Towards the Royal Noble Flower: Myanmar Buddhist Nuns' Educational Practices and Rituals in Training

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on the Buddhist nuns at the Kyaiklat Chaung nunnery, their experiences of education and monastic training, and their spaces of choice or convenience that help mediate these practices. By allowing the spatial aspects of one nunnery to organize my investigation, I am able to move through each building, encountering nuns at different life stages and with various aspirations, creating a much more complex picture than if I had used what might be called an “ideal” renunciant with a linear and straightforward educational path. More specifically, this approach enables me to touch on themes of secular vs. monastic education, child nuns vs. older ones, disability and minority status, reformed nunneries vs. old institutions, and lineages, among other matters. While examining Kyaiklat Chaung, I also look at the connections this nunnery has to two seminary type of nunneries, Ayemyo Chaung and Sakyadhita Sathindaik, and monasteries in the area. I detail the nuns’ syllabi for the government pathama-pyan and dhammacariya exams and the rituals that occurred during the transmission process in the classroom. I fill in the gaps in literature on how the nuns themselves view these exams and how and what they study. The texts in the classroom include not only the mūla texts of the Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha, the Mātikā, the Paṭṭhāna, the Dhammapada, and the Pārājikakaṇḍa but their associated commentaries and support texts needed for the exams. As I look at the formal education, I also pay attention to the informal “action-oriented” pedagogies that help shape the thilashin (Myanmar Buddhist nun). I find the “interlocking relationships” and the concept of kyezusat, or the “returning of gratitude” that occurs between teacher and disciple, and between monastic relatives, important in the thilashin’s overall success. The strategies that allow these interlocking relationships to be formed and to persist help overcome the potential fragmentation of thilashin’s trajectories, offering them opportunities to shape cohesive career paths and to be recognized as successful nuns.