as marking off a new period in history in which the sāsana would be universalized.” The date of the synod was significant, for it concluded in May 1956, which coincided with the 2,500th anniversary of Gotama Buddha's parinibbāna and thus the halfway point of the 5,000-year period thought to separate the historical Buddha from his successor Metteyya Buddha. Similar to the councils held in the fifteenth century, the Sixth Council was embedded in millenarian thinking and Metteyyanic expectations (Frasch Reference Frasch2013). Even the location chosen for the Sixth Buddhist Council was linked with the weizzā when, in 1948, a “Holy Man, who was dressed in pure white clothes” presented a devout layman with a staff and urged that it be handed over to Prime Minister U Nu so that he might be convinced to erect a pagoda that, if built, would usher in an era of peace and prosperity across the world (Brohm Reference Brohm1957, 395).Footnote ³⁴ Many weizzā devotees believed that the Liberation Era was to commence in 1956 at the end of the council.Footnote ³⁵ The dual cycle of sāsana decline of two 2,500-year periods that was favored by weizzā groups was even brought up at the Sixth Buddhist Council, but the more normative theory of a gradual decline over the course of five periods of 1,000 years was considered valid (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 204).Footnote ³⁶ Note that, at least by the 1990s and probably as early as the 1980s, most weizzā devotees no longer adhered to the “liberation era” theory. Among no informants, nor in any of the sources I consulted from the 1990s onwards, did I come across reference to the cyclical schema of the sāsana’s decline that was popular in the middle of the twentieth century. It seemed as if most Buddhists (weizzā-affiliated and otherwise) had settled upon accepting the more traditional theory of decline put forth at the Sixth Buddhist Council. Many devotees believed that an era where weizzā ruled the country was about to arrive but that it still fit with the general theory of the gradual, 5,000-year decline of the sāsana.

Weizzā of the Post-Independence Era and Islamic Threats

Most of the weizzā associations had disbanded or were absorbed into non-weizzā organizations during the 1980s. As a consequence of General Ne Win's purge of the religious landscape in the early 1980s, weizzā associations, especially those concerned with practices that could be interpreted as black magic or sorcery, were more closely monitored (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 176). Immediately following the independence in 1948, Burmese authorities were preoccupied with suppressing ethnic insurgencies and worrying about communism invading the country. By the late 1970s, when these issues were under control, Ne Win turned his attention to religion and undertook a mission to purge the sāsana from elements that he perceived as deviating from orthodox Buddhism. In a speech delivered in December 1979, Ne Win likened these weizzā associations to the Jim Jones Peoples Temple cult and warned that such groups only seek to exploit their members for their own self-interests (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 81). A series of restrictions were then placed upon the weizzā associations, and those considered illegal, like the Shwe-yin-kyaw Association that was popular among soldiers and civil servants, were banned, while others, like the Manoseitopad Association, were heavily monitored (Tosa Reference Tosa1996, 241). During this period, Ne Win also banned magazines, printed books, and other forms of media that were created by weizzā associations and even had portrayals of weizzā and their supernatural powers censored from written works and films. Houtman (Reference Houtman1990, 184) noted how books on such topics were prohibited from being sold in bookshops during his years of fieldwork in the 1980s.Footnote ³⁷

When the associations dissolved, weizzā members did not simply stop engaging in activities defending and bolstering the sāsana, however. A further trickledown effect seems to have occurred where, instead of being in the hands of larger groups of organized weizzā factions, sāsana responsibility fell to individual weizzā devotees. Whereas we saw above that the power and responsibility for the care of sāsana was in the hands of organized lay associations, here we see it diffuse still further to a wider swath of individual Buddhists, both lay and monastic, who were sought out by the weizzā to carry out their sāsana propagation missions (Patton Reference Patton2016). Keiko Tosa, a Japanese scholar of weizzā associations, discovered during her fieldwork in the late 1980s and early 1990s that, although weizzā beliefs and practices among individual devotees were still widely popular (and were becoming increasingly so in the years she was in Burma), no one was particularly interested in forming new associations or joining the few remaining ones. Instead, they were devoted to entering into personal, direct relationships with weizzā saints and carrying out sāsana propagation activities as directed to them by their patron weizzā saints.Footnote ³⁸

The few weizzā associations that remain active, and especially a growing number of individual weizzā devotees, continue to see themselves as the principle vanguards of the sāsana in a time when its vitality is still under attack. Instead of fighting against the threats of colonialism or societal unrest, however, present-day associations and their devotees consider the greatest threat against the sāsana to be Islam. Although the past couple of years has seen a dramatic increase in the physical violence that Buddhists have inflicted upon Muslims in Burma, weizzā associations have been, for at least the past decade, engaging in spiritual warfare with what they perceived to be the evil, anti-Buddhist forces of Islam—a war, Foxeus (Reference Foxeus2011, 350) reminds us, “fought by members seated in a cross-legged position.” Believing that their meditation techniques of the mind can influence the physical world around them, members of some associations engage in rituals to create earthquakes, tidal waves, typhoons, and similar catastrophes that could be used as weapons against Muslims. One weizzā organization believed, proudly, that their ritual activity generated the tsunami that struck South and Southeast Asia in December 2004 and that they navigated it away from Burma and towards Muslim-dominated Indonesia (Foxeus Reference Foxeus2011, 386). In their view, if large numbers of Muslims could be weakened or killed outside of Burma, the less threat there would be of Muslims possibly invading Burma at a later date.

While attending a weizzā association's ritual celebration in 2004, about a year after the Iraq War began, a member of the congregation leaned over to me and said, “President George Bush is a great man even though he isn't Buddhist.” When I asked what he meant by this, he replied that the president was doing a great service to the world by waging war on Muslims and “it is karmic retribution for the Muslims destroying the great Buddhas in Afghanistan!” (He was referring, of course, to the desecration of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban in 2001.)

The majority of weizzā associations and individual devotees do not espouse such violence and focus, instead, on promoting the longevity of the sāsana through obtaining prowess in particular meditation techniques and engaging in forms of missionary work of conversion, preaching, and healing. Such efforts are not the work of royalty or monastic authorities, but of Buddhists from all walks of life who take seriously their responsibility to ensure that the sāsana is protected for future generations despite the inevitability that the sāsana will eventually disappear completely from this world. For such devotees, the actions of the weizzā, like the sorcerer-saint described at the beginning of this article, offer models for how they should live and how the world should be governed. They continue to look to and emulate the many great weizzā of the past who protected the sāsana in dynamic and multivalent ways and vow to carry on the mission that the weizzā began.