Aung San Suu Kyi

In the past few days, distressing news have emerged from Burma which claim that the opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, is ‘not in good health’ and that she is dehydrated, suffering from low blood pressure, and is barely able to eat.

After having visited her last Thursday, her doctor was arrested by the authorities for no apparently legitimate reason, just 24 hours after an American national was arrested after having been caught swimming away from the compound in which Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest for the greater part of the past 19 years.

These latest occurrences are nothing short of disheartening and serve only to highlight the injustice of a political situation in which rampantly egoistic dictators have persistently trumped the valiant efforts of an incredible woman and her democratically elected party, the National League for Democracy.

San Suu Kyi’s party won a landslide victory in 1990, yet she has never been allowed to formally run the country by the ruling military, led by a psychotic group of individuals who have only served to remove the smallest trace of human rights and disseminated terror. It has done everything from uproot the country’s capital from Rangoon to the secluded town of Naypyidaw and severely delayed large-scale international relief efforts when Cyclone Nargis devastated the country last year.

A ‘trans-religious spiritual activist’ is how her friend, supporter and former Buddhist monk, Alan Clements describes Burma’s imprisoned democracy leader. In six months of recorded conversations with Alan, Aung San Suu Kyi revealed the inner workings of her mind and heart, including her readiness to laugh and joke about her imprisonment. Their conversations have been published in an inspiring book, The Voice of Hope, which providies a rare glimpse into the soul of this incomparable woman.

Alan Clements has recently been touring Australia to raise awareness of San Suu Kyi’s plight, and was interviewed by ABC Radio National within the programme, The Spirit of Things, hosted by Rachael Kohn. In the name of awareness and truth, here is an excerpt from their conversation:

Aung San Suu Kyi is not a nun, she is someone who has resolutely remained in the secular world. How Buddhist is she, in fact how much does she practice Buddhist meditation?

That’s an interesting question I also asked myself and her on numerous occasions, both verbally and just emotionally being in the context for six months of our conversations together, watching this woman, this remarkably, indominantly, ferociously intent lady with the heart of a child. She cries easily, she easily is upset, she’s a mother of two, and she is I would call a trans-religious spiritualist.

In Burma, it’s a land of perhaps 174 different dialects Rachael, 13 or 14 major ethnicities. We have Muslims, we have Hindus we have Sikhs, we have Tibetans, we have Burmese, we have Mahayana Buddhists, we have Vajrayana Buddhists we have Theravada Buddhists, Christians, Catholics, Baptists. It’s so many varieties of the human experience. And Aung San Suu Kyi having living in the west, she comes from a very sophisticated background that really sees beyond religion, I think, and be on to her own ‘ism’, Buddhism.

Didn’t she even have a Catholic education, or went to a Catholic school at some point?

I think so, in India. And her husband, her former husband, or her late husband, was a Professor of Tibetan Buddhism at Oxford. And so specifically she’s a very modern woman with a modern spiritual heart that really respects that love and compassion and kindness and goodness aren’t specific to one spirituality or one religion. And so in that sense she is leading a very contemporary, spiritual revolution.

(continues)

Pages: 1 2