'Bodawpaya's Madness': Monastic Accounts of King Bodawpaya's Conflict with the Burmese Sangha, Part One

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, a conflict between the Burmese king, Bodawpaya (r. 1782-1819) and his council of monastic leaders led to the temporary persecution and suppression of the Burmese sangha. Historical research into t he affair has relied for the most part on early European reports and more recently on Bodawpaya's own royal orders to come to an understanding of the motives and objectives of the king's actions. This article takes a somewhat different approach by exploring the incident as it was seen through the eyes of the monastic community. Citing both contemporary sources and later nineteenth- and twentieth-century historical retrospectives, this article discusses the issues deemed important by the sangha in terms of its perceived legitimacy, its role in the world as an agent of salvation, and its prerogatives as an institution vis-à-vis the Buddhist state. This information, important in its own right, also helps to clarify the motives that informed the king's behavior, as well as allows a more critical assessment of western accounts of the controversy. The apologetics presented in the monastic narratives are technical and imbedded in a conceptual universe that merges the religious, the cosmological and the political, and as such require a familiarity with Theravāda scholasticism and the Burmese Buddhist world view to be understood. Implicitly, this article argues for the utility of such kinds of Buddhist cultural literacy in the study of Burmese religious history and in Burma studies more generally.