01/06/2026
“There is no such thing as ‘traditional Buddhism.’”
For Marte Nilsen, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Buddhism is not a fixed inheritance. It is continually reinterpreted through lived experience, social change, political fear, and moral imagination.
Her work examines how religion interacts with power in Myanmar and Thailand, and how myths, symbols, art, ritual, and architecture can be used both to justify authority and resist it.
She begins with a striking painting by Burmese artist Chuu Wai, based on the sixteenth dream of King Pasenadi. In the original Buddhist story, goats chase lions, signaling a world where moral order has collapsed. In Chuu Wai’s version, the goats become the ignorance of the military, while the lions represent righteous students and citizens forced into exile. A laughing demon watches from behind, embodying the generals who orchestrate chaos.
From there, Nilsen traces a deeper pattern: the military’s long effort to claim Buddhist legitimacy through temples, pagodas, and public ritual, and the equally persistent efforts of monks, artists, citizens, and communities to reclaim those symbols as tools of critique.
Her analysis moves through Ma Ba Tha’s grassroots influence, the weaponization of religious anxiety, the moral rupture of the Rohingya crisis, the divisions within the Saṅgha after the 2021 coup, and the creative protest rituals that turned cosmology into resistance.
At the center is a profound question for Myanmar’s future: how does a society recover empathy after decades of fear, propaganda, and obedience?
Nilsen argues that Myanmar’s struggle is not only political. It is psychological, cultural, and spiritual. Real freedom will require more than the end of military rule. It will require rebuilding moral courage, unlearning fear, and remembering that no system, however entrenched, is permanent.
“Life isn’t permanent,” she says. “Everything will change. Nothing will stay.” Insight Myanmar Podcast
