Mr B finds Pamela writing: Thou, Burma, art fair and beauteous to see (5)

Part V - Monkhood

“Then I went to see the great bell at Megon [Mingun]. Here is a Buddhist convent and as I stood looking a group of nuns surrounded me. They wore robes of the same shape and size as the monks, but instead of the monks’ fine yellow of a grimy dun. Little old toothless women, their heads shaven but covered with an inc of thin grey stubble, and their little old faces deeply lined and wrinkled. They held out skinny hands for money and gabbled with bare pale gums. Their dark eyes were alert with covetousness and their smiles were mischievous. They were very old and they had no human ties or affections. They seemed to look upon the world with a humorous cynicism. They had lived through every kind of illusion and held existence in a malicious and laughing contempt. They had no tolerance for the follies of men and no indulgence for their weakness. There was something vaguely frightening in their entire lack of attachment to human things. They had done with love, they had finished with the anguish of separation, death had no terrors for them, they had nothing left now but laughter. They struck the great bell so that I might hear its tone; boom, boom, it went, a long low note that travelled in slow reverberations down the river, a solemn sound that seemed to call the soul from its tenement of clay and remind it that though all created things were illusion, in the illusion was also beauty; and the nuns, following the sound, burst into ribald cackles of laughter, hi, hi, hi, that mocked the call of the great bell. Dupes, their laughter said, dupes and fools. Laughter is the only reality.” - WSM, The Gentleman in the Parlour.

Would they indeed? Is laughter the only reality? Have they become utter but friendly cynics, the nuns as much as the monks? I do not know. It is very hard to look into the Oriental mind, especially in matters of faith. Many of them have gone up the spiritual path from their very early years, as children, and have not known any other reality.

Monks are everywhere, in multitudes. Burma, the land of Golden Pagodas could just as rightly be called the Land of the Red Robes. As the uprisings in the past have shown, a force to be reckoned with whenever they stand up non-violently for the people. For they are the people. Like in the West in former times, at least one son in every household is to become a monk. Vows are given at the tender age of five to ten years, and can be revoked if the child reaches adulthood. Not many do. Revoke their vows, that is. Monks are widely respected and form an integral part of daily religious life. Every household, no matter how poor, prepares or donates food for the beggar monks and nuns. The system works. Our guide in Yangon, the mundane and businesslike Coco, confides that he, when younger, envied the life of the monks, and that he still does at times. ‘They never have to work’, he says. ‘They get food and shelter. They can meditate the whole day. Must be a pleasant life’. ‘But also a hard one’, I interject, ‘and it cannot be easy to observe all the 224 religious rules that the Buddhist monk is expected to observe, contrary to the four rules of life that ordinary mortals should to try to live by.’ He nods, but he is not entirely convinced, I can tell.

Below a series of pictures entitled Monkhood. By clicking on the pictures, they open up in a gallery.