Exposing Enlightenment: The 'Living Arahant' in Photography and Print in Post-colonial Burma

 

 

 

The saint, prophet, liberated guru, or enlightened being occupies a powerful place not only in their respective religious spheres, but in the social lives of the cultures that create and maintain them. Yet how are these social categories “created” and through what means are their parameters delimited over the last century and a half as technologies of mass comminication have transformed the epistemology of discourse?

 

To approach these questions, this paper focuses on the “living arahants” of early twentieth-century Burma, examining how the narratives surrounding this supposedly enlightened class are negotiated and contested in the public sphere through the mediums of photography and print. By exploring the figure of the Mingun Jetavana Sayadaw (1868-1955), a Burmese scholar-monk and pioneer of insight, or vipassanā meditation, it is argued that the application of these categories is not just a religious act, but profoundly political—determining who wields the power of definition itself.   

 

BIO:

Tony Scott is a PhD Candidate at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, working under Professor Christoph Emmrich. His research focuses on the relationship between Pali commentary, insight (vipassanā) meditation, and Buddhist statecraft in twentieth-century Burma/Myanmar. Tony’s dissertation centres on the Milindapañha-aṭṭhakathā (Commentary on the Questions of King Milinda) of the Mingun Jetavan Sayadaw (1868-1954), a rare example of a modern Buddhist commentary (aṭṭhakathā) that caused controversy amongst the highest levels of the Burmese monastic community (saṅgha) and first independence government.

 

As a 2018-2019 Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellow in Buddhist Studies, Tony spent the year working in Myanmar, Tokyo and Hong Kong, and as a 2019-2020 Bukkyō Dendō Kyokai Foreign Scholar Fellow, he will finish his dissertation at the University of Tokyo under Professors Norihisa Baba and Ryosuke Kuramoto.