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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how followers of the controversial monk Ashin Nyāna utilize a disenchanted, secularized form of Buddhism focusing on the Four Noble Truths as a technology to gain prosperity and success in business in Burma/Myanmar and to develop an increased sense of agency.

Paper long abstract:

In 1988, the planned economy of the socialist Ne Win period (1962-1988) was abandoned and the military junta SLORC-SPDC (1988-2011) seized power and implemented a limited market economy. During the second parliamentarian period (2011-2021), a further liberalization of the market economy was brought about. The notion of prosperity has long been integral to Buddhist traditions. Novel forms of Burmese Buddhism promising prosperity emerged in interplay with these economic changes, both enchanted forms (various cults of spirits, spirit possession cults, etc.), which are linked to traditional Theravāda Buddhism, and disenchanted forms. The latter have not yet been examined in the scholarship. One such example is mou-pyā-wāda, the “teaching of the Sky-Blue (One),” established by the controversial monk Ashin Nyāna.

Based on interviews and fieldwork, the aim of this paper is to explore how followers of Ashin Nyāna experienced traditional, enchanted forms of Burmese Theravāda Buddhism, as well as spirit cults, as impediments to economic success, and how they claimed to have achieved economic prosperity by practicing Ashin Nyāna’s secularized form of Buddhism. For them, the latter served as a technology for economic success and provided an increased sense of agency. They perceived traditional Buddhism, especially its teaching of karma accumulated in previous lives, as an impediment to economic prosperity and that had made them rather passive and poor. Ashin Nyāna’s teaching is a doctrinal and ethical form of Buddhism emphasizing one life; a reinterpretation of the Buddhist cosmology of heaven and hells as being merely psychological states, and the Four Noble Truths, especially the Eightfold Path, as an everyday practice for laypeople. This secularized form of prosperity Buddhism is the very opposite of the enchanted forms. Another aim of this paper is to provide some precision to the concept of secularized Buddhism.