Ideological Issues of Buddhist Socialism

Abstract

Aung San wanted Burma’s constitution to be “essentially Burmese in ideology and purport,” ... “thoroughly adapted to suit Burma’s aspirations and Burmese genuis.”¹ His successor U Nu declared, when summing up the balance of European rule, that inclusion in the British Empire had given Burma an opportunity to align her civilization with world developments without losing in that process Burmese individuality and tradition.² Association with Britain has left to Burma a heritage of constitutional government: Burma’s Constitution had originally been drafted in English and had then to be translated into Burmese. Its political goals of Democracy and even the formulations of Welfare State Socialism had come from Occidental sources but were accepted within the context of a traditional Buddhist social ethos. In Burma the degree of Anglization, even of the elite, was never as great as in Ceylon or even in India; therefore ideological syncretism was inevitable and marked. Precisely the independence from England, the model state of liberalism, increased the dependence of the Burmese government on Burma’s traditionalist majority for whom the unfamiliar abstractions of Democracy and Socialism could become comprehensible only in the familiar Buddhist context.