Monks in Myanmar have a new target

THEY HAD travelled for hours, some for days. It didn’t matter. They had made it to Taung Pyone. Every August hundreds of thousands of pilgrims from all over Myanmar descend on this village 20km north of Mandalay to commune with nats, spirits willing to bless the faithful with good fortune if they are given the right offering. Nats accept bananas, coconuts, booze and cash—the more the better. At this year’s festival, devotees clutching wads of bills queued under a gazebo to meet one of the nats’ flesh-and-blood envoys, a medium. But the time-honoured display of piety is marred by seven Buddhist nuns with shaved heads and pink robes, who are bickering with the devotees. Nat worship, the nuns insist, is base superstition—a stain on the true faith.

Buddhism is the overwhelmingly dominant religion in Myanmar. Roughly 90% of the population is Buddhist. There are some 500,000 monks and a further 75,000 nuns in a country of 54m. Holy folk have often been at the forefront of politics, leading the failed “saffron revolution” against military rule in 2007, for instance. More recently nationalist monks have helped propagate the idea that Buddhism is under threat in Myanmar, and urged holy war against Muslims—a campaign that helps explain public indifference about the army’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group living in the extreme west of the country.