The Insight Myanmar podcast team recently sat down to speak remotely with Daw Viranani, a Buddhist nun from the United States who resides at the Chan Myay Maing Monastery in Yangon. Here the team reflects on the conversation, which focused on Dhamma practice during the fraught times since the Myanmar military coup.
At her monastery, Daw Viranani practices metta-in-action (meaning loving kindness). She teaches and supports local monasteries as well as those in need. However, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, her monastery has essentially been closed to outsiders for much of this past year, and its residents have mostly remained in the compound. Daw Viranani’s wisdom and compassion reverberated strongly throughout the interview, as did her profound sense of gratitude for the Burmese people and culture.
Daw Viranani gives advice on how meditators should respond to worldly oppressions and explains that wholesome and positive action in the world is an extension of a mature spiritual practice. In other words, acting for the welfare and happiness of others is an expression of one’s practice, to the degree that one’s particular environment and circumstances allow, but intentional non-action is simply avoidance.
She used herself as an example, saying that if she had been in the United States during the Black Lives Matter movement, she would have been in the streets protesting; now in Myanmar, given the present circumstances, generating metta is the best she can do in the moment. This connects to the importance of generating metta, even to those who affect us most negatively, a theme which was reiterated throughout the talk.
Samsara by definition means ups and downs, happiness and sadness, humans doing both wholesome and unwholesome things. When people speak or act in unwholesome ways, they are merely enacting their karma, like we all do. Besides its overall value in the world, generating loving kindness and compassion for all helps us hold the vagaries of samasara in our hearts without getting overwhelmed…even as we can be righteously indignant at oppression and seek to change it for the good of others.
Because of the importance of Burma to many contemporary meditators around the world, there is shock, sadness, anger, and a feeling of powerlessness at what is transpiring now. In response to a question about how to deal with that, Daw Viranani again goes back to reflecting on samsara. “(It) is not supposed to work,” she said.
Things will go up…and down…and then back up and down again…and on and on. It will never just be right. In understanding this, we give ourselves space to hold our negative feelings along with appreciating the beauty of the world; no matter how bad it may seem at any given point in time, flowers still bloom.
We should appreciate this reality, without getting attached to either pole. As we compassionately work to support the people of Burma in whatever way we can, we will be seeing all kinds of news, some of it quite shocking and negative.
We shouldn’t just obsess about the news but give ourselves space to appreciate the good that does exist in the world at the same time; that should not give rise to guilt, which ultimately arises from attachment to the way we want things to be. The more inner balance we maintain, the more positive our speech and action will be.
To concerned meditators, she says, “Metta, presence, and keep going one step at a time."
