Monastic Education in the Margins: Chanting, Marginalia, and Intertextuality in Myanmar Buddhist Nun-Making

Myanmar Buddhist nuns have always been in the margins, whether in Myanmar society itself or within academic scholarship. Yet, the past few decades have seen an increase in the population of nuns which can be attributed partly to their increase in status and recognition. Nuns have proved that they too can be learned in the Buddhist teachings by passing difficult monastic examinations. As monks can traverse other avenues, such as preaching, and still often have many followers and supporters, for the nuns preaching is not an avenue usually available to them. Passing these exams is often instrumental to their success.

Scholars such as Pyi Phyo Kyaw and Kammai Dhammasami have extensively written about the importance of monastic exams. Not just for the test takers to acquire knowledge but for donors to easily locate where their donations should end up. Kyaw has looked at how texts for the exams changed throughout time and space. More specifically, her dissertation demonstrated that the Patṭhāna texts composed in Myanmar had been “transformed from analytical expositions, i.e., ayakauk texts, to examination-orientated pedagogical textbooks in response to changes in Burmese monastic education systems” (Kyaw 2014, 36). Dhammasami having gone through the exams as a monk criticized them as many monks have done in the past. Critiques include how teaching monks have limited agency in what they can teach to their students due to the examination boards’ control of the exams. He mentions that important basic texts such as the Dhammapada are not included in the syllabus. He does mention in a footnote, however, that nuns study this text.

Bringing nuns out of the footnotes and out of the margins, I dig into their monastic education. Based on ethnographic data from participant observation of the nuns’ monastic education, this paper focuses on the importance of chanting, marginalia, and intertextuality in contributing to the making of the Burmese Buddhist nun.

I show the situation not from a broad survey and historical analysis but from a case study with close and intricate details to a specific time and place. For example, in chanting, I discuss repetition’s effect on the practitioner. Not only can chanting and repetition be pleasing to the ear (Emmrich 2022), but the physical differences generated from chanting is perhaps not discussed enough. Rapid chanting requires the mouth and tongue muscles to have become accustomed to particular movements. Chanting seems to slow down or control the breath, and recitations performed in Myanmar, where the climate is extremely hot, after I was finished reciting, even though I was not “off book”, I would feel a sense of accomplishment and a cooling effect. Even if one does not truly comprehend what is being recited – which according to many monastics is the goal of recitation – a certain amount of concentration is needed and can be used as meditation (Gethin 2007). Awareness is required due to the minor variations between sections, which if not memorized will cause the reciter to fail. Repetition in chanting has a variety of uses; and recognizing the importance of memorization to practitioners’ understanding scriptural detail is key to understanding these practices.

Understanding marginalia in the texts shows how texts are connected. Myanmar student nuns listen carefully to their teacher the text that is being chanted and writes it above the correct Pali word of the original Pali text. The teacher is chanting a nissaya, usually the definitions of the Pali word in Burmese, but this definition can mean a multitude of things and whether the teacher picks the correct nissaya to study and memorize can mean the success or failure of the student. The nun student having listened must memorize both the root text with the corresponding nissaya. What is also important is the word order which is changed to match Burmese grammar. One nun teacher explained to me that when she was learning, she had to learn everything by heart, as they had few books, or notebooks for that matter. At that time, she said, the nuns had to listen carefully to the sayadaw (monk teacher); but nowadays, “the nuns do not even really pay attention to what the teacher is saying. They just buy many books, but even then they read [their content] but don’t remember it.” Similarly, another nun at a different nunnery commented to me that nuns had better memorization skills when there was no electricity, because it meant that to study, they needed to have the text memorized. I ran into this problem when chanting the Paṭṭhāna at night with the nuns. If the electricity went out, I would have a harder time remembering what to chant without being able to read the words, though usually, hearing the other nuns would trigger my memory. New technologies, while useful in many ways, also can mean that the original practice weakens and may eventually fade away.

And lastly, I will use my observations from my fieldnotes, such as below, to talk about affect between teacher and student that is missed if only studying texts:

The student nun, in her mid-thirties, walks into the room, places her books on the wooden platform about three feet off the ground. She climbs up onto it, prostrates to the Buddha three times and then to her teacher. She begins with namo tassa and then starts reciting the previous day’s lesson. She fumbles over some words and the teacher corrects her. She does it again, and she and the teacher chuckle as the latter pokes gentle fun at her.

Whether it’s the teachers themselves and the way they teach that creates an inviting atmosphere, understanding the body during chanting, or the ways in which marginalia is written and how it is used, I find that even in the highly structured and controlled syllabus of the government monastic exams that by studying the margins whether figuratively, or literally in the pages, and using both textual and anthropological methods we can discover changes, variations, and important ways of understanding knowledge production and knowledge communities that aren’t picked up otherwise.