2019.22: Thomas Patton: The Ethnographer and the Charlatan
Burmese Buddhist wizards (weizzā) 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 dispensation from a host of threats, both physical and metaphysical. 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.” 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. Individuals who adhere to prescribed practices related to the weizzā and put them into everyday practice are said to follow the weizzā path.
These associations are often made up of members who came from a wide range of socio- economic backgrounds. Merchants, office workers, taxi cab drivers, booksellers, housewives, and monastics all join these gaing to varying degrees of involvement and engage in activities that included pagoda construction, healing ceremonies, sermonizing, and Buddhist missionary work throughout the country, all of which are understood by members to be part of strengthening the Buddha’s dispensation.
Although I have given primacy to my interlocutors’ voices and views throughout my book research,[1] I would like to offer some of my own views on the issue of Buddhist authenticity with reference to the weizzā phenomenon and discuss another main critique of the weizzā phenomenon (i.e. that it is nothing but charlatanism and quackery) by raising methodological questions and reflecting upon my informants’ discourse and my role as an ethnographer.
Firstly, with reference to Buddhist “authenticity,” I propose that any Buddhist community or individual that self identifies as “Buddhist” counts to the same degree as any other. It is not the job of scholars of Buddhism to police the borders of religious communities and to “create standards against which one can measure authenticity and allow (or disallow) membership.”[2] Rather, what exactly Buddhism is should be left up to Buddhists (speaking as Buddhists) to determine. Even on a daily basis, scholars of Buddhism and Buddhists themselves are challenged to re-assess previously held notions of such seemingly uncomplicated things as “Buddhism” and what it means to be “Buddhist.” I have come to value the process of understanding another culture and writing often about my fieldwork experiences, which has helped me develop an appreciation for greater self-reflexivity in my analysis of other cultures (which of course helps to understand my own). Rather than giving special credibility to certain types of explanations and dismissing others in order to justify my theoretical positions, I consider local contexts of my field sites and give legitimacy to explanations by the people of these locations.
My goal in my work has been to situate beliefs and practices related to these entities within the broader context of contemporary social dynamics in twentieth and twenty-first centuries Myanmar. I have attempted to do so from a “lived religions” approach, a method that examines “the practices people use to remember, share, enact, adapt, create, and combine the stories out of which they live. And it comes into being through the often- mundane practices people use to transform these meaningful interpretations into everyday action.”[3] From this perspective, we see that rather than a single object, Burmese Buddhism is actually a composite of a varied, multifaceted, and continually shifting assortment of practices, beliefs, experiences, and relationships. In the truest sense of the Buddhist word, it is empty of inherent existence. I hope to make this clear in my research by providing my readers with many instances of how weizzā devotees' religion-as-lived are not static, unitary, or even readily intelligible. I have attempted to show throughout my work how Buddhism in Myanmar is a process of imaginings and reimaginings in relation to, bound up with, and reacting against the conditions and circumstances in which weizzā devotees find themselves living. This is important because the fractures that appear to divide the Burmese Buddhist field into various factions and the ways weizzā and non- weizzā Buddhists create and re-create such distinctions fade at the level of practice.
There were, however, things I have found disturbing and difficult to make sense of during my research that did not simply dissolve away at the level of practice. Reflecting on such disturbances, and how employing a lived religions approach to them helped me deal with such difficulties to produce a more refined examination to weizzā phenomenon, is how I would like to conclude. Let me now share what it was that I encountered during my research that invoked such feelings of unease. It was not the time when a member of a weizzā association threatened to assassinate me if he found out I wrote negative things about his cult, or even the bizarre instance when I walked in on a monk (believed by his disciples to be a low level weizzā) being massaged all over his body by two female devotees.[4] Rather, it was the instances I believed to involve charlatanism and swindling that I found the most difficult to tolerate.
One early November morning in 2008, I decided to visit a small village on the outskirts of Mandalay where I heard claims of a medium’s ability to dhāt-si (channel) a weizzā. This was one of the first mediums I visited during my research, and I was eager to see such a thing for myself. When I arrived, there were already about fifty people mulling around in front of the house, and when I peeked in through a window at the side of the house, I saw a young woman, about twenty years of age, dressed in white robes applying water to another woman’s legs while chanting something in Burmese and Pāli. “Her name is Ma Yee Yee. She channels Bo Min Gaung,” a middle-aged man standing nearby told me. “When I first heard the news, I didn’t believe it. Along with the other villagers, I went over to her house and taunted her by shouting, ‘Hey, Bo Min Gaung! Bo Min Gaung! If you really are him give us some [winning] lottery numbers!’” he laughed. He went on to say that she replied to them saying, “I am not the Bo Min Gaung who gives out lottery numbers. I am the Bo Min Gaung who heals people of their diseases.”
As I continued to observe Ma Yee Yee and the events taking place before me over the course of several hours, I found myself growing increasingly agitated. I saw a destitute family offer what must have been a large amount of money for them to buy a bottle of murky water they believed to have been blessed by the medium. An elderly woman with severe glaucoma cried out in joy that her eyes were healed after the medium touched them with her hands. A teenager with a crippled leg hobbled out of the house after being told by the medium that he no longer needed his crutches. And all the while, the medium’s parents were in the other room, in full view of those who had come to be healed, counting the thousands of kyats that were pouring in. Images of Christian televangelists and so-called faith healers from my country that are often accused of bilking money out of their believers began to flood my mind.
Seeing me at the window, Ma Yee Yee eventually motioned for me to come inside. Respectfully taking my seat in front of her and looking around, I saw a handful of monks at the side of the room. Some were chatting, smoking and drinking tea; others chanted Buddhist paritta while fingering their rosary beads. Behind Ma Yee Yee was a large altar with a hodge-podge collection of religious accouterments. Surrounding me was about forty lay people, all sitting quietly fanning themselves to keep cool inside the stuffy room.
“Is there anything you want to ask? Speak!” she said to me in the gruff voice of Bo Min Gaung. Pride welling up inside me, I decided I wanted to test Ma Yee Yee to see if she really was possessed. I thought to myself (in a tone, looking back on, I am quite ashamed of), “I will expose her for the charlatan she is.” I immediately began to pepper her with questions about Bo Min Gaung and his life that I had read about in his biographies. Surely, if Bo Min Gaung had entered this young woman’s body/mind, he would be able to easily tell me facts about his own life. Question after question, Ma Yee Yee either refused to answer or got wrong. I was feeling quite full of myself at this point and looked around, completely expecting the audience to be overjoyed for exposing their so-called healer as a fraud. But my eyes were met with only icy, angry stares. “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” a woman directed at me as she exited the room in disgust. I frantically looked hoped to catch a sympathetic face, but I only saw looks of disappointment. I was drenched in sweat at this point and the smoke from the incense stung my eyes and nostrils and made me nauseous. It became clear what I had done. Not only had I disrespected Bo Min Gaung, I had disrespected a revered healer, someone whom the community had already tested and determined was legitimate. As an outsider, thinking that I knew what was good for them, I had embarrassed the healer and those who relied on her for their physical and mental well-being. I also had embarrassed myself in the process. I stammered to find the words in Burmese to express my apologies as I shuffled my way to the exit.
Ma Yee Yee, speaking as Bo Min Gaung, told the assembled audience to not be angry with me for I was “a foreigner who was not familiar with dhat-si or Bo Min Gaung. It was good that he tested Abha [referring to herself as Bo Min Gaung] for it was an opportunity for everyone to listen to what I am about to speak of.” Ma Yee Yee went on to recount the day when even members of that very community had doubted her power and taunted her. And “remember the newspaper reporter from Yangon,” she continued, “who challenged me on issues of money and what my granddaughter [referring to Ma Yee Yee] does with all the money donated to her.” She finished her brief sermon by stressing that she only cared about the wellbeing of the sāsana and her patients. “Lots of people come to me for healing, but I do not want their money. You know I never charge money for my work. I only want their good will. Money I receive it, used for sāsana-pyu. Indeed, money is worthless and can’t be used to reach nibbāna. The only thing I ask in return is that they practice metta for that will be one’s support for attaining nibbāna, will it not?”
With that, Ma Yee Yee stood up and walked into a backroom. The mood of the audience immediately changed for the better, and people began offering me tea and snacks and laughing as I again tried offering my apologies. I was told to return whenever I wanted for it was pathan-hset (karmic connection) that had brought me there that day.
I took them up on their offer and returned several more times but always retained my doubt of Ma Yee Yee’s powers and continued to feel uneasy about people exchanging money for healing. I kept such thoughts to myself and applied the lessons I learned to the many other instances when I was overwhelmed with feelings of skepticism.
Throughout my research, I continued to be bothered by what I figured to be deviousness of some of the mediums and healers who preyed upon the desperate and ignorant, as well as the gullibility of the devout who seemed to be all too quick to part with their money. At several points of my research, I almost turned away in disgust at the venality of the mediums and gullibility of the devout to pursue other, more palatable forms of religious behavior in Myanmar. What kept me from doing so, however, was the realization I came to before embarking on my fieldwork: there are many religious worlds, and, therefore, many different ways of making and inhabiting reality. Now that I was confronted with these worlds, I needed to develop a strategy for making sense of the experiences I was observing, both among my interlocutors and within myself.
I like to think that I accomplished this by allowing myself to become vulnerable to encounters and experiences that were destabilizing and unfamiliar. For the most part, I was able to deal with such instances in a disciplined way by suspending the need to guard myself against those aspects of my study that I found problematic. There were aspects of my interlocutors’ religious lives that did not match my preferred ideas steeped in modern, liberal Protestantism and human equality --- aspects that made me wonder if perhaps my interlocutors who warned me to stay away from the weizzā path were correct in their negative views of the weizzā path. The rare instances in which I encountered abuse, manipulation, and treachery among weizzā communities and devotees were sometimes enough to make me want to recoil in disgust and provide an unflattering analysis of weizzā activity in my writings. I of course did neither, and in the end I decided that the instances of such behavior were so few and irregular as to not warrant inclusion in this study. I also found my views transformed by the end of my fieldwork in that I became more empathetic to a phenomenon and its people whose beliefs and practices I did not believe in and of whose efficacy I was doubtful of from the start.
I accomplished the latter transformation by reminding myself constantly that I was placing myself in an intermediary position located at the boundary of my reality and the reality of my interlocutors. Such an in-between location required that I discipline my “mind and heart to stay in this in-between place, in a posture of disciplined attentiveness, especially to difference.”[5] I used the distress induced by instances of difference as a point of reflection. Instead of guarding myself against what I perceived to be morally reprehensible practices and then going on to condemn the acts, I used these experiences as opportunities to reflect upon the roots of my interlocutors’ actions and the roots of my own discomfort.
The rewards from such an undertaking were well worth the effort. With regards to my initial anxiety over the monetary transactions of religious healing taking place, I came to observe over many months of research, that there was no open coercion by medium- healers or their entourage to give money. Money was expected to be given for services rendered, but in the form of donations, no different from what would be offered to a monk or nun. The way these donations were provided for the healers’ services were done in a similar manner: with a reverent attitude, the patient prostrated to the healer, or if the healer was busy or not present, a photograph of the healer and/or the weizzā was channeled. Money, usually a modest amount, and within the financial means of the donator, was placed in a bowl or box watched over by members of the healer’s family or disciples. During the many times I have witnessed such healings, I have never once seen someone not give something, whether money, food, or goods.
Why did I think that these healers, their healing facilities and their services and payments should be any different from that which is expected upon receiving services at a doctor’s office or health clinic? Money is anticipated for services rendered, and although the services rendered here are of a supernatural nature, they are no less worthy of monetary payments. The difference, however, is that the healing power that was granted to these healers are by beings whose job is to guard and propagate the Buddha sāsana. Because of this, it is in the best interest of the healer to use this money for such purposes, either through erecting pagodas, making offerings to monks and nuns, or sponsoring ordination ceremonies. Many of these “clinics” also provide free meals and lodging to patients and their families. For example, in 2009 it cost a healer in Mandalay over fifty thousand kyat (approximately US$50) per day to run her healing clinic, a sum difficult for most Burmese families to handle without some significant source of revenue.
From my prolonged interactions with these mediums and their families, I witnessed that large portions of the monetary donations they received were invested back into the community for building pagodas, schools, and monastic buildings, throwing religious celebrations, and erecting shrines dedicated to Bo Bo Aung and Bo Min Gaung. A rather well-known healer whom I had the chance to meet in the early 2000s, used the donations she received from healing people (“I never charge fees for my work,” she emphasized) for building water tanks, schools, and monastic buildings.
At the very least, such an approach may also help us (and those hostile to the weizzā phenomenon, should they ever read my research) to suspend our moral judgments about beliefs and practices that revolt us and disturb our most valued mores, instead of those that inspire us. It opens up the possibility to study Buddhist beliefs and practices that very well may contain elements that we find unsettling, dangerous, and morally corrupt and take such elements seriously in order to present as full as possible an account as we can.
Most importantly, it allows us to examine aspects of Burmese religious life from the perspectives of those whose experiences are often misrepresented or entirely ignored, not only in academic works on religion, but also in Burmese historical monographs and other written sources. In addition to increasing our understanding of the lived religious experiences and practices of weizzā devotees, this approach to religious studies also enriches our investigation of the complex interrelationship between these experiences and practices and the wider social world in which they are enacted.
Thomas Patton is assistant professor of Buddhist and Asian studies at the City University of Hong Kong. He is author of The Buddha’s Wizards: Magic, Healing, and Protection in Burmese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2018). http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-buddhas-wizards/9780231187602. He can be reached at tpatton@cityu.edu.hk.
[1] This includes my book, The Buddha’s Wizards: Magic, Protection, and Healing in Burmese Buddhism (Columbia University Press, 2018).
[2] Satlow, Michael L. 2006 “Defining Judaism: Accounting for ‘Religions’ in the Study of Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74:4, 847.
[3] McGuire, Meredith B. 2008. Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 111.
[4] It was not unlike the incident in the following video where female devotees kiss and massage a “bodaw” monk with the hopes that they will receive some of his spiritual power: “Myanmar News Now 8 20 12 Myanmar News Now.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtdZahYfOiA.
[5] Orsi, Robert. 2005. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 198.