Beyond Trauma: In Myanmar a Declaration of Hope in a Nation Traumatized

Alan Clements Part One The Buddha saw no first beginning of suffering. Few observations in the history of human inquiry demand a more radical reorientation of consciousness than these seven words. They overturn one of the deepest assumptions of the modern mind: that if we search carefully enough, excavate deeply enough, recover enough forgotten memories, identify enough formative experiences, or trace enough ancestral patterns, we will eventually arrive at the original source of our suffering. For the people of Myanmar, these words possess an immediacy that is difficult to exaggerate. They illuminate one of the great human tragedies of our time. After more than seven decades of military dictatorship, civil war, political imprisonment, ethnic persecution, forced displacement, censorship, and, most recently, the devastation unleashed by the military coup of February 1, 2021, one question reverberates across the nation’s history with heartbreaking persistence: Where did this suffering begin? Was it the coup itself?