Please join us for a talk by MK Long (PhD Candidate, Department of Asian Studies).

This paper opens the historical study of initiated female Buddhist devotees (thilashin) in Myanmar through analysis of the 1982 biography of Daw Medawadi (1862-1932), founder of a Buddhist nunnery (chaung) at the turn of the twentieth century. Attending to rhetorical models of practice that reveal the stakes of the historically specific and local social worlds in which thilashin have sought to establish and maintain institutional footholds, I reconsider the assumed predominance of tropes of renunciatory asceticism in the self-presentation of thilashin and propose a more closely calibrated understanding of thilashin as non-ordained but initiated women unevenly empowered by relationships and practices that enable their advancement on a Buddhist path to liberation. In particular, I focus on the biography’s emplacement of its subject, Daw Medawadi, within a family system and within a patronage network as evidence of the meaningful persistence of highly intimate and localized networks of belonging and affiliation amidst the state-driven reorganization of Myanmar Buddhist institutions of the 1980s. Read intertextually with other contemporary, vernacular Burmese literature written by and about thilashin, Medawadi’s life narrative and other thilashin biographies offer a vital and largely untapped source that can contribute to our understanding of the social and historical underpinnings of understudied institutional forms of female Buddhist devotion in Myanmar.

The Cornell Buddhist Studies Seminar Series is co-sponsored by the GPSA-FC, the Departments of Anthropology, Asian Studies and Philosophy, by the South Asia Program, and by the Society for the Humanities. The paper can be read in advance, by those with a Cornell NetID at this link; interested parties without a NetID may contact MK directly at ml2458@cornell.edu.

The talk is in-person and open to the graduate and professional student community; for accessibility queries please contact buddhiststudies@cornell.edu