Possessed for Success: Prosperity Buddhism and the Cult of the Guardians of the Treasure Trove in Upper Burma

Abstract

Following the global spread of capitalism from the early 1990s, individualistic, non-institutionalised prosperity religion and ‘occult economies’ have emerged throughout the world, including South-East Asia, but have seemingly not yet been investigated with respect to Burma/Myanmar. This article focuses on the cult of the guardians of the treasure trove – a form of ‘prosperity Buddhism’ – in Upper Burma, wherein predominantly business women of lower middle classes perform possession dances to become successful in business. It has partly evolved from the lower status ‘traditional’ possession cult of the 37 Lords. The aim of this article is threefold. Firstly, it examines novel kinds of ‘Buddhicised’ possession rituals of higher status that discard religious specialists. These practices represent a democratisation of public spirit-mediumship and provide a route for success in business, agency and empowerment. Secondly, it is demonstrated that these cults seek to preserve Buddhism in the face of the current rapid changes in Burma. Thirdly, this article shows how these novel cults emerged in dynamic interplay with recent economic, social and political changes in Burma, as well as an increasing impact of globalisation.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Erik af Edholm, Per Faxneld, Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, Ferdinando Sardella and Alicia Turner for their helpful criticisms of this article.

Notes

1. I refer to these Buddhist practices as ‘prosperity Buddhism’ because their focus is almost solely on mundane wishes to gain wealth and success in business. For more on the cult of weizzās, see Foxeus 2016a.

2. This article is based on about nine month’s fieldwork in Upper Burma/Myanmar, 2013–2015, mainly in the Mandalay area, but also in Yangon and at Mt Popa. Throughout this period I have interviewed about 500 people attending various cults, but this article is mainly concerned with cults at two pagoda clusters, where I have interviewed around 200 people.

3. The Buddha’s sāsana refers to Buddhism as a social fact in terms of being institutionalised and anchored in society (see Foxeus 2016b).

4. Such possession dances are also performed by ordinary people on certain occasions, such as at privately sponsored ceremonies, the annual celebration of Bho Min Khaung’s ’exit’, and during the birthday celebration of the nagā Mya Nan Nweh at Botataung Pagoda in Yangon.

5. In August, November and December 2014, I accompanied two groups on three occasions on pilgrimages to these two clusters of pagodas. On the first occasion, there were just a few pilgrims in one car, but on the other two occasions, there were about 45 people in three cars, and on the last occasion there were about 30 people in two cars.

6. Pagoda cluster one consists of Kangyīma Pagoda; Paw Taw Mu Pagoda, Aung Buddha Pagoda, Shwe Kyay Si Than Kyā Pagoda, and Kan Kū Gyī Pagoda. Pagoda cluster two consists of Shwe Sā Yan Pagoda, Ka Wun Pagoda (the formal name is Lou-in-pyi-wa-nā-ṭaung-kya-hpayā), Hsu-taung-pyi Nagā-youn Pagoda, and Zāmaṇī Thaik.

7. In this article, ‘P.’ is an abbreviation for Pāli. All foreign words are Burmese, unless otherwise indicated.

8. Nagās (P. nāga), ‘serpent spirits’, and bhīlū/yekkha (P. yakkha) belong to this category. It is often thought that many of these beings have been kings and queens in their former lives and ended up in these treasure troves because of their greed and attachment to their property.

9. The idea of nāga kingdoms ruled by kings and a country named Bhogavatī is derived from Pāli texts, especially Bhuridatta Jātaka. Moreover, nagās are thought to live in the sea, rivers, creeks, on mountains, in the air, and underground. They may assume human shape when they appear in the human world. They are regarded as Buddhists who observe the Buddhist precepts and Buddhist Sabbath days. This Buddhist lore is well-known among Burmese people and appear in popular Buddhist magazines (see Hpou Sun 2013; Than 2015). The most well-known motif of nagās in Burma is the Nagā Mucalinda who sheltered the Buddha shortly after his awakening, as depicted in the many Nagā-youn pagodas throughout Burma.

10. I have interviewed people at the two clusters of pagodas and temples every month from August to January (2013–2015) during four field trips. I tried to select as broadly and unbiased as possible – young, middle-aged and old, poor, those who looked wealthy, and those in-between; those who merely made offerings in the shrine, and those who also became possessed. Many did not have time to be interviewed because they were on a pilgrimage and on their way to leave for the next pagoda. The interviews were therefore rather short – most of them around ten to fifteen minutes, and a few around 30 min. Most of these interviews were structured and consisted of a set of questions. Furthermore, I interviewed some of the pilgrims for a longer time in Mandalay in semi-structured interviews.

11. For more on the illegal Thai lottery in Burma, see Rozenberg 2005.

12. Throughout my fieldwork 2013–2015, I interviewed about 500 people (the two pagoda clusters outside Mandalay, the cult of Bho Min Khaung, and the cult of Mya Nan Nweh in Yangon), and the majority claimed to have thaik-hsek relationship.

13. I have taken the idea of a social imaginary from C. Taylor (2004).

14. The majority of my informants arranged the main figures of the Buddhist field of religion hierarchically as follows: Buddha, Dhamma, Sangha; weizzās, guardians of the treasure trove (thaik), and the 37 Lords. This hierarchy was also attested by Brac de la Perrière’s fieldwork in Lower Burma (2011, 2012b).

15. There are several kinds of ’performance’ theories of ritual, the most well-known of which derive from the ‘metaphor of theatre’ and entertainment, and that is not intended here. What are relevant in the present case are instead performative rituals focused on efficacy, and what they can ’create, effect, or bring about’, and is thereby something through which ‘a type of transformation is achieved’ (Bell 1997, 74–75; Endres 2011).

16. A form of ‘individualism’ has also developed among female mediums of Bho Min Khaung (Patton 2014).

17. I have adopted W. S. Sax’ idea here that agency is the ‘capacity to transform the world.’ Spirits/gods, he explains, serve as real social agents in rituals whereas the humans and others are ascribed agency in a distributed manner (Sax 2006, 479–480). Kirsten Endres and Andrea Lauser refer to this idea as ‘distributed, relational agency’ (Endres and Lauser 2011, 10). Nothing can be accomplished by a single individual.

18. Banknotes are collected from the audience by possessed people and then redistributed by throwing them up in the air, whereupon children run and jump after the blessed banknotes and a joyous, chaotic atmosphere emerges. A similar ritual is performed by spirit-mediums within the cult of the 37 Lords (see Brac de la Perrière 2016).

19. This concept seems to have originated in weizzā cults, and is very common within esoteric congregations and cult groups devoted to weizzās (see Foxeus 2011).

20. The Burmese phrase hmi-khou literally means ‘dependent’, and corresponds to ‘housewife,’ that is, they have no employment and depend on their husbands for their subsistence.

21. Others were seamstresses, staff at restaurants, cafés and hotels, and car dealers; a few were gem or diamond traders, engineers, drivers, employees at companies and beauty salons, and so forth.

22. Raw jade looks like grey stone and must be cracked to find out whether it contains much jade or not.

23. Here he had the possession dances that are performed at Kangyīma and similar places in mind.

24. This is similar to contemporary female mediums of Bho Min Khaung (Patton 2014).

25. The illness was interpreted as a sign that the serpent spirit wanted to remind her of her vow.

26. That means she is sharing the merit with them.

27. Monks can say ma-shi-lou-ma-hlū, ma-hlū-lou-ma-shi, “because you don’t have [anything], you don’t donate. Because you don’t donate, you don’t have [anything].

28. The idea is that the amount of merit is in direct proportion to the degree of disciplinary observance of the monk. This is a common view within Buddhism in South-East Asia, and was also observed by Spiro in the early 1960s (Spiro [1970] 1982).

29. Alternatively, the idea ‘the more you give, the more you have’ in the here and now, and that one’s resources do not reduce by giving, is similar to ‘traditional’ notions of sharing merit - the more merit one shares with others, the more one has (sharing merit is also an act of merit-making). The application of this logic on money may demonstrate how Burmese people understand novel phenomena on the basis of familiar ones.

30. For instance, one preacher of a mega church in the US asked the audience to hold their money high and repeat after him: ‘“Give and it shall be given.” He tells his listeners, “When you give, it qualifies you to receive God’s abundance” and “If you’re not prospering, it’s because you’re not giving”’ (McGuire 2008, 83).

31. Aung Buddha Pagoda was renovated in 1999. The treasure trove temples were built in 2000 and 2002. Only a few pilgrims came back then, and their number has increased since around 2009. Almost all of the donors came from Mandalay.

32. The treasure trove temple at Ka Wun Pagoda was built in 2000; the one at the Nagā-youn Pagoda in Moundaw in 2012, and an adjacent cave was built in 2009. The temple at Zāmaṇī Thaik was constructed in 2008.

33. In the early 1960s, one of Spiro’s informant’s in Mandalay said that all the rich people believe in nats (Spiro [1967] 1996, 60).

34. A consumer culture originally emerged in the capitalist British colonial period (Ikeya 2012, 118–119).

35. However, some of those I interviewed came back to the temples because their appetite for more success had been whetted, since they perceived that the guardians of the treasure trove had been generous to them. Some wealthy women did not make wishes for prosperity because they were already wealthy.