whispered lineage

 The beautiful Sagaing Hills, an area some thirty kilometres out of Mandalay in central Burma, is home to a rich diversity of Buddhist retreat culture. There are hundreds of monasteries and nunneries, lay-retreat meditation centers, colleges and other educational institutions to be found there, housed in quiet hermitages, attractive old colonial outposts and more modern monastic facilities. There are innumerable examples of the typically golden-spired Burmese pagodas rising up out of the rich green foliage of the hills, that themselves border and rise away from the tranquil broad banks of the Irrawaddy River.

view of the Irawaddy

It is a remarkably serene, limpid place, only the occasional sound of amplified Buddhist chanting joining the atmosphere of repose and ease that imbues the life here. Sagaing is the Burmese equivalent of Indian ashrama culture, where many Burmese come after retirement to devote themselves to matters of the spirit, and a personal discipline in Buddhist study, meditation and ethical living. The often beautifully elegant pagodas, monastery temples and shrines are testimony to this culture; the people likewise, monastic and lay, move along the roads with a calm and gentle eye – even the numerous street denizens of dogs and cats suggest a life of renunciation from strife and discord.

I.B.E.C. main building

Beyond the dirt roads of a small village and rising high above the outlying area into the topmost of the range of the Sagaing hills, is the newly-developed International Institute of Buddhist Education (IBEC). Initiated in 2006, the new monastic and secular educational institution now houses nearly one hundred young monks, a new and impressive central teaching and administrative building (see attached photos), a library, classrooms, several outbuildings and an eating and cooking area. Its principal director is the Venerable Ashin Sobhita, a young but already highly respected Burmese senior monk who with eight other monk colleagues has been a guiding force for the establishment of IBEC since its founding.

Venerable Ashin Sobhita and monks

Many of the young monks who have come there have sought refuge from broken families, poverty and the vagaries of life under a totalitarian state regime. Their ages range from five to twenty years old. Many are orphans and others simply seeking a better educational prospect than the public schools often too expensive for their means. At IBEC the educational curriculum includes the secular national curriculum of the sciences, Burmese, English language, history and mathematics, as well as the Buddhist training program. This latter consists essentially of two main areas: Priyati, or the text-based study of the Pāli language in which the corpus of Theravada Buddhism (of Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand) is written. This includes a thorough oral and aural training in the suttas, or original sacred texts of the Buddha, in the vinaya or monastic codes of discipline for Theravada monks (and nuns), and the abhidhamma, or more technical philosophical and psychological treatises analyzing the nature of mind, consciousness, emotions and samsaric ignorance, and the Buddhist path to awakening from such ignorance. All three of these areas of study constitute the three traditional ‘baskets’ of Theravada (indeed all Buddhist) study, the tripitaka.

dining hall

classrooms and outbuildings

The secular educational component is also strong at IBEC, and some half-dozen trained, and often quite young, teachers live on the premises in their own dwellings, some distance from the central monastery buildings. Many of these teachers have received their education in Rangoon or Mandalay or other large cities, but prefer to live in the semi-retreat conditions of Sagaing in order to pursue their own Buddhist interest. Indeed, the entire institution functions as a Buddhist refuge for both monastic and lay interests; some teachers are part-time professionals who come to spend a shorter period living on the site and offering their expertise, whether it be English-language teaching, IT training or technical know-how. Some of them might be local people, educated but suffering personal travails that demand they seek some ‘time out’ from urban pressures.

Many others, and there have been at least a dozen teaching volunteers as well as newly-ordained monks and nuns, are Western travelers who come to appreciate the unusual and idyllic possibilities somewhere like IBEC, and its surrounding context, offers someone who in the West has perhaps less choice of lifestyle, and at a much higher cost. Those who come to IBEC as volunteer teachers receive food and board, along with the other resident teachers, at no cost. Several of the Western teachers have been able to ordain at IBEC as monks and nuns in the Theravada tradition, for shorter or longer periods, and with the full support of the resident sangha. Mandalay is only an hour or less away, so some volunteers also combine their experience at IBEC with commitments they might have in the city. The flexible ease of options at IBEC appears to work excellently for all concerned.

view from main building roof

Venerable Sobhita hopes to add further extensions to the existing housing and teaching buildings on the site, as well as computer-lab and multimedia facilities for seminars, conferences and seasonal retreat services offered by IBEC in the future. He envisions IBEC and similar Buddhist institutions as offering an alternative to the state-run educational system, often limited in its scope and too expensive for poorer and disadvantaged people, and for developing a genuinely global and tolerant perspective on other religious faiths.

He also sees IBEC as being able to foster an ethical expertise in being able to train sangha and lay-people alike for many of the social and political challenges that face Burma as well as the world at large. He welcomes visits and/or donations to IBEC from anyone with a sincere interest in Theravada Buddhist teachings, and especially those who seek other possibilities of life in environs unlike those they know in the urban megalopoli of the East and the West.

pagoda in the hills

Sagaing is a quiet, idyllic place where it is easy to forget the troubles of the greater world, yet where better to start the work Venerable Sobhita describes? And it would seem that the training and environment for Buddhist attainment could realistically be achieved here, where such an authentic example of the intentional Buddhist life flourishes so richly.

The website of I.B.E.C. can be found at: www.ibec-sg.com, as well as further contact for visit, retreat or donation enquiries.

in the hills