Unease about arts course.
Jan. 4th, 2010 01:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
supermouseSo, I am doing a ten point OU course on the arts.
Part two is about Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, who led the anti-British movement towards Burmese independence. Aung San Suu Kyi is an activist from the country currently known as Myanmar. (Burma and Rangoon are referred to as Burma and Rangoon throughout the course material. The names used by the current administration are Myanmar and Yangon. Deciding which terms to use is a political statement in itself.)
Aung San Suu Kyi moved to the UK to study, married a white Brit and had children there then came back to Myanmar/Burma to head a pro-democracy party. She's been under house arrest and had her movements curtailed for a long time.
Much of the material at the start of this section is interviews and parts of a documentary by John Pilger, a British journalist.
One question during the course asks if Buddhism has informed her political views regarding the role of violence or non-violence in resisting authority. We are pointed to the first five verses of _The Dhammapada_, a Buddhist text (I've chosen the online translation which is closest to the one we are given in the course). The particular translation we are shown is the one that is published as a Penguin Classic, and is by Juan (Joan) Mascaro, a Spanish man who spent a while as VP of a Sri Lankan university then came to Cambridge University and where he wrote his translation of _The Dhammapada_ from Pali to English. Mascaro's original interest in texts stems from his interest in occultism.
We're shown these five verses and told that they preach non-violence, and they are Buddhist thought, and Aung San Suu Kyi is a Buddhist and therefore thinks this way and thus preaches non-violence.
So we've got an English-educated activist, seen through the eyes of a British journalist, and whose religion is being judged by popular UK-published English translation by a Spanish occultist. I can't help but feel that the Burmese point of view is missing - but then Aung San Suu Kyi *is* Burmese, so I am discounting her just for going to Oxford University and living in England for two decades. I think it's the choice of translation of the Dhammapada verses, and the focus on John Pilger that make things feel 'off'.
So, does anyone know more about Aung San Suu Kyi and/or Buddhism who might be able to help me untangle all of this? It's *not* helping me do my homework: examining the lens that Aung San Suu Kyi is being viewed through would almost certainly cause me to fail that part of the course. My job for the course is to ingest, digest and tidily regurgitate the John Pilger point of view.
Part two is about Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Aung San, who led the anti-British movement towards Burmese independence. Aung San Suu Kyi is an activist from the country currently known as Myanmar. (Burma and Rangoon are referred to as Burma and Rangoon throughout the course material. The names used by the current administration are Myanmar and Yangon. Deciding which terms to use is a political statement in itself.)
Aung San Suu Kyi moved to the UK to study, married a white Brit and had children there then came back to Myanmar/Burma to head a pro-democracy party. She's been under house arrest and had her movements curtailed for a long time.
Much of the material at the start of this section is interviews and parts of a documentary by John Pilger, a British journalist.
One question during the course asks if Buddhism has informed her political views regarding the role of violence or non-violence in resisting authority. We are pointed to the first five verses of _The Dhammapada_, a Buddhist text (I've chosen the online translation which is closest to the one we are given in the course). The particular translation we are shown is the one that is published as a Penguin Classic, and is by Juan (Joan) Mascaro, a Spanish man who spent a while as VP of a Sri Lankan university then came to Cambridge University and where he wrote his translation of _The Dhammapada_ from Pali to English. Mascaro's original interest in texts stems from his interest in occultism.
We're shown these five verses and told that they preach non-violence, and they are Buddhist thought, and Aung San Suu Kyi is a Buddhist and therefore thinks this way and thus preaches non-violence.
So we've got an English-educated activist, seen through the eyes of a British journalist, and whose religion is being judged by popular UK-published English translation by a Spanish occultist. I can't help but feel that the Burmese point of view is missing - but then Aung San Suu Kyi *is* Burmese, so I am discounting her just for going to Oxford University and living in England for two decades. I think it's the choice of translation of the Dhammapada verses, and the focus on John Pilger that make things feel 'off'.
So, does anyone know more about Aung San Suu Kyi and/or Buddhism who might be able to help me untangle all of this? It's *not* helping me do my homework: examining the lens that Aung San Suu Kyi is being viewed through would almost certainly cause me to fail that part of the course. My job for the course is to ingest, digest and tidily regurgitate the John Pilger point of view.
