Episode #218: Dhamma at a Crossroads
“Without the Burmese tradition, there would be no ‘me’ here teaching the Dhamma,” explains Beth Upton, “and it's easy to lose sight of that.”
After an extended time practicing as a Buddhist nun in Burma, Beth started a teaching career in the West, which she discussed in a previous interview— which also happens to be the fourth most listened-to interview in the history of our platform). As some of her students suggested she might address the ongoing conflict in Myanmar, Beth reached out to Insight Myanmar to renew the conversation.
“Burma isn't the only country in the world that is holding a depth of Dhamma, but it's definitely one of the main ones,” she points out, noting just how many teachers in the West come from Burmese traditions or learned under Burmese teachers. “It's easy to lose sight of what of wealth we have there, and how desperately we need to protect it,” she adds. As meditators are now advised to avoid visiting Burma as this conflict plays out, Beth describes how, with the Golden Land all but closed off, “we lose that diversity and complexity and richness and layering of the Buddhist teachings that we find in a culture that's been carrying it for years.”
While agreeing that it’s natural for spiritual teachings to be transformed as they are carried across time, geography, and culture, Beth stresses that there is depth of understanding in Burma that is difficult to find elsewhere. For example, she describes how it can be challenging to understand the suttas “through our own modern day cultural lens, our own new interpretation of what that sutta means,” and so that is where the commentaries are so helpful in digging deeper into its intended meaning. In Burma, where regular study of ancient commentaries is common across society, there are many resources for Beth can seek out answers. “If I want to find out what this one line of the Paṭṭhāna is referring to, I want to go to Burma. Where do I go if I can't go there? Where do I go? In Myanmar, even in the tiniest little village, you can wake up in the morning to hear the whole of the Paṭṭhāna any day!” Looking ahead, Beth sadly notes how this isn’t only a short-term loss of not having a particular question clarified, but potentially a generational loss; it is an entire community of teachers in the West not being able to refine and improve their spiritual guidance. “It’s a huge loss of incredibly powerful wisdom, held in that deep refined scholastic knowledge and practicing knowledge [of Burma.]”
For her, this points to how the benefits that a meditator accrues from spending time in Burma transcends the experience found on silent retreats alone. “When you live in that culture, you are immersed in its richness, and it shows up in little ways, in all aspects of life. That can't be encapsulated in a meditation technique,” she says. “A meditation technique is great to have, but it's a very small part of the teachings of the Buddha! And if that's all that we've taken, just the meditation technique, then there's very much that we miss.”
Similarly, Beth is concerned that stripping the Buddha’s teachings down to a single meditation technique removes the “relational aspect” of the path that is critical for any real spiritual development. “It mirrors back to us things that we don't see in ourselves when we're just alone with our little meditation technique, because to us, those defilements have been normalized in our experience of ourselves,” she explains. Noting how the generosity, warmth, humility, and sense of community that she found in Burmese Buddhist practitioners has been quite hard to replicate in the West, a practitioner visiting the Golden Land is able to more easily see where further growth is needed when experiencing these qualities in others.
Speaking on the growth of practice around the world, Beth notices that terms like karma, vipassana, jhāna, and others have become increasingly popular. However, what hasn’t become as well-known is kusala (kuthol in Burmese), meaning a skillful, wholesome action which brings joy to the mind. “Whoever you meet in Myanmar, the shop owner or the local drunk, they all know this word! They all know what is kusala, [which is] just so much more rich and so much more broad than a meditation technique. It's the wholesome way in which we engage with the whole of life.” And so, losing access to this Burmese Buddhist culture leaves a missing piece of the practice unfulfilled.
This naturally leads one to wonder about what a foreign practitioner who has benefited from these Burmese teachings might do in response to the present situation there. For Beth, it all starts with an open heart. She then echoes the words of a previous guest, Whit Hornsberger, who affirmed that one’s practice must extend beyond oneself to truly be effective. “If we don't reciprocate, then we lose something in ourselves,” Beth says. “We lose some authenticity or alignment in ourselves, on some level, and we know something is out of balance there. Whether you've directly spent time in Myanmar or not, if you are a dedicated practitioner of the Dhamma, then part of that has come from the Burmese tradition, and the dedication of the of Burmese practitioners over hundreds of years. So when we receive that gift, and we don't repay it when reciprocity is needed, we are not fully congruent in ourselves.”
Still, the question as to what to do and how to do it is not so easy to answer. On one hand, Beth points out the danger of over-politicizing the Dhamma, noting that the Buddha’s teachings were not intended to “fix” the problems of the world, but rather to guide the practitioner in coming out of one’s own suffering. “But there's also the way in which we can take that messaging to the other extreme, where you hear meditators saying, ‘Okay, I'll just do my silent retreat, and that's what I do. I don't want to be involved, that's just externalizing, I can't do anything about that.’ This is also a mistake.” In other words, while some Western yogis define “spiritual qualities” strictly as those meditative skills developed in silence on the cushion, Beth points back to the Burmese example, which also refers to acts of service and generosity; e.g. the relational side.
In closing, Beth says, “This has been felt by anybody who has gone to practice in Myanmar for a stretch of time long enough to immerse themselves in the culture, so that we feel these teachings like faith, humility, generosity, sīla, so deeply embedded in the culture in a way that we can't carry away with us, like a meditation technique.”