In the Zayat Built Before You: Biographies and Belonging of Buddhist Women in Myanmar (1860s-1980s)
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This dissertation is the first study of vernacular biographical writing composed by Buddhist monastic women in Myanmar, known in Burmese as thilashin. In 1979, the thilashin, Sayagyi Daw Zanawati (b.1904), head nun of the Sagaing Hills Khemethaka Nunnery, composed a 150-page biographical volume entitled, Head Teachers of the Sagaing Hills Khemethaka Nunnery. The volume was completed in preparation for the celebration of the 75th anniversary of Khemethaka’s 1904 establishment and published by a Yangon press in 1982. Narrating the lives of her forerunners—Khemethaka’s founder, Daw Medhawati (1862-1932), Medhawati’s trusted friend, administrative partner, and successor, Daw Konmari (1866-1962), and Konmari’s successor Daw Gunawati (b. 1888)—before turning to her own autobiography, Zanawati embeds the story of Khemethaka’s establishment, growth, and maintenance within and between multiple family histories, currents of broader Buddhist institutional change amidst regional Buddhist modernist movements and colonial-era administrative reforms, and the volatile regimes of political power that coincided with and followed Myanmar’s independence. This analysis of late twentieth century biographies of Buddhist women in Myanmar aims for neither the empirical reality of history, nor the emergent realities of ethnography, but for something in between: a study of the stakes of rhetorical self-presentation of Buddhist monastic women in late twentieth century Myanmar.Barred from ordination-based succession and kept aside of male monastic centers of institutional activity, thilashin remain subject to exclusion from the normative terms and spaces of male monastic identity and continuity. To overcome challenges of recognition and institutional legibility, Zanawati and her predecessors crafted their own expressions of Buddhist authority. Across the volume’s four entries, Zanawati mobilizes vernacular idioms of authority, affect, time, and space. This dissertation examines these four concurrent themes in relation to Zanawati’s four entries, tracing the ways that tacit theories of time and space, articulated in the affective register of personal encounters, inform they way women orient themselves, their relationships, and their claims to authority in a broader Buddhist institutional environment.