Lay meditation; State-society relations; Burma; Mass meditation
摘要
All post-Independence Burmese governments have been preoccupied with justifying the legitimacy of their regimes in Buddhist terms. The nation-state building project of Burma's first post-Independence government promoted mass lay meditation with the aim of securing a shared national identity grounded in the Buddhist construction of reality. During the period of military rule beginning in 1962, meditation grew into a mass phenomena that interpenetrated state structures.
In Buddhist historical terms, mass lay meditation is an unprecedented phenomenon in terms of its scale and because meditation was a practice previously reserved to virtuosi practitioners in the monastic order. Today, practitioners of the “Mahasi vipassana” technique alone claim over a million enlightened adherents. I study the meditation center that is at the institutional heart of the mass lay meditation movement and recount how individuals experience an “epistemic reconstruction” of their perception of the objective reality (coming to “see things as they are”) through stages of insight associated with vipassana meditation.
To isolate the dynamic between vipassana meditation and popular understanding of what constitutes the self-evident moral causal conditions for the production of social hierarchy, power and political authority, I concentrate on the infrastructure of the meditation movement: lay and monk meditators, meditation teachers and donation cliques, monks' organizations and lay voluntary committees. Proposing a methodological innovation, I explore how the study of meditation as a phenomenological subject might be used in demonstrating the process by which sources of knowledge are constructed, how they get warranted as the “really real,” and the implications this holds for the politics of legitimation.
I conclude that taken collectively, mass enlightenment constitutes a substrate for shared understandings as to what constitutes a moral citizenry. It simultaneously sets the stage for contestation over state claims for legitimacy, because in the revitalization process itself, classical conditions for political legitimacy have been reasserted. Traditional practices and habits, most particularly donation, have been reinvigorated as repositories of moral validity and hence popularly conceived to causally produce the potent conditions for the embodiment and exercise of power in the phenomenal world.
