Word: buddhists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Still, the monks march. The demonstrations are so large that downtown Rangoon has a carnival atmosphere. Students have now joined the march, waving red flags bearing their emblem, the fighting peacock. At the rear of the column is a group of shaven-headed Buddhist nuns in their bubble-gum-pink robes...
...hoping that they won't want to create an international incident by firing on a scruffy-looking Brit, and that my presence will protect the protesters. She will soon be proved terribly wrong. But for the moment, the protesters appear undaunted, even jubilant. They are chanting a Buddhist mantra whose melody will haunt me for days to come...
...Buddhist monks who first sang this mantra. For a week now, they have been marching through these streets, calling peacefully for change in a country that has been ruled for almost a half-century by a barbaric military junta. Burma's monkhood and military are roughly the same size--each has 300,000 to 400,000 men--but there the similarities end. With the monks preaching tolerance and peace and the military demanding obedience at gunpoint, these protests pit Burma's most beloved institution against its most reviled...
They pour out of the Shwedagon, an immense golden pagoda that is Burma's most revered Buddhist monument, two miles north of downtown Rangoon. The monks form an unbroken, mile-long column--barefoot, chanting their haunting mantras, clutching pictures of the Buddha, their robes drenched with the late-monsoon rains. They walk briskly, stopping briefly to pray when they reach Sule Pagoda. Then they're off again, coursing through the city streets in a solid stream of red and orange, like blood vessels giving life to an oxygen-starved body. Their effect on Rangoon's residents is electrifying. At first...
Overnight, troops surge into monasteries across the city, beating and arresting monks. At Ngwe Kyar Yan monastery, the floors are puddled with blood, the thin dormitory walls perforated with holes from rubber bullets. The raids enrage the people. The lives of Burmese Buddhists are intertwined with the lives of the monks. Monks preside over marriages, chant over the dead; they shelter orphans, care for HIV patients and help schoolchildren cram for their exams. A devout Buddhist will not even step on the shadow of a monk. With soldiers and police still inside Ngwe Kyar Yan, hundreds of local people surround...