Ritual and Play in Buddhist Nun-Making: Girlhood, Nunhood, and the Shaping of the "Little Teacher" in Today's Myanmar

Abstract

This article looks at what it means to be a girl child and a renunciate in contemporary Myanmar. As Theravada Buddhism is conventionally thought of as the most stringent with concern to the boundaries between monastics and the laity, I complicate these boundaries by examining how child and adolescent nuns play, the highly formalized "adult play," ritual, and the tensions between lay life and nunhood. I look at play as mediating between continuity and transition, between lay and monastic, girl child and young nun. I show how what might be thought of as mundane, or outside the nunnery, can actually strengthen the religious or supramundane, often considered inside the nunnery. Along with play, I also look at how mundane rituals, such as schooling, serve to break down the divide, demonstrating the lay within the monastic, embodied to show that often the lay is used in a manner that does not necessarily take away from the religious but rather can strengthen it; they are often inseparable. The ideal of the nun is that of the genderless renunciant, yet the reality of the thilashin (Myanmar Buddhist nun) is a complex site for examining these phenomena.