Word: buddhists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Burmese majority and the tribal groups - the Arakanese, the Shan, the Kachin, the Karen, the Mon, the Wa and the Chin, to name a few - yawns ever wider, the chance of renewed armed conflict grows stronger. "To the military, we [ethnic minorities] are like mosquitoes," says a young Arakanese Buddhist monk, who participated in the crushed antigovernment uprising of September 2007 and chafes at Burmese discrimination against his people. "We buzz in their ear, and they slap at us and don't care if they kill us." But, he adds, "there are many mosquitoes...
...Organization (KIO) is accustomed. An ethnically based movement in northern Burma's Kachin state, the KIO waged a long insurgency against the Burmese regime before signing a peace treaty in 1994. Most Kachin are Christian, and they believe their faith makes them particularly vulnerable to persecution by the exclusively Buddhist junta. In a complicated arrangement, the KIO controls some territory on Kachin's border with China. Chinese trucks that rumble through KIO turf pay taxes on the jade, gold and timber they're carrying, and KIO officials say the Chinese generally pay up, lest instability infect the area. "China wants...
...friend in Rangoon is a busy man. He manages a couple of companies in Burma's commercial capital, helps raise his children and regularly makes merit at a Buddhist temple. He also spends time tending to a plant that he knows is only grown to die. In Dec. 2005, Burma's economically inept junta - one of its leaders once decided to denominate the national currency by multiples of nine because he liked the number - decided that the country's future lay in a shrub called jatropha...
...adherents of other faiths are looking to make their mark in the public sphere, too. In early March, Buddhist students armed with nothing more menacing than joss sticks staged a protest against the Buddha Bar. They argued that a place called Muhammad Bar or Jesus Christ Bar would hardly meet with approval. The students demanded that the hotspot's name be changed, something the Jakarta Legislative Council has agreed must be a prerequisite for the Buddha Bar to reopen. At the same time, Indonesian Corruption Watch, a local NGO, has raised questions about whether the dining lounge, which is located...
...serve up a pan-Asian menu and aesthetic that clearly uses the Buddha more as a cultural marker than as a religious icon. Restaurant souvenirs for sale include a Buddha snow globe - not the kind of thing a member of the faithful would be likely to purchase. Indeed, the Buddhist reverence toward compassion notwithstanding, a Middle Way might not be so easy to reach in the current climate in Jakarta...