One Time, One Meeting

As the world knows, Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace prize laureate and leader of the opposition in Myanmar, was released from house arrest in November, 2010. What is not so well known is that during her long years of confinement—fifteen of the past twenty-one—Aung San Suu Kyi relied on meditation to maintain her equanimity. Every morning, she practiced Vipassana (“insight”) meditation, concentrating on the rising and falling of her abdomen. Her practice, she has since reported, enabled her to deal with the “intense irritation and impatience” she felt toward those who had imprisoned her. It also helped her cope with the loss of her husband to prostate cancer and her subsequent estrangement from her two sons. “After years of meditation,” she has said, “I think you remain very much on an even keel. There is not much difference to you mentally whether you’ve been released or not.”*

Myanmar used to be called Burma. And Aung San Suu Kyi’s meditative stability in the midst of political turmoil brings to mind Michio Takeyama’s novel The Harp of Burma (1946),** whose central theme is the preservation of one’s humanity in a time of war. Set in the last days of World War II and the period immediately following, this short novel depicts a company of war-weary Japanese soldiers, who are losing their campaign against the British in the tropical jungles of Burma. Fortunately for the troops, their captain is a musician, who has taught the men to sing; and though they are exhausted and homesick, they have kept their spirits up by singing Western and Japanese songs. Among their favorites is “Hanyu no Yado,” a Japanese version of “Home, Sweet Home.” And in one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, in which the company is surrounded by British forces and is bracing itself for an attack, the company’s harpist, Corporal Mizushima, plays “Hanyu no Yado” on his Burmese harp.  To everyone’s surprise, the British soldiers hidden in the forest can be heard singing “Home, Sweet Home.” Shortly thereafter, the British come out of hiding, and the Japanese learn that the war is over.

In that pivotal scene, Corporal Mizushima assumes the foreground. And as the novel progresses, Mizushima’s personal transformation becomes the center of attention. A man of meditative disposition, whose face wears “the sad, contemplative expression that tropical peoples such as the Burmese often have,” he is sent on a mission to persuade a remnant of Japanese troops, who are holding out against British artillery, to give up their suicidal effort and surrender. His mission fails, and he is separated from his company. To survive, he acquires a monk’s robes and wanders unnoticed through the villages. But as the narrator observes, clothes influence a person’s outlook; and it is not long before Mizushima, who has been impersonating a Theravadan Buddhist monk, elects to become one. Wearing his robes, he visits the British prison camp where his fellow soldiers have been confined, and they observe that he “seems to be meditating, peering into his own heart.” Later they learn that Mizushima, having come upon the decomposing bodies of  Japanese soldiers during his wanderings, has decided to stay in Burma to bury the dead.

Throughout the Harp of Burma, Mizushima’s peaceful, meditative temperament is associated with the 13-string Burmese harp, an ancient instrument with a long and venerable tradition. Made of “finely polished inlaid wood and shaped like an eggplant,” it produces a lingering, ethereal sound. As the narrator explains, Burmese music is said to have begun in imitation of rain drops, and the tones of the Burmese harp, “now high, now low,” are “joined in innumerable intertwining strands, falling in and out like the long sigh of a soul drifting toward heaven.”  By its very nature, the Burmese harp induces a sense of peace. And in The Harp of Burma, the instrument’s gentle tones, rooted in nature and harmonious with natural rhythms, come to represent a way of being that Takeyama attributes to the Burmese people. In contrast to the overweening Japanese, the Burmese “accept the world as it is,” rather than try “to change it according to their own designs.”  Rather than “wishing to master everything through strength or intellect,” they “aim for salvation through humility and reliance on a power greater than themselves.” Rather than try “to control nature by their efforts,” they have learned to “yield to it and merge into a broader, deeper order of being.”