Creating Demand and Creating Knowledge Communities: Myanmar/Burmese Buddhist Women, Monk Teachers, and the Shaping of Transnational Teachings

Abstract

The importance of Abhidhamma (higher doctrine) in Myanmar Buddhist society is well known. However, it is only within the last century that this doctrine has become more accessible to the laity, and specifically to women devotees. Today, women make up the majority of monks’ devotees in the country. Indeed, as this article argues, a major role in increasing the Abhidhamma’s importance and visibility in Burmese society has been played by women. Although monks such as Ledi Sayadaw (1846–1923) reworked the teachings to make them more accessible to the laity, laywomen seem to have played an active role in creating a “demand” for learning the more difficult Buddhist teachings that were previously only available to monastic elites. It may be difficult to find individual female authors or references to women in texts written by monks during the earlier part of the colonial era, yet we can find examples of women displaying agency as part of larger groups. This fact complicates the notion of individual agency that is usually focused on in current research. During the colonial era, a considerable number of literate women were part of a “growing reading public,” and I argue that Burmese laywomen created a “demand” for learning Buddhist doctrine, with monks then creating a “supply”. My suspicions grew regarding women’s “demand” for learning, from multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Myanmar at a village monastery near Meiktila in 2014, and at a suburban house monastery in the San Francisco Bay Area during various visits beginning in 2010. I found that after observing the same teaching monk in both places that one woman student was responsible for creating these “knowledge communities” after creating a “demand” to learn the Abhidhamma. I was also able to learn how this monk’s doctrinal content and pedagogical methods of his teaching practice had been impacted not only by the different teaching environments, but also by the female students at the two sites.