Campaigning Monks

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/streetlevel/2009/monks/
By Kate Branch

Outside their dingy brick building, nine Burmese monks huddled around the latest underground update from their brother monks back in Burma. Four hundred monks unaccounted for, the fax said. Two hundred more in prison.

Since the failure of the September 2007 uprising in Burma they helped lead, New York City has become a central place of refuge for Burmese monk-activists, many on the run for their lives.

This office-cum-monastery in Elmhurst, Queens, has been fashioned into the unlikely international headquarters of the monks’ resistance movement. It’s a nexus of prayer, to embody dharma, the Buddha’s tradition of loving kindness and compassion; solace and refuge for displaced monks; and a center of international advocacy for political and social freedom in Burma. The country, renamed Myanmar by its military rulers, has been controlled by military governments since 1962, when a coup toppled the civilian government. None of the periodic protests to demand opening and democracy has had much success.

The monks in America quietly considered the latest report. Their bodies were wrapped in red-orange robes of different shades, twisting from front to back, starting at their ankles and finishing over their left shoulders. At home, traditional Burmese monastic life has been nearly obliterated, they told me. Whether or not they’d ever been in jail, monks in Burma are now afraid to wear their robes. The government has managed to strip away their identities.

“Only here can we keep our traditions alive,” said Ashin Nayaka, a visiting religion professor at Columbia University who was serving as the group’s translator.

The Elmhurst monks are an elite group. The spiritual director, Venerable U Pannya Vamsa, 83, is Burma’s leading expatriate monk dissident. He came to the United States 30 years ago, and built this country’s first Burmese Buddhist temple, in Los Angeles. Opposite him was former political prisoner U Aggadhamma, who survived five years of daily torture. U Kovida – away in California to promote democracy for Burma — was a leader of the September 2007 uprising, the so-called Saffron Revolution.

At 26, U Kovida, from the rice growing land of both Buddhism and Islam, on Burma’s western coast bordering Bangladesh, is youngest of this group of refugee monks, and also considered the most “liberal.” He became a monk at age 12. In 2007, when skyrocketing fuel prices sparked protests, and democracy activists, monks and ordinary people began to take to streets to protest decades of repressive rule, the authorities raided Kovida’s monastery. So Kovida set off for Yangon, the former capital, to join the demonstrations.

“I don’t like to just pray,” he said. “Because it won’t do anything. If you want to be free, breathe, you have to fight.”

In Yangon, 2,000 protesters and 500 monks sat on the tiled floor of 152 foot-high golden domed Sule Pagoda. U Kovida called on 10 fellow monks to help him lead a march, and 15 came forward. They led columns of demonstrators down the streets.

Their leadership was soon felt: around the city, other groups of monks began to organize marches. Led by as many as 50,000 monks, the demonstrators grew to some 150,000 in number, Human Rights Watch reported at the time.
The government soon began a violent crackdown. “The police pulled off the monks’ robes and beat them,” U Kovida remembered.

Kovida dyed his newly-budding hair blond, stripped off his saffron robes and climbed over a brick wall. Carrying a false identification card and wearing a crucifix around his neck, he made his way toward the Thai border. For two weeks he hid in a tiny abandoned wooden hut in a small village 40 miles outside of Yangon. There was no running water, and little food. He was afraid to make any noise. Finally he left, running out barefoot in the middle of the night, diving into bushes and ditches whenever a car passed. By the time the October 18 edition of “The New Light of Myanmar” had falsely accused him of hiding “48 yellowish high-explosive TNT cartridges” in his monastery, Kovida was already in Thailand. He soon applied for asylum in the United States.

Stories of the Generation of ‘88

About 50,000 Burmese live in the United States, 2,000 of them in Elmhurst, a downtrodden neighborhood full of middle and working class immigrant families. Some Burmese here are families with children, looking for education; others are adults looking for work. But many are refugees, who simply don’t look back. And the monks who live in Elmhurst say they have no intention of returning soon.

The Elmurst Burmese community began forming after the last big spurt of anti-junta protests, in 1988, and the cancelation of a 1990 parliamentary election won by the party of democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest. U Aggadhamma, an activist of the Generation of ’88, has a story to tell from that time.

The barefoot monks filed inside, to their acetic main room, with its single couch and big oriental rug. They pulled their white folding chairs into a circle and prepared to talk.

U Aggadhamma sat very still, lips pursed, looking nervous at the prospect of sharing his story. He hesitated, looking around the circle of his fellow monks. Spiritual Director U Pannya Vamsa nodded in encouragement, and said, in a low, hypnotically calm om of a voice: “She wants the truth.”

Shortly after the ’88 protests, U Aggadhamma said, he was sentenced to five years in jail. His crime was refusing alms from government officials—a thousand-year-old tradition specifying that monks may refuse aid from those they want to rebuke for breaking Buddha’s laws.

In prison, Aggadhamma was stripped naked, and forced to lie on the cold cement floor of the cell. His jailers tortured and beat him when he would not answer their questions. After five years, “I completed my suffering,” he said, and was released. He resumed wearing his saffron robe, and agitating against the regime, though he likely would have been punished had he been caught. Then in 2000, he won the green card lottery, and with it the right to live in the United States.

“He was a lucky monk,” U Nayaka, his translator, teased.

U Aggadhamma didn’t smile. He gazed at the wall, an absent look in his eyes. His chair was closest to a string of lights hanging over a 35-pound white pearl statue of Buddha carried from India, displayed on a shelf of the faux-wood bookcase. For a moment, the flashes of green, red, and yellow lights seemed to make his orange-red robe shine the brightest.

Most of the monks live in monasteries, but the organization keeps a small staff a headquarters. Every morning at 5, they rise and pray to the white pearl Buddha in a corner. “We don’t pray to the statue, but see it and our mind goes to Buddha,” explained U Khemissara, a youthful monk nicknamed “The Monk Star.” He got this nickname because, before he became a monk, he was the hottest rock musician in Burmese Elmhurst.

“Hard rock,” he specified.

U Khemissara came to New York at 17, and attended Cardozo High School in Bayside, one of New York City’s best public high schools. He became lead guitarist of Mahura (Black Stone), which performed for the Burmese community. The group’s most popular song was “Breaking the Law.” But in 2006 he found a new calling: he returned to Burma, and joined the monkhood.

“The junta tried to make it seem like I came to Burma to cause trouble and stir the people,” he said shaking his head.
By the time he’d returned to New York in May 2007, he’d shaved off his shoulder-length rocker hair. But he is still a kind of lead vocal, with a hard voice. He organized and led the protest in front of the Burmese consulate in New York in September 2007, urging compassion for the monks, nuns, and people he’d left behind in Burma three months before. He roared on behalf of those suffering from poverty, hunger and health problems.

“They have no voice,” U Pannya Vamsa said in a choked outburst. “They have no voice.”

Though Elmurst is wracked by recession, the monks have no wants. As in Burma, they rely on the local community for food, and their monastery for shelter. Their people offer them new robes each year, in the traditional Kathina ceremony, as a sign of respect and appreciation for the monks’ work. Now such traditions can only be practiced outside Burma, the monks said sadly.

I was allowed to attend the Elmhurst Kathina ceremony this year.

“Spicy or ordinary?” asked Kyaw Ray Zhan, a Burmese student on hand for the ceremony. He handed me a dish of noodles, with sliced white fish, fried beans and purple onions and greens, and bowl of fish soup. For dessert, Ray served five assortments of gel-like desserts that jiggled when they moved. That made him laugh.

Ray, 30, came from the same region as U Kovida, rural Rakhine. His choppy black hair and long black eyelashes stuck straight out. His teeth bent in, and broke through his wide smile. Before he and others marched all day and night in other anti-junta student demonstrations of 1996, he’d been studying technology. But in 1996, the schools were shut down. The police kicked and dragged him, and beat him on the thighs. With others he was piled into the cars headed for a military camp, and interrogation. “You couldn’t turn your head,” he said. “People died in those cars.”

He arrived in Elmhurst in 1999. Now works on the monks’ website, and studies computer science at the City University of New York. “I wanted to leave because I would have most likely gone to jail,” he said. “Or died.”

With no sign of loosening of the repression at home, the Burmese refugee community in Emhurst keeps growing. Forty new émigrés recently arrived.

Mornings, Burmese expatriates bring the monks food, and either water or traditional Thai iced tea, a green sugary juice with a hint of lemon taste. Because the United States is rich in opportunity, the monks said, the Burmese expatriates can work and make donations.

They spend most of the morning meditating, and offering spiritual guidance to their donors. They teach Buddhist lessons, and pray and chant to the Buddha five to seven times a day.

After noon, they don’t eat solid food. They devote their minds and bodies to the Buddha; sit with visitors, and work to raise awareness about the tragedy of Burma.

Many also spend time researching, studying, and reading. In Burma, there are American libraries available to those who can pay for $15 membership fee. “Most cannot,” Ray said.

Before leaving for California, U Kovida, took ESL classes, and spent much of his free time at the Elmhurst public library, reading books, such as “Gandhi, Che Guevara, many biographies,” Ray said.

One Friday, walking home from English class, Kovida stopped to talk to a homeless man.

“[He] was sitting on the ground, looking as if he was paying homage. He was a drinker,” Kovida said. “I really, really, have peace for him, so I speak a little bit to him. I know that many people are looking at me. But we all need the peace, the kindness, the love, even if he is drinking, drug, homeless.” A new understanding of the universal need for compassion flooded over him. “I realized [this] because of him.”

The monks are dogged political activists. While car radios blast at stoplights and yellow cab drivers honk and streetwalkers snarl as they pass the brick office, they campaign for U.S. and international backing for their cause, via peaceful demonstrations and words of loving-kindness.

“Our enemy is our country,” said U Nayaka. “And if American people help us…”

“If international people help us,” interrupted U Pannya Vamsa, shooing away the statement as if it had been buzzing in his ears for years. The monks want the U.N. Security Council to support an arms embargo against Burma, but need to convince China, India and Russia to back that initiative. The European Union and the United States have already called on the Security Council to do so, and have also urged the Burmese government to release all political prisoners (a leading opposition group puts the number of political prisoners at 2,100). Each letter the monks write closes with the phrase: “In Peaceful Happiness.”

As they put it in a December 2008 letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon: Ours is a “simple quest for human rights, democracy, and a decent life not lived in constant fear and deprivation.”

Today, the monks place their hope in President Barack Obama. As they said in their November congratulatory letter to the then president-elect, “We hope that your message of change will ripple out to our country.” They’re waiting to see.

By Kate Branch
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/streetlevel/2009/monks/