Dirt and difficulty: Life as the wife of a Buddhist monk

For both writers and Zen Buddhists, paying attention is important. It stands to reason, then, that Tracy Franz’s recently published memoir, “My Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk’s Wife in Japan,” is full of carefully observed detail — a praying mantis tucked into a corner, the rice-grain-length stitches on a monk’s garments, an urn containing the bones of a beloved cat.

Franz, 44, says that she has been deeply observant since her childhood in Alaska, where she was frequently alone and outdoors. “I spent a lot of time with my mind,” she recalls, “wandering in the wilderness.”

Her parents divorced when she was a child, and her mother remarried — and divorced — three times. One stepfather, Fred, was particularly cruel. Franz’s first marriage ended in divorce as well. She writes, “I was terrified that I’d somehow married a younger version of one of my stepfathers — or a composite of all three of them — and that this was in fact a pattern with me, my only way to understand love, and that I would do it again and again until it destroyed me.”

Solo mission: After following her husband-to-be to Japan
when he became a Buddhist monk, author Tracy Franz
developed her own connection to the country.
| COURTESY OF TRACY FRANZ

She met Garrett, who now goes by his ordained name Koun, while studying fiction writing in the master of fine arts program at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, Washington. Although only close friends at first, when he left for Japan to figure out how to enter a monastery, she shaved his head for him and decided to follow him there.

After two years in Japan, they went back to the United States to marry. But, after just 10 months in Seattle, they returned to Japan. In 2004, Koun entered a 600-year-old Soto Zen temple in Takamori, Kumamoto Prefecture, for a year. While he was cloistered, Franz taught English at Shokei Gakuin University, and took up pottery-making, karate and meditation. She also wrote. “I wanted to create a thing from it,” she says of her year alone.

“My Year of Dirt and Water” is that thing, recounting friendships with other women in her pottery class, failures and small victories at the pottery wheel, changes in weather and exchanges with her students. In one delightful episode, she struggles to make herself heard over the croaking of frogs while teaching an English class.

The memoir is arranged as a diary, divided by seasons, with each entry dated. These vignettes are carefully crafted from “prose, lists of things and email exchanges,” often ending in koan-like phrases. At one point, during a conversation with her Alaskan meditation partner, Loren, Franz says, “‘I feel like I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing — being confused. That’s my day-to-day experience in Japan. I never completely understand everything.’ ‘Well — that’s Buddhism!’ laughs Loren.”

Three's company: Tracy Franz (left) with her child and husband. |
 COURTESY OF TRACY FRANZ

There is darkness as well. When a crying student reveals that she was molested, Franz recalls her own experience of being attacked, and of having seen a man thrown out of a moving car by gangsters. Meanwhile, she receives a postcard from Koun describing a drunken fistfight between monks over the nature of enlightenment.

Franz also relates brief visits to her husband, during which she is allowed to cook with — but not kiss — him, and the loneliness she feels at their separation. In addition, she writes about two trips back to the States during that year, where she deals with health issues in her and Koun’s families and confronts childhood traumas. What emerges is a discreet love story, but also an account of a woman discovering her own inner strength while living in Japan.

Franz began putting the book together in 2006, but her progress was interrupted by the couple’s move back to Alaska, and later, by motherhood. In 2010, after the birth of their son, they returned to Kumamoto, where Franz taught at Sojo University while her husband assisted his teacher at the monastery where he had studied in Takamori. And then, in 2013, they relocated to Canada.

Now married for 17 years, Tracy and Koun have two children, ages 7 and 9.

They currently live in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Koun leads a Buddhist community and works as an editor of the magazine Buddhadharma. As the wife of a Zen Buddhist monk in Canada, Franz says, with a laugh, that she has “no duties.” She reports that she is not presently doing pottery or karate, which have been made difficult by motherhood, but she does continue to meditate. She is working on a novel and teaching English for academic purposes at Dalhousie University.

Although she initially came to Japan because of Koun, she eventually developed her own relationship with the country. “Living in Japan is hard for a foreigner, but fascinating,” she says. “It’s more difficult in Japan than in Canada, but I loved it. I love the people and I miss the food.” The constant trials that she endured in Japan are missing from her life in Canada, but she says that she really enjoyed them. “Even if I had a bad day, it was interesting — wonderful and very, very interesting.” The same can be said of her book.

(Source: JT)

The art of self-preservation: Monks spent years turning themselves into mummies

Perched cross-legged on an altar in one corner of Churenji Temple, cupped palms facing upward, the monk Tetsumonkai is set up for perpetual meditation — just as he intended as he lay dying nearly two centuries ago.

The skeletal figure draped in clerical robes is one of eight self-mummified monks — sokushinbutsu — found in the northeastern prefecture of Yamagata, among 18 thought to exist in Japan as a whole.

Several of these emaciated remains of zealots who endured extreme fasting to attain Buddha-hood are enshrined in old Shingon Buddhist temples sitting in the shadows of sacred Mount Yudono.

Shinnyokai | COURTESTY OF RYUSUIJI DAINICHIBO

They represent a unique tradition associated with the area’s practitioners of Shugendo, an old ascetic religion combining aspects of mountain worship with Shintoism and esoteric Buddhism, in which practitioners (shugenja, which are sometimes called yamabushi), submitted to harsh training in the hope of achieving enlightenment and supernatural powers.

I first heard of these parched saints decades ago as a child visiting Tsuruoka, my mother’s hometown, during summer holidays. To a kid who thought mummies were bandaged, undead monsters in horror flicks, or dried-up Egyptian pharaohs exhibited in museums, it seemed peculiar that adults talked about them as if they were respected, kind uncles — local elders overseeing the well-being of their communities.

I had forgotten about these venerated mummies until August, when I read that a previously out-of-print 1996 book by Masashi Hijikata, “Nihon no Miira Botoke o Tazunete” (“In Search of Japan’s Mummified Buddhas”), had been republished. I bought a copy and discovered that Tsuruoka was a mecca for monks who would mummify themselves.

Shinnyokai is enshrined at Ryusuiji Dainichibo Temple in Yamagata Prefecture. | ALEX MARTIN

I already had plans to visit Tsuruoka in September to attend the third-year memorial service for my late grandmother. My trip gave me an opportunity to explore those curious sages from centuries past, whose bodies were immortalized as testament to the religious zeal that drove some to physical extremes that are perhaps beyond comprehension in today’s increasingly secular society.

According to Hijikata,”while methods vary, the practice of mummifying respected priests as a form of worship is relatively common in East Asia and can be found in the Korean Peninsula, China, Taiwan, Vietnam and Nepal, not to mention Tibet, where monks were embalmed and preserved after their passing.”

Hijikata heads the Sendai-based publisher Araemishi. He spent four years traveling across Japan researching his book, offering an intriguing look into the history and folklore surrounding the self-mummified Buddhas through anecdotes he collected from priests, followers and other locals. I spoke to him in Tokyo ahead of my trip to Yamagata.

He explained how the custom likely traced back to the first millennium, with early examples found in “Song Gaoseng Zhuan,” biographies of eminent monks compiled during China’s Song Dynasty (960-1279).

Hijikata said one story describes a monk who settled on Mount Jiuhua (in what’s now Anhui province), one of the four sacred mountains in Chinese Buddhism. The monk subsisted on minimal food while dwelling inside a stone chamber, which became his tomb when he died at the age of 99. Three years later, his disciples opened the chamber to find their master mummified in lotus position. They hoisted out and enshrined his body.

In Japan, the unusual phenomenon centered on Mount Yudono, which is grouped together with two other mountains, Mount Haguro and Mount Gassan, to form the Dewa Sanzan mountains.

While Mount Haguro came to be affiliated with the Tendai sect of Buddhism, temples that worshipped Mount Yudono belonged to the Shingon school of Buddhism founded by Kukai (774-835), a Heian Period (794-1185) monk and monumental figure in Japanese Buddhism, whom local legend credits with establishing Mount Yudono as a site for ascetic practice.

Author Masashi Hijikata spent four years traveling across Japan collecting anecdotes on self-mummified monks. | ALEX MARTIN

Hijikata said that during the Edo Period (1603-1868), Dewa, the area that now comprises Yamagata and Akita prefectures, was a spiritual center that rivaled Shikoku’s 88-temple pilgrimage and Mount Koya, the giant temple settlement in Wakayama Prefecture founded by Kukai.

“That also meant a lot of money poured into Dewa, leading to a rivalry between the Shingon and Tendai sects over control of the sacred mountains,” Hijikata said. “The competition over orthodoxy intensified to the point where Mount Yudono’s Shingon followers began adopting radical interpretations of Kukai’s teachings.”

To get a better understanding, I contacted Eric Swanson, an old college friend who studied esoteric Buddhism at Koyasan University for his master’s degree and who is now a doctoral candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard.

“Although one could argue that the doctrinal basis of sokushinbutsu is based on Kukai’s sokushinjobutsu, there are major differences between the two,” Swanson said, explaining that in this case the character “jo,” meaning “to become,” is significant.

By relying on the ritual practices of the Buddhist tradition that Kukai transmitted to Japan from China, Kukai asserted that a Buddhist practitioner could attain full enlightenment in a single lifetime.

“What is important here is the claim that the potential for this enlightenment is achieved ‘within one’s lifetime,’ and never once did Kukai suggest in his writings that the goal was to transform one’s corpse into an object of veneration after death, as seen in the phenomenon of sokushinbutsu,” Swanson said.

Then why did this happen? Key to understanding the practice, according to Swanson, is how Kukai was memorialized through legends that were created after his death. These claimed that he “entered into a state of contemplation,” or nyujo, at the end of his life on Mount Koya — suggesting that he never died but was in a state of perpetual meditation.

“The lore that surrounded Kukai’s death and his postmortem transformation into a compassionate, salvific figure captured the imagination of religious practitioners throughout the medieval period and could be seen at the basis of the development of the sokushinbutsu phenomenon,” Swanson said.

In honor of Kukai, the names given to sokushinbutsu of the Mount Yudono lineage all end with “kai,” the Chinese character for ocean.

The practice, however, was outlawed with the Meiji Restoration, when Shinto was separated from Buddhism and declared the official religion of Japan. Dewa Sanzan also moved toward becoming Shinto, and many mummies are thought to have been lost in the ensuing destruction of Buddhist property.

In the 1960s, the remains were cast into the spotlight when a group of academics and scientists led by the late Waseda University professor Kosei Ando began unraveling the mystique surrounding the mummified icons in northern Japan through anatomical and anthropological research. The researchers discovered that many of the mummies were artificially treated for better preservation, although there were no signs of the brain and viscera being removed in most cases. The corpses had been extensively damaged by rats and flies and appeared to have been posthumously smoke-dried.

“The investigation triggered a mummy boom in the 1960s and ’70s that saw television shows and books and magazines featuring the subject, ranging from serious academic studies to those aimed at children’s entertainment,” Hijikata said. The trend would soon die down, however, and by the time Hijikata began reporting for his book in the early ’90s, there was virtually no new literature on the topic.

Now interest in these mysterious monks appears to be making another comeback, thanks to an NHK documentary on sokushinbutsu that ran in 2015 and Haruki Murakami’s 2017 novel, “Killing Commendatore,” which draws on the legend of mummified priests of Dewa as a major plot device.

Ryusuiji Dainichibo Temple lies at the foot of Mount Yudono, which is around 30 minutes by car from Tsuruoka Station. | ALEX MARTIN

With these things in mind, I headed up to Tsuruoka to see the “living Buddhas” myself.

Ryusuiji Dainichibo Temple, or simply Dainichibo, lies at the foot of Mount Yudono, around 30 minutes by car from Tsuruoka Station. It may be one of the more tourist-friendly of the temples that enshrine sokushinbutsu. A steady stream of visitors can be seen entering the temple gates — a beautifully weathered wooden structure established during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333) — to pay respects to Shinnyokai, the temple’s resident sokushinbutsu.

“Going to see mummies was a fairly common family event when I was a child,” recalled Nobuhiko Takayama, my cousin and a life-long Tsuruoka resident, who agreed to drive me around temples housing sokushinbutsu. “Come to think of it, though, it’s sort of a strange choice for a family outing.”

Indeed, it’s a bizarre sensation to sit in front of a withered corpse that departed this world hundreds of years ago.

Shinnyokai, born in 1687 as the oldest son of a farming family in Tsuruoka, is said to have chosen to become a sokushinbutsu as a form of self-sacrifice to end the suffering caused by a major famine at the time. He passed away in 1783 at the age of 96.

Yugaku Endo, the chief priest of Ryusuiji Dainichibo Temple, poses alongside Shinnyokai. | ALEX MARTIN

Yugaku Endo, the chief priest of Dainichibo and 95th in his line, said that when Shinnyokai was 20, he accidentally spilled night soil, or human excrement collected to be used as fertilizer, on three passing samurai. Enraged, the samurai attacked Shinnyokai, but in the ensuing frenzy Shinnyokai somehow managed to kill all of them. Appalled at what he had done, he sought sanctuary at Dainichibo, or so the story goes.

“Shinnyokai is said to have been a large man,” Endo said. “Even so, could an unarmed commoner kill three samurai on his own?

“Locals, however, recount a different episode. They say he was moving logs on a sled one winter when three children asked for a ride. Being a kind man, he obliged, but one of the children fell off the sled and was killed. Shinnyokai decided to live the life of a monk in atonement for what happened.”

Like others who became sokushinbutsu, Shinnyokai chose the path of an issei gyonin, or one who dedicates his life to ascetic practices. This mainly involved two types of austerities: mountain confinement, called sanro, and tree-eating austerities, mokujiki-gyo.

Ascetics would spend 1,000-day intervals in Mount Yudono’s Senninzawa (Swamp of Immortals), performing cold-water ablutions and visiting the Yudono Shrine as part of their rigorous training regimen. Many would not survive the freezing winters, when the area would be covered with heavy snow. Those who perished were honored with stone tablets commemorating their challenge.

Straw sandals are tied to the gates leading to Ryusuiji Dainichibo Temple. | ALEX MARTIN

To begin preparations for self-mummification, the ascetics would adopt a strict diet requiring them to abstain from eating the “five cereals” of rice, barley, wheat, soybeans and adzuki beans (this combination could vary), followed by another set of five plants, typically corn, Japanese millet, foxtail millet, buckwheat and potatoes. Practitioners instead would forage in the mountains for nuts, roots and seeds — a process Endo said was aimed at reducing body fat and muscle.

To inhibit the growth of bacteria, Endo said Shinnyokai is believed to have drunk the toxic sap of urushi, the Chinese lacquer tree related to poison sumac. And to prevent decomposition, he consumed nothing but salt water for over 40 days, emptying the body of any food.

Finally, the ascetic would perform dochu nyujo, or entering deep meditation in the ground.

“A pit 3 meters deep and around 4½ tatami mats wide was dug, and its walls were ensconced with stone,” Endo said. “A wooden coffin would be assembled for the ascetic to enter, which would then be lowered into the chamber. Empty space would be filled with charcoal to remove humidity.”

Once the pit was secured shut, two bamboo tubes would be inserted to funnel down drinking water and act as air vents. Bells would be attached on both ends of one of the tubes, a device used by the ascetic to signal that he was still alive. Once the ringing stopped for good, Endo said, the bamboo tubes would be pulled out to seal the pit. For the next three years and three months, the corpse would be left in the underground cell. On the final day, the body would be unearthed — an instant Buddha if all had gone well.

Tetsuryukai, as seen in a pamphlet available at Nangakuji Temple. | COURTESY OF NANGAKUJI TEMPLE

Of course, success was not guaranteed, and many corpses decomposed during the process. There are also said to be numerous burial mounds of sokushinbutsu yet to be excavated after the practice was banned during the Meiji Era.

Endo said Dainichibo used to enshrine three sokushinbutsu but two were lost to fire when the original temple burned down in 1875, seven years after the Meiji Restoration. Now Shinnyokai sits alone in a glass case, except when he is taken out for a redressing ceremony held every six years.

Sokushinbutsu offer a trove of interesting backstories. Honmyokai entered the ground in 1683 to become the oldest mummy in the Shonai region. He was believed to be a samurai who decided to devote himself to a life of an ascetic after praying at the Swamp of Immortals for the recovery of his master, Lord Sakai, the daimyo of Tsuruoka, who was suffering from an illness.

Komyokai, who is said to have been an excellent hunter with perfect aim before entering the priesthood, was discovered in 1978, 124 years after his death. The excavation that took place in the town of Shirataka in Yamagata Prefecture stirred people’s imagination and was widely publicized at the time.

But in terms of the number of colorful episodes and meritorious deeds recorded, no one surpasses Tetsumonkai, whom Hijikata calls the “superstar” of all sokushinbutsu. Born Sunada Tetsu in 1759, he was a river worker who dug wells and floated lumber, and was known for his stormy temperament. According to one account, he killed two samurai after finding them intoxicated on duty and confronting them for negligence. Another account describes him killing a samurai during a fight over a favorite prostitute.

Churenji Temple sits in the shadows of sacred Mount Yudono in Yamagata Prefecture. | ALEX MARTIN

Churenji, the temple where Tetsumonkai is enshrined, gives a somewhat milder account, saying he was angered by the arrogance of an official in charge of river construction and pierced the man’s leg with a fire hook and dragged him around. In any case, Tetsu fled to escape his pursuers and joined the seminary at Churenji in his 20s, where he was given his priestly name.

Records indicate Tetsumonkai was a widely traveled and respected holy man with numerous legends to his name. Once when he was visiting Edo, he witnessed the outbreak of an eye disease that caused great suffering. He proceeded to gorge his left eye out and offered it to the Sumida River in prayer for a cure. Later research found that his left eye is indeed missing, going some way to authenticating the story.

Komei Sato, the head priest of Churenji, has been working to unearth traces of Tetsumonkai through stone monuments commemorating his deeds. Nearly 200 of them have been discovered so far, he said. “There are probably more out there.”

Tetsumonkai’s missionary work centered on the Shonai region, but the monuments show it extended from the Kanto region up through Hokkaido. He is remembered for gathering 10,000 volunteer workers to build a new road through a mountain connecting Kamo Port to Tsuruoka, facilitating trade.

Sato said there are festivals that continue to this day based on Tetsumonkai’s teachings. “He left an enduring impact on many people of that time,” he said.

A portrait of Tetsumonkai | COURTESY OF CHURENJI TEMPLE

However, perhaps the most compelling of his legends may be another one involving self-mutilation. At one point, Tetsumonkai is said to have been visited by a prostitute, possibly the same one he fought the samurai for. The woman tried to convince Tetsumonkai to come back to the city with her, but he refused. To prove his resolution and dedication to a life of austerity, he disappeared and shortly returned with a small package for her. Inside were his bloody testicles. He had sliced them off.

The object is said to have made its way around prostitutes of the local pleasure quarters as a good luck charm, and was eventually sent to Nangakuji Temple in Tsuruoka, where it was preserved as a relic. Adding weight to the legend, the genitals are missing from Tetsumonkai’s mummified body.

I visited Nangakuji to see Tetsuryukai, one of the newest surviving sokushinbutsu, who is believed to have been mummified at around 1881. Considered Tetsumonkai’s disciple, Tetsuryukai was preparing for self-mummification when the practice was outlawed. He and his followers secretly went ahead with the process, but it wasn’t until 1923 that his existence could be publicized.

One of the visitors asked a question that had also been on my mind: Was the temple really in possession of Tetsumonkai’s testicles? “Yes,” said the head priest’s elderly wife, who was giving us a brief tour of the room where Tetsuryukai is enshrined along with other artifacts. “But they’re not for public viewing.”

Tetsumonkai’s blood group is B, which was also the blood group of the scrotum found in Nangakuji, according to past scientific research. Academics at the time concluded that it was highly likely that the dried testicles belonged to a man who endured extreme physical abuse in the name of ascetic training before being entombed at the age of 71.

Mount Yudono (left), Mount Ubagatake (center) and Mount Gassan | TOMOFUMI SATO / VIA WIKICOMMONS

It’s easy to dismiss the sokushinbutsu phenomenon as an obscure ritual that died out as the nation marched toward modernization in the late 19th century. However, the mummies provide a fascinating window into the social landscape of pre-modern Japan through their stories of passion, hardships, sacrifice and intense religious fervor culminating in the attainment of Buddha-hood in the flesh.

And they are, in a sense, still very much alive, treated as living, breathing saints by generations of priests and worshippers who have kept the tradition relevant.

To those of us who visit the quiet mummies today, they offer a respite from the seemingly unending trivialities of life.

“They make us think of life and death, and what, if anything, it all means,” Hijikata said. “I’ve come to believe that’s what they’re here for.”

(Source: JT)

Inside a 20th century nude commune

In Kerala, a 96-year-old building is occupied by Siddha Samaj, a society that is powered by ideas of free sex and spirituality and has 300-odd practising members, writes Nidheesh M.K. in Live Mint. Read on: 

S. Dhananjayan likes hanging out naked, except in front of strangers.

He has no family, holds no property, does no work, makes no money, serves no government, obeys no supervisors, has no subordinates, worships no god and practises no religion. He has consensual sex with whoever he likes, with no expectation of love. Dhananjayan, who is in his 20s, is, in his own estimation, a happy man in a free world.

He is one among 300-odd people who are continuing a social experiment that began nearly a century ago in north Kerala’s Calicut (also known as Kozhikode) district. They are inmates of Siddha Samaj, an alternative society with four branches in Kerala and one in Tamil Nadu.

Inside the Siddha Samaj in Kerala’s Vadakara town. Photographs by Nidheesh MK/Mint

This little-known commune was formed as a critique of private property and interests. Former Kerala chief minister E.M.S. Namboodiripad is said to have described it as a community of primitive Communists.

Two years ago, I found myself staring out of the window of a train to Vadakara, a small coastal town in Kozhikode, on my way to learn more about this society, shortly after learning that my grandfather had apparently helped build it. It all began when my father and uncles found a yellowing notebook, tattered and falling to pieces, in an old trunk in our ancestral home. It was deemed useless because it had none of the things they were looking for, such as details of any real estate my grandfather might have had, unknown to them.

To my mind, though, it seemed interesting as a historical document. The notebook was small. In neat handwriting, it was full of his thoughts about his life and his surroundings, seemingly written at a very old age. He wrote about the financial hurdles he faced when trying to get into a school; the odd assortment of jobs he did, including playing native guide to a foreign scholar and serving as tax collector to the local king, the zamorin of Calicut; his readings on theology, philosophy and science; the journeys he made to places like Kashi (Varanasi) and Rishikesh and so on.

There was a cryptic reference to having conducted “the first inter-caste marriage in Kerala”. The year on the left, 1922, was enough to pique my curiosity.

Caste hierarchies were rigid in Kerala in the early 20th century. To accidentally catch sight of a member of the lower castes entailed ritual pollution; an upper-caste person would typically bathe after doing so. How then to make sense of an organized inter-caste marriage in such a time?

My grandfather, C.S. Menon, credits the society in Vadakara with leading this initiative. It turns out, he was also its first general secretary. The diary ended with a note indicating he had written another book, a summation of his spiritual journey, but also an autobiography, that could be found in the society’s Vadakara office.

The next morning, I was on a train on my way to Vadakara, to try and bridge the gaps in my understanding of my grandfather. Until then the old man had been little more than a black and white photograph hanging on a wall in the ancestral house, still watching over, it seemed, his books on Indian philosophy and Marxist politics. I needed colour in the portrait.

The orphanage which doubles up as a school—children are taken away from mothers and brought here at the age of 3, where they lead a secluded life.

A republic of dreamers
Wide, open gates beckon visitors towards an impressive 96-year-old building that houses Siddha Samaj. The building is a couple of hundred yards from the gates, past a guard shack with no guard. It closely resembles the traditional Kerala homestead, nālukettu, a large multistoreyed dwelling with dozens of rooms and an open central courtyard.

The building is in the middle of about 60 acres of farmland owned by the Samaj, the land ringed by a high, moss-covered compound wall. Members of the Samaj grow everything they eat on this land. To one side of the building stands an Ayurvedic medicine manufacturing unit—their medicines are fairly popular among locals—and the profits go towards sustaining the society and its members. Funds for the Samaj also pour in through donations.

There is a second gate that opens in the morning and closes in the evening every day, from where a neatly laid-out path flanked by lush green lawns splits into three: the path on the left leading to the nālukettu, the one on the right leading to a small hostel for outsiders, and another going straight to a temple-like structure erected on bulky pillar shafts with a dome at its top.

All ritual is banned inside this structure. It exists in remembrance of, and in respect to, the idealist who founded the society, Swami Sivananda Paramahamsa.

Little is known about Sivananda. The notebook described him as “a unique yogi—no blind beliefs, out and out socialist, no religion, no caste, was not learned in the (traditional) sense of learning, belonged to Badagara (Vadakara)—thousands of disciples...”

Legend has it that Sivananda was a colonial-era policeman who began searching for the meaning of life after a family tragedy, and ended up founding a commune which in his view would be a haven for joy and freedom. He found the practice of caste demeaning and banned it in his utopia. He also thought clothes were a hindrance to a natural way of living, apart from causing skin diseases, and asked members to be unencumbered by clothing.

He wrote a book titled Siddha Vedam, which he described as the fifth of the Vedas, ancient Indian philosophical books commonly divided into four. It is hard to know whether Indian philosophy or Karl Marx—the German revolutionary was a hero in Kerala then, as he is now—inspired him, but he was keenly interested in socialism.

Sickened by mankind’s seemingly endless desire to accumulate, he enforced a ban on private interests of any sort. This meant every person had to look after everybody else in the community, but no one could claim ownership of anything.

Sivananda applied this thinking to relationships too. There could be no husbands or wives, among other things, because that would indicate ownership. In the Samaj, you may have consensual sex with whoever you want, but they won’t be only your partner.

A ban on private interests also means no family. Every child born in the Samaj is taken away from the mother at the age of 3. The children are raised together, in a common orphanage alongside a school, at Vadakara, and no one is told who their parents are. They are taught to accept prakriti (nature) as their common mother. Everyone’s father is considered the same, and is denoted with the surname “S”, short for Sivananda.

Hence, S. Dhananjayan.

Portraits of Samaj founder Swami Sivananda Paramahamsa, displayed in the visitors’ gallery.

The silent heaven
Dhananjayan did not choose to join the society. He was born into this world and it is all he knows.

He is a short and stout man with a wispy beard and shoulder-length hair. He wears a white mundu. The first time we met, he was one of two people playing games on a smartphone in the courtyard of the nālukettu. We began a conversation about mobile phones.

Dhananjayan is generally chatty. Most of the other members of the order appear meditative and sombre. When Dhananjayan and I talked about phones, we were the only people talking in that big house—the only other sounds were of people running errands. There is a relaxed air about everything. But the truly free world, it turns out, was dead silent as a cemetery.

The almost oppressive silence of the house began playing on my mind. The next time I saw Dhananjayan, I asked him if he sometimes felt like an inmate in a jail.

“Don’t you want to get out of this?”

“Never,” he replied in Malayalam, smiling. “It is a jail (only) when you look from the outside. For us, you guys are living in a jail.”

Portraits of Samaj founder Swami Sivananda Paramahamsa, displayed in the visitors’ gallery.

Free or caged?
For a free society, Siddha Samaj has a number of rules governing aspects of life that would ordinarily be considered very private.

Such as vegetarianism and an 8 hours work-8 hours meditation-8 hours sleep routine every day. And the prayer room—outsiders are not allowed to enter—where the inmates of the Samajam go about unclothed. Dhananjayan describes it as an ill-lit dormitory of sorts, a place where people can do pranayam, retire to sleep and, if they so choose, have sex.

In Sivananda’s belief, the act of pranayam, or regulating one’s breathing, can help the body attain a state of happiness that would otherwise only be attained with orgasm.

The Samaj receives two kinds of visitors: the ones called Siddha Vidyarthi—practitioners of Siddha Veda—who are not inmates, and general onlookers or tourists. To the outsider, the Samaj would seem like a decidedly strange place, with strange rules on how to love, and even what love is.

How do you feel if the girl you love has a relationship with someone else, I asked Dhananjayan once.

“Why should I (feel anything)?” he replied.

“We don’t own anything in Samaj, people or objects. Besides, it’s her choice to decide with whom she wants to be.”

“And you don’t feel shy, or a sense of shame, when having have sex amid your elders and younger ones?”

“Sex is a natural feeling. Why would one feel shy about doing something natural?”

The Samaj’s reputation for free sex and free living notwithstanding, there are several aspects that appear somewhat problematic. For one, the children of the society, ranging between the ages of 3 and 16, have a room similar to that of the adults, to which they retire completely naked for prayer.

The children raised in the Samaj are effectively mandated to lead a life within the compound’s walls. He or she will possess little understanding of life beyond, not to mention the lack of educational qualifications demanded by the rest of society.

There is also the fact that the women of the society, while free to do as they wish, largely stay indoors as a norm, doing much of the housekeeping and cooking. Even in utopia, it seems, a working woman has no escape from patriarchy.

There could be no husbands or wives, among other things, because that would indicate ownership. In the Samaj, you may have consensual sex with whoever you want, but they won’t be only your partner
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Want for nothing
A wish-box was installed on the premises of the school some years ago, says Dhananjayan. The students were allowed to write down a wish they wanted fulfilled on a piece of paper and drop it in. It has been empty ever since. The box has become something of a joke in the Samaj.

Dhananjayan’s utopia is filled with such anecdotes. While they may not be what others consider modern civilization, they are not as distant as others imagine either.

Dhananjayan has never watched a movie in a theatre, or eaten an ice cream—the simpler pleasures of living in a modern society. But he has taught himself, like many others in the Samaj, to use computers and drive vehicles. He says he learnt these skills because they proved useful when it came to supplying Ayurvedic medicines to retail stores that were often quite distant from their compound. He makes it clear that he does not claim either computer or car as his own.

What, then, is the ultimate achievement of this 96-year experiment in social engineering?

Has it been a success? Has it been able to make equality a reality? While rejecting the established order to become their own masters, have they, on the way, become victims of a different kind of captivity?

I did not recover the autobiography I had set out in search of—outsiders are not permitted to examine the society’s archives. My grandfather’s role in the society remained locked in a past I could not reach. But on the train back, I sat opposite a young man who looked the same age as Dhananjayan. He was wearing a T-shirt that said, “No greater love than self-love.” It made me wonder: what if there is?

Neuroscience has a lot to learn from Buddhism

Buddhist contemplative science has many things in common with cognitive therapies, in particular with those using mindfulness as a foundation for remedying mental imbalance. Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard and scientist Wolf Singer compare notes on meditation, therapy, and their effects on the brain.  The Atlantic has an article adapted from Matthieu Ricard and Wolf Singer’s book, Beyond the Self: Conversations Between Buddhism and Neuroscience. Read on:

Can training the mind make us more attentive, altruistic, and serene? Can we learn to manage our disturbing emotions in an optimal way? What are the transformations that occur in the brain when we practice meditation? In a new book titled Beyond the Self, two friends—Matthieu Ricard, who left a career as a molecular biologist to become a Buddhist monk in Nepal, and Wolf Singer, a distinguished neuroscientist—engage in an unusually well-matched conversation about meditation and the brain. Below is a condensed and edited excerpt.

Matthieu Ricard: Although one finds in the Buddhist literature many treatises on “traditional sciences”—medicine, cosmology, botanic, logic, and so on—Tibetan Buddhism has not endeavored to the same extent as Western civilizations to expand its knowledge of the world through the natural sciences. Rather it has pursued an exhaustive investigation of the mind for 2,500 years and has accumulated, in an empirical way, a wealth of experiential findings over the centuries. A great number of people have dedicated their whole lives to this contemplative science.

Modern Western psychology began with William James just over a century ago. I can’t help remembering the remark made by Stephen Kosslyn, then chair of the psychology department at Harvard, at the Mind and Life meeting on “Investigating the Mind,” which took place at MIT in 2003. He started his presentation by saying, “I want to begin with a declaration of humility in the face of the sheer amount of data that the contemplatives are bringing to modern psychology.”

It does not suffice to ponder how the human psyche works and elaborate complex theories about it, as, for instance, Freud did. Such intellectual constructs cannot replace two millennia of direct investigation of the workings of mind through penetrating introspection conducted with trained minds that have become both stable and clear.

Wolf Singer: Can you be more specific with this rather bold claim? Why should what nature gave us be fundamentally negative, requiring special mental practice for its elimination, and why should this approach be superior to conventional education or, if conflicts arise, to psychotherapy in its various forms, including psychoanalysis?

Ricard: What nature gave us is by no means entirely negative; it is just a baseline. Few people would honestly argue that there is nothing worth improving about the way they live and the way they experience the world. Some people regard their own particular weaknesses and conflicting emotions as a valuable and distinct part of their “personality,” as something that contributes to the fullness of their lives. They believe that this is what makes them unique and argue that they should accept themselves as they are. But isn’t this an easy way to giving up on the idea of improving the quality of their lives, which would cost only some reasoning and effort?

Modern conventional education does not focus on transforming the mind and cultivating basic human qualities such as lovingkindness and mindfulness. As we will see later, Buddhist contemplative science has many things in common with cognitive therapies, in particular with those using mindfulness as a foundation for remedying mental imbalance. As for psychoanalysis, it seems to encourage rumination and explore endlessly the details and intricacies of the clouds of mental confusion and self-centeredness that mask the most fundamental aspect of mind: luminous awareness.

Singer: So rumination would be the opposite of what you do during meditation?

Ricard: Totally opposite. It is also well known that constant rumination is one of the main symptoms of depression. What we need is to gain freedom from the mental chain reactions that rumination endlessly perpetuates. One should learn to let thoughts arise and be freed to go as soon as they arise, instead of letting them invade one’s mind. In the freshness of the present moment, the past is gone, the future is not yet born, and if one remains in pure mindfulness and freedom, potentially disturbing thoughts arise and go without leaving a trace.

Singer: What you have to learn then is to adopt a much more subtle approach to your internal emotional theater, to learn to identify with much higher resolution the various connotations of your feelings.

Ricard: That’s right. In the beginning, it is difficult to do it as soon as an emotion arises, but if you become increasingly familiar with such an approach, it becomes quite natural. Whenever anger is just showing its face, we recognize it right away and deal with it before it becomes too strong.

Singer: It is not unlike a scientific endeavor except that the analytical effort is directed toward the inner rather than the outer world. Science also attempts to understand reality by increasing the resolving power of instruments, training the mind to grasp complex relations, and decomposing systems into ever-smaller components.

Ricard: It is said in the Buddhist teachings that there is no task so difficult that it cannot be broken down into a series of small, easy tasks.

Singer: Your object of inquiry appears to be the mental apparatus and your analytical tool, introspection. This is an interesting self-referential approach that differs from the Western science of mind because it emphasizes the first-person perspective and collapses, in a sense, the instrument of investigation with its object. The Western approach, while using the first-person perspective for the definition of mental phenomena, clearly favors the third-person perspective for its investigation.

I am curious to find out whether the results of analytical introspection match those obtained by cognitive neuroscience. Both approaches obviously try to develop a differentiated and realistic view of cognitive processes.

What guarantees that the introspective technique for the dissection of mental phenomena is reliable? If it is the consensus among those who consider themselves experts, how can you compare and validate subjective mental states? There is nothing another person can look at and judge as valid; the observers can only rely on the verbal testimony of subjective states.

Ricard: It is the same with scientific knowledge. You first have to rely on the credible testimony of a number of scientists, but later you can train in the subject and verify the findings firsthand. This is quite similar to contemplative science. You first need to refine the telescope of your mind and the methods of investigations for years to find out for yourself what other contemplatives have found and all agreed on. The state of pure consciousness without content, which might seem puzzling at first sight, is something that all contemplatives have experienced. So it is not just some sort of Buddhist dogmatic theory. Anyone who takes the trouble to stabilize and clarify his or her mind will be able to experience it.

Regarding cross-checking interpersonal experience, both contemplatives and the texts dealing with the various experiences a meditator might encounter are quite precise in their descriptions. When a student reports on his inner states of mind to an experienced meditation master, the descriptions are not just vague and poetic. The master will ask precise questions and the student replies, and it is quite clear that they are speaking about something that is well defined and mutually understood.

However, in the end, what really matters is the way the person gradually changes. If, over months and years, someone becomes less impatient, less prone to anger, and less torn apart by hopes and fears, then the method he or she has been using is a valid one.

An ongoing study seems to indicate that while they are engaged in meditation, practitioners can clearly distinguish, like everyone who is not distracted, between pleasant and aversive stimuli, but they react much less emotionally than control subjects. While retaining the capacity of being fully aware of something, they succeed in not being carried away by their emotional responses.

Singer: How do you do this? What are the tools?

Ricard: This process requires perseverance. You need to train again and again. You can’t learn to play tennis by holding a racket for a few minutes every few months. With meditation, the effort is aimed at developing not a physical skill but an inner enrichment.

In extreme cases, you could be in a simple hermitage in which nothing changes or sitting alone always facing the same scene day after day. So the outer enrichment is almost nil, but the inner enrichment is maximal. You are training your mind all day long with little outer stimulation. Furthermore, such enrichment is not passive, but voluntary, and methodically directed. When you engage for eight or more hours a day in cultivating certain mental states that you have decided to cultivate and that you have learned to cultivate, you reprogram the brain.

Singer: In a sense, you make your brain the object of a sophisticated cognitive process that is turned inward rather than outward toward the world around you. You apply the cognitive abilities of the brain to studying its own organization and functioning, and you do so in an intentional and focused way, similar to when you attend to events in the outer world and when you organize sensory signals into coherent percepts. You assign value to certain states and you try to increase their prevalence, which probably goes along with a change in synaptic connectivity in much the same way as it occurs with learning processes resulting from interactions with the outer world.

Let us perhaps briefly recapitulate how the human brain adapts to the environment because this developmental process can also be seen as a modification or reprogramming of brain functions. Brain development is characterized by a massive proliferation of connections and is paralleled by a shaping process through which the connections being formed are either stabilized or deleted according to functional criteria, using experience and interaction with the environment as the validation criterion. This developmental reorganization continues until the age of about 20. The early stages serve the adjustment of sensory and motor functions, and the later phases primarily involve brain systems responsible for social abilities. Once these developmental processes come to an end, the connectivity of the brain becomes fixed, and large-scale modifications are no longer possible.

Ricard: To some extent.

Singer: To some extent, yes. The existing synaptic connections remain modifiable, but you can’t grow new long-range connections. In a few distinct regions of the brain, such as the hippocampus and olfactory bulb, new neurons are generated throughout life and inserted into the existing circuits, but this process is not large-scale, at least not in the neocortex, where higher cognitive functions are supposed to be realized.

Ricard: A study of people who have practiced meditation for a long time demonstrates that structural connectivity among the different areas of the brain is higher in meditators than in a control group. Hence, there must be another kind of change allowed by the brain.

Singer: I have no difficulty in accepting that a learning process can change behavioral dispositions, even in adults. There is ample evidence of this from reeducation programs, where practice leads to small but incremental behavior modifications. There is also evidence for quite dramatic and sudden changes in cognition, emotional states, and coping strategies. In this case, the same mechanisms that support learning—distributed changes in the efficiency of synaptic connections—lead to drastic alterations of global brain states.

Ricard: You could also change the flow of neuron activity, as when the traffic on a road increases significantly.

Singer: Yes. What changes with learning and training in the adult is the flow of activity. The fixed hardware of anatomical connections is rather stable after age 20, but it is still possible to route activity flexibly from A to B or from A to C by adding certain signatures to the activity that ensure that a given activation pattern is not broadcast in a diffuse way to all connected brain regions but sent only to selected target areas.

Ricard: So far, the results of the studies conducted with trained meditators indicate that they have the faculty to generate clean, powerful, well-defined states of mind, and this faculty is associated with some specific brain patterns. Mental training enables one to generate those states at will and to modulate their intensity, even when confronted with disturbing circumstances, such as strong positive or negative emotional stimuli. Thus, one acquires the faculty to maintain an overall emotional balance that favors inner strength and peace.

Singer: So you have to use your cognitive abilities to identify more clearly and delineate more sharply the various emotional states, and to train your control systems, probably located in the frontal lobe, to increase or decrease selectively the activity of subsystems responsible for the generation of the various emotions.

An analogy for this process of refinement could be the improved differentiation of objects of perception, which is known to depend on learning. With just a little experience, you are able to recognize an animal as a dog. With more experience, you can sharpen your eye and become able to distinguish with greater and greater precision dogs that look similar. Likewise, mental training might allow you to sharpen your inner eye for the distinction of emotional states.

In the naïve state, you are able to distinguish good and bad feelings only in a global way. With practice, these distinctions would become increasingly refined until you could distinguish more and more nuances. The taxonomy of mental states should thus become more differentiated. If this is the case, then cultures exploiting mental training as a source of knowledge should have a richer vocabulary for mental states than cultures that are more interested in investigating phenomena of the outer world.

Ricard: Buddhist taxonomy describes 58 main mental events and various subdivisions thereof. It is quite true that by conducting an in-depth investigation of mental events, one becomes able to distinguish increasingly more subtle nuances.

Take anger, for instance. Often anger can have a malevolent component, but it can also be rightful indignation in the face of injustice. Anger can be a reaction that allows us to rapidly overcome an obstacle preventing us from achieving something worthwhile or remove an obstacle threatening us. However, it could also reflect a tendency to be short-tempered. If you look carefully at anger, you will see that it contains aspects of clarity, focus, and effectiveness that are not harmful in and of themselves. So if you are able to recognize those aspects that are not yet negative and let your mind remain in them, without drifting into the destructive aspects, then you will not be troubled and confused by these emotions.

Another result of cultivating mental skills is that, after a while, you will no longer need to apply contrived efforts. You can deal with the arising of mental perturbations like the eagles I see from the window of my hermitage in the Himalayas. The crows often attack them, even though they are much smaller. They dive at the eagles from above trying to hit them with their beaks. However, instead of getting alarmed and moving around to avoid the crow, the eagle simply retracts one wing at the last moment, letting the diving crow pass by, and extends its wing back out. The whole thing requires minimal effort and is perfectly efficient. Being experienced in dealing with the sudden arising of emotions in the mind works in a similar way. When you are able to preserve a clear state of awareness, you see thoughts arise; you let them pass through your mind, without trying to block or encourage them; and they vanish without creating many waves.


Singer: That reminds me of what we do when we encounter severe difficulties that require fast solutions, such as a complicated traffic situation. We immediately call on a large repertoire of escape strategies that we have learned and practiced, and then we choose among them without much reasoning, relying mainly on subconscious heuristics. Apparently, if we are not experienced with contemplative practice, we haven’t gone through the driving school for the management of emotional conflicts. Would you say this is a valid analogy?

Ricard: Yes, complex situations become greatly simplified through training and the cultivation of effortless awareness. When you learn to ride a horse, as a beginner you are constantly preoccupied, trying not to fall at every movement the horse makes. Especially when the horse starts galloping, it puts you on high alert. But when you become an expert rider, everything becomes easier. Riders in eastern Tibet, for instance, can do all kinds of acrobatics, such as shooting arrows at a target or catching something on the ground while galloping at full speed, and they do all that with ease and a big smile on their face.

One study with meditators showed that they can maintain their attention at an optimal level for extended periods of time. When performing what is called a continuous performance task, even after 45 minutes, they did not become tense and were not distracted even for a moment. When I did this task myself, I noticed that the first few minutes were challenging and required some effort, but once I entered a state of “attentional flow,” it became easier.

Singer: This resembles a general strategy that the brain applies when acquiring new skills. In the naïve state, one uses conscious control to perform a task. The task is broken down into a series of subtasks that are sequentially executed. This requires attention, takes time, and is effortful. Later, after practice, the performance becomes automatized. Usually, the execution of the skilled behavior is then accomplished by different brain structures than those involved in the initial learning and execution of the task. Once this shift has occurred, performance becomes automatic, fast, and effortless and no longer requires cognitive control. This type of learning is called procedural learning and requires practice. Such automatized skills often save you in difficult situations because you can access them quickly. They can also often cope with more variables simultaneously due to parallel processing. Conscious processing is more serialized and therefore takes more time.

Do you think you can apply the same learning strategy to your emotions by learning to pay attention to them, differentiate them, and thereby familiarize yourself with their dynamics so as to later become able to rely on automatized routines for their management in case of conflict?

Ricard: You seem to be describing the meditation process. In the teachings, it says that when one begins to meditate, on compassion, for instance, one experiences a contrived, artificial form of compassion. However, by generating compassion over and over again, it becomes second nature and spontaneously arises, even in the midst of a complex and challenging situation.

Singer: It would be really interesting to look with neurobiological tools at whether you have the same shift of function that you observe in other cases where familiarization through learning and training leads to the automation of processes. In brain scans, one observes that different brain structures take over when skills that are initially acquired under the control of consciousness become automatic.

Ricard: That is what a study conducted by Julie Brefczynski and Antoine Lutz at Richard Davidson’s lab seems to indicate. Brefczynski and Lutz studied the brain activity of novice, relatively experienced, and very experienced meditators when they engage in focused attention. Different patterns of activity were observed depending on the practitioners’ level of experience.

Relatively experienced meditators (with an average of 19,000 hours of practice) showed more activity in attention-related brain regions compared with novices. Paradoxically, the most experienced meditators (with an average of 44,000 hours of practice) demonstrated less activation than the ones without as much experience. These highly advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the skill of expert musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the “flow” of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control. This observation accords with other studies demonstrating that when someone has mastered a task, the cerebral structures put into play during the execution of this task are generally less active than they were when the brain was still in the learning phase.

Singer: This suggests that the neuronal codes become sparser, perhaps involving fewer but more specialized neurons, once skills become highly familiar and are executed with great expertise. To become a real expert seems to require then at least as much training as is required to become a world-class violin or piano player. With four hours of practice a day, it would take you 30 years of daily meditation to attain 44,000 hours. Remarkable!

A war of words puts Facebook at the center of Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis

Myanmar’s government has barred Ashin Wirathu, an ultranationalist Buddhist monk, from public preaching for the past year, saying his speeches helped fuel the violence against the country’s Rohingya ethnic group that the United Nations calls ethnic cleansing.

So he has turned to an even more powerful and ubiquitous platform to get his message out — Facebook.

Every day he posts updates, often containing false information, that spread a narrative of the Rohingya as aggressive outsiders. And posts like these have put Facebook at the center of a fierce information war that is contributing to the crisis involving the minority group. International human rights groups say Facebook should be doing more to prevent the hateful speech, focusing as much on global human rights as on its business.

“Facebook is quick on taking down swastikas, but then they don’t get to Wirathu’s hate speech where he’s saying Muslims are dogs,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.

Across the world, Facebook and other social platforms are being questioned about their expanding role and responsibilities as publishers of information. In Britain, investigations have begun into the spread of misinformation on social media about the European Union membership referendum. In the United States, lawmakers are looking into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election on social media platforms.

In Myanmar, Facebook is so dominant that to many people it is the internet itself. And the stakes of what appears on the site are exceptionally high because misinformation, as well as explicitly hostile language, is widening longstanding ethnic divides and stoking the violence against the Rohingya ethnic group.

Monks in Yangon, Myanmar, studying at the Ywama Monastery, which supports the Buddhist nationalist Ma Ba Tha movement. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

For example, since the government crackdown against the Rohingya began, Zaw Htay, a spokesman for the country’s de facto leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has shared dozens of posts on his Facebook page and Twitter account that include images said to show Rohingya burning their own homes. Many of these images have been debunked, yet they still stand.

First-person accounts from Rakhine State establish a coordinated crackdown against the Rohingya minority by the military and by ultranationalist groups, driving more than 600,000 refugees across the border into Bangladesh.

Facebook does not police the billions of posts and status updates that flow through the site worldwide each day, relying instead on an oftentimes confusing set of “community standards” and reports by users of direct threats that are then manually assessed and, in some cases, removed.

After the 2016 United States elections, Facebook rolled out a set of guidelines to help users identify fake news and misinformation. The company does not regularly remove misinformation itself.

Facebook has no office in Myanmar, but the company has worked with local partners to introduce a Burmese-language illustrated copy of its platform standards and will “continue to refine” its practices, said a spokeswoman, Clare Wareing, in an emailed statement.

Human rights groups say the company’s approach has allowed opinion, facts and misinformation to mingle on Facebook, clouding perceptions of truth and propaganda in a country where mobile technology has been widely adopted only in the past three years.

Under the rule of the military junta, strict censorship regulations deliberately made SIM cards for cellphones unaffordable to control the free flow of information. In 2014, restrictions loosened and the use of mobile technology exploded as SIM cards became affordable. Facebook users ballooned from about two million in 2014 to more than 30 million today. But most users do not know how to navigate the wider internet.

Followers of Ashin Wirathu watching him deliver a sermon on a projector screen in an overflow area of the Thein Taung Monastery in Myanmar in 2013. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

“Facebook has become sort of the de facto internet for Myanmar,” said Jes Kaliebe Petersen, chief executive of Phandeeyar, Myanmar’s leading technology hub that helped Facebook create its Burmese-language community standards page. “When people buy their first smartphone, it just comes preinstalled.”

Mr. Petersen said local media and news outlets should help combat misinformation in a technology sector still in its infancy.

“There are still some challenges here, and there are of course very big differences between big cities and rural communities,” he said. “I think it’s really important that people focus on educating this new generation of digital users.”

In the meantime, Facebook has become a breeding ground for hate speech and virulent posts about the Rohingya. And because of Facebook’s design, posts that are shared and liked more frequently get more prominent placement in feeds, favoring highly partisan content in timelines.

Ashin Wirathu, the monk, has hundreds of thousands of followers on Facebook accounts in Burmese and English. His posts include graphic photos and videos of decaying bodies that Ashin Wirathu says are Buddhist victims of Rohingya attacks, or posts denouncing the minority ethnic group or updates that identify them falsely as “Bengali” foreigners.

Facebook has removed some of his posts and restricted his page for stretches, but it is currently active. In an interview, Ashin Wirathu said that if Facebook did remove his account, he would simply create a new one. He added that if anyone did not like his Facebook posts, “they can sue me.”

Posts from verified government and military Facebook accounts also carry misinformation. Some, for example, refuse to acknowledge the Rohingya as an ethnic group deserving of citizenship rights, despite the fact many have lived in Rakhine State for generations.

Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Myanmar’s armed forces who has carried out the crackdown on the Rohingya, has more than 1.3 million users on his verified account. A post from Sept. 15 describes the operation as a response to an “attempt of extremist Bengalis in Rakhine State to build a stronghold,” after an Aug. 25 attack on remote border posts by a Rohingya militant group.

Rohingya activists also use Facebook, documenting human rights abuses, often with graphic images and videos as evidence. Sometimes the company has taken these down.

Ashin Wirathu in 2013. He has been barred from public preaching in Myanmar since March. Credit Adam Dean for The New York Times

Ms. Wareing, the Facebook spokeswoman, said the company removed graphic content “when it is shared to celebrate the violence.” She said the company would allow graphic content if it was newsworthy, significant or important to the public interest, even if it might otherwise go against the platform’s standards.

Richard Weir, an Asia analyst with Human Rights Watch, said the situation was complicated.

“It’s a really delicate balance here between things that are violent and posted by people who would seek to inflame tensions and those that are trying to disseminate information,” Mr. Weir said. “It’s difficult to know where exactly to draw the line.”

Some of the social media conversation is happening privately. For instance, chain messages on Facebook Messenger before Sept. 11 this year falsely warned of a planned Rohingya attack against Buddhists. Written like a chain letter, the message called for people to share it, and many people were put on edge as it spread.

“I was nervous about it,” said U Tin Win, a teacher from Mandalay, the country’s second-largest city, who received the letter. “I don’t know who started the message, but I ordered my family not to go outside that day.”

Mr. Weir said that people in Myanmar relied on social media for their news.

“The government can sort of trot out its own views and spread them very rapidly, in addition to a bunch of other nonstate entities,” he said. “Views about people in Rakhine State, about the origins of population and about things that may or may not have happened fly around Facebook extremely quickly and can create unstable situations.”

(Source: NYT)

Gujarat Class 12 topper Varshil Shah is now Jain monk Suvirya Maharaj

The 17-year-old Varshil Shah, who got 99.9 percentile in his Class 12, on Thursday was ordained as Jain monk.

A tonsured head, white dhoti, a deep farewell bow and 17-year-old Varshil Shah was now Suvirya Ratna Vijayji Maharaj, a Jain monk.

The teenager from Ahmedabad, who scored 99.9 percentile in the Class 12 exam a few days ago only to denounce it all, on Thursday joined his guru in his spiritual quest at an early morning ceremony in Surat.

Two weeks ago when the commerce student aced the school-leaving exam, there were no celebrations. His Diksha ceremony, or the initiation ceremony, too, was a quiet and private affair.

At about 4.30am, Vashidaan – a procession in which members of the Jain community dispose of jewellery and cash, symbolising shunning of material world – was held on the banks of the Tapi river.

It was followed by tonsuring of his head, reciting of prayers. And then came perhaps the most poignant of the rituals, as the young man sought the permission of his family to renounce the world.

From now, Varshil Shah will only dress in a white dhoti worn by the members of the Svetambara, or “white clad”, sect of Jainism.(HT photo)

His mother Amiben Shah and Jigarbhai, an income-tax officer, are happy with their son’s decision. Varshil was raised in a house that doesn’t have a television or a refrigerator. Electricity is used only when it is absolutely necessary as the Shahs believes many aquatic animals are killed during power generation, which is against the Jain vow of ahmisa, or non-violence

On the eve of the ceremony, Varshil dressed like a groom, wearing a gaudy sherwani paired with a turban, the last time he would wear coloured clothes.

On Thursday, donning a white dhoti and wrap, he joined his guru Kalyan Ratna Vijay. From now on, he will only dress in a white dhoti worn by the members of the Svetambara, or “white clad”, sect of Jainism. He will walk bare foot and make all his journeys on foot as well.

As monks are not supposed to cook, he will eat what he will receive in alms.

Varshil is history as Suvirya Ratna Vijayji Maharaj begins his spiritual journey.

(Source: HT)

Jain couple to leave 3-yr-old daughter, Rs 100-cr property for monkhood

The couple’s decision has sent shockwaves across hometown Neemuch, where their families are established in politics and business.

A Jain couple from Madhya Pradesh has decided to leave behind their three-year-old daughter and property worth around Rs 100 crore to become munis (monks), stunning the community that is no stranger to acts of renunciation.

Sumit Rathore, 35, and his wife Anamika, 34, are scheduled to take deeksha (the first step of their initiation into monkhood) under Sudhamargi Jain Acharya Ramlal Maharaj at Surat in Gujarat on September 23.

Their decision has sent shockwaves across hometown Neemuch, about 400km northwest of state capital Bhopal, where their families are established in politics and business.

The first question on the lips of incredulous Neemuch residents is: what about their daughter, Ibhya?

“I will take care of my granddaughter,” said Anamika’s father, Ashok Chandaliya, a former Neemuch district president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

He said no one could convince the couple not to renounce the world. “We had no counter to their religious arguments and relented. One cannot stop anyone when religion calls,” Chandaliya added.

Sumit’s father, Rajendra Singh Rathore, who owns a factory that makes sacks for cement companies, too accepted the decision. “We were expecting this, but not so soon,” he said.

Sumit and Anamika’s decision was not exactly a surprise for their loved ones because they had declared their intent to become munis when Ibhya was only eight months old and, as preparation, started living separately.

Sumit announced his final decision to take deeksha during a gathering of Acharya Ramlal’s at Surat on August 22. The Acharya told him to seek Anamika’s permission. She gave consent and expressed her desire to take deeksha too. Their families rushed to Surat to dissuade them, but failed.

Sumit and Anamika, who married four years ago, have taken a vow of silence till the deeksha.

Sumit Rathore and his wife Anamika will take deeksha under Sudhamargi Jain Acharya Ramlal Maharaj at Surat in Gujarat on September 23. (HT Photo)

Anamika was Neemuch’s first gold medallist in Class 8 board examinations. She did her BE from Modi Engineering College, Laxmangarh (Sikar) in Rajasthan, and worked with Hindustan Zinc before marriage.

Sumit holds a diploma in import-export management from a college in London, where he stayed and worked for two years before returning to Neemuch to manage the family business.

Sumit’s cousin, Sandeep, who is close to him, said, “He had everything that a man wanted. Property worth around Rs 100 crore, a loving wife and a daughter. But he chose to renounce everything. We are stunned.”

Prakash Bhandari, a leading Jain community member in Neemuch, said as far as he knew, this decision was unprecedented. “This is the first time that such a young couple is taking deeksha and that too by leaving behind a daughter,” added Bhandari, secretary of Sadhumargi Jain Shravak Sangh.

Earlier this year, a stunning renunciation by a Jain teen from Gujarat made waves across the country.

Varshil Shah, 17, renounced the world and became a monk in June, barely weeks after scoring a stupendous 99.9 percentile in Class 12 Commerce examinations. After initiation for his spiritual quest, the teen’s name changed to Suvirya Ratna Vijayji Maharaj.

The Jain community, with an estimated population of less than 50 lakh in India, follows an austere lifestyle including vegetarianism and a large section is known to observe customs laid down thousands of years ago. Digambara Jain monks – who consider the sky their clothing – still go naked.

The death of a 13-year-old Jain girl, Aradhana Samdariya, in October 2016, less than three days after she ended a 68-day fast under the tapasya ritual practised by her community triggered debates across the country.

Aradhana’s death put the spotlight on the community’s tapasya ritual. Amid debates, many Jain leaders came out in support of her parents, saying they were being hounded and the community was being maligned.

According to Jain elders, the ‘tapasya’ that Aradhana undertook was voluntary and the first of nine steps (nav-pad) aimed at attaining salvation, and it was not the same as the ritual of ‘santhara’ under which the elderly or the sick abstain from food until they die.

(Source: HT)

Himalayan Monks have super human abilities that stun even Harvard scientists

Buddhist Monks are fascinating. It is popularly believed that these monks have brains that function beyond human capabilities. Plus, they are known to easily rewire their brains.

It is an established fact that Buddhist monks are super human but it is their out-of-this-world incredible feats that continue to stun and shock scientists! This is because at the end of the day these monks are born as normal human beings.

In the 1980s, a curious group of scientists and researchers led by Professor Herbert Benson from the Harvard School of Medicine trekked to the remote monasteries nestled in the Himalayan mountains. They wanted to discover, document and decode the ways in which monks manipulated their bodies subtly. These monks were known to raise their body temperatures, especially of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees and they could also lower their body’s metabolic rate by 64%. They did so through the stress reduction technique of yoga called the ‘gTum-mo’.

The researchers from Harvard also recorded the monks drying clothes and cold wet sheets using their body heat.

The monks performed astonishing feats – they would spend nights on a rocky ledge when the temperatures dropped to zero degrees Fahrenheit. These rocky ledges were at the height of 15000 feet and the monks only had cotton or woollen shawls to keep them warm. These feats, the scientists observed, the monks achieved them through rigorous meditation techniques, spiritual conditioning and guided exercises.

Through their gTum-mo techniques, these monks entered a state of deep meditation. When doing so, other monks soaked sheets of 3 by 6 feet into the cold water and placed them on the meditating monks.

For common, untrained people, these would lead to shivering and illness, even death. But the scientists observed that steam rose from these sheets within an hour.

Therefore, after observing and witnessing such experiences, Benson emphasised the importance of advanced meditation. It could lead to treatment for stress-related illnesses.

He observed: This is important because more than 60 percent of the visit to physicians in the USA are for stress related problems and these are wrongly treated by drugs and even surgery. But if we all begin to practice advanced meditation, it can miraculously rewire our brains and cure us.

He further stated that he hopes that self-care such as they monks undertake will be equal to medical drugs, surgery and other therapies that will help alleviate mental and physical suffering. Meditation along with proper nutrition, diet and exercise of the mind and body will lead to self-care practice. It would help save millions of dollars annually in medical costs.

(Source: Speaking Tree)