Rebirth and Perfection in Ordinary Lives: Biographical Writing and Vernacular Religious Ethics in Twentieth-Century Myanmar

Abstract

This article investigates stories of rebirth and ascriptions of pāramī, ethical perfection, in a 1982 biography of the Buddhist nun Daw Gunawati (1890-1991) of Khemethaka nunnery in Sagaing Hills, Myanmar. In this and other contemporary biographical narratives, the cosmic timescale of Buddhist ethical cultivation protects and authorizes girls and women who wish to circumvent social expectations of marriage in order to initiate as nuns. In conversation with Leela Prasad's concept of “ethical resonance,” I examine pāramī as an idiom of Buddhist authority through which women reconstruct family relationships and reimagine monastic belonging. I propose new interpretive strategies that center vernacular theorists and affective registers of personal encounter in the study of Buddhist ethics, with further implications for the inclusion of vernacular, non-canonical textuality in studies of religious ethics.