Episode #617: This is the first episode in a seven part series, which examines how Buddhist law and institutions have shaped religious life, and how they interact with secular legal systems.

The first guest, Rebecca Redwood French, begins with a lawyer’s question: “What [is] the morality behind legal systems?” It took her from public defense work to Tibetan exile communities in India, where she interviewed former judges and officials, translated law codes, and eventually wrote her acclaimed book, The Golden Yoke. Returning to North American academia, she found Buddhism treated mainly as meditation and private morality, while its legal traditions were dismissed as monastic discipline.

French responded by helping to build a field. An initial meeting produced plans for books, conferences, a journal, and a scholarly network, eventually leading to Buddhism, Law and Society and four conferences by 2026. Her claim is that the Vinaya shaped far more than monastery life; it influenced punishment, exchange, political authority, and statecraft.

Her Tibetan cases showed judges sometimes trying to transform offenders rather than isolate them. Her later work extended Buddhist law into donation, merit, intention, and joy. The difficulty remains making these legal worlds visible without reducing them to rules or stripping away the values that gave them force.

The next guest, Sanjayan Rajasingham, is a Tamil Christian and law professor at the University of Jaffna, and he studies how Buddhism has shaped constitutions in Theravada-majority states. His concern is that religious power often enters law indirectly, through national stories that make majority control appear necessary for protecting the Dhamma.

In Sri Lanka, the unitary state and executive presidency contain little explicitly Buddhist language. Yet both are understood through the Mahavamsa story that the Sinhala people were entrusted with preserving Buddhism. Centralized authority can then appear necessary, while minorities are cast as threats.

Thailand follows a related pattern, with the monarch treated as a Buddhist guardian able to restrain elected institutions. Rajasingham argues that inherited narratives “have a power of their own,” and their consequences have included violence against non-Buddhists and repression of dissent.

Yet he sees another possibility within the same tradition: “What better way to preserve the Dhamma than to live out the fact that ‘the other’ is truly welcome?” As for Myanmar, he feels that a future constitution must prevent religious protection from becoming another route back to exclusion.

Episode #616: Joseph, a community leader among Myanmar refugees in Malaysia, and Patrick, an advocacy specialist working on refugee and migrant issues there, speak about their work and the very challenging situation faced by Myanmar refugees. Refugees themselves, while they have adapted to daily life in Malaysia, that adaptation never became security. Even after many years, they still live with constraints imposed by their legal status.

Because Malaysia was not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, those fleeing conflict are permitted to remain in the country but are not legally recognized as refugees and have no pathway to citizenship or permanent residency. There is also a large and growing group of stateless children born to refugee parents, who can neither obtain citizenship from Myanmar nor legal status in Malaysia.

Joseph and Patrick connect the cumulative effects of violence in Myanmar, dangerous flight, detention risk, economic exploitation, and prolonged legal uncertainty to a widening mental health crisis. They hear from individuals experiencing severe psychological distress, including suicidal thoughts and paranoia. At the same time, mental health services for refugees have largely collapsed there. As a result, refugees with serious psychological conditions have nowhere else to turn.

In response to all these challenges, Joseph and Patrick run community-based training programs that teach culture, language and survival skills. Many newcomers have never before lived outside Myanmar and so are unfamiliar with the exigencies of cross-cultural awareness and understanding. These programs also address the importance of dignity and restoring hope.

Both men reflect on the psychological toll of their own long-term exile and community involvement. Unlike those resettled in Western countries, they continue to imagine their return at some unknown point in the future as the only true endpoint. This prolonged suspension—neither fully rebuilding a life elsewhere, nor fully relinquishing the hope to return home—shapes how Myanmar refugees in Malaysia endure displacement.

Patrick and Joseph say the Burmese people are fighting not for leaders but for freedom and dignity, and he asks those who believe in freedom to stay with them. They end with this plea: “Please don’t forget about Myanmar!”

Episode #615: “My passion for journalism and for telling stories to others still remain,” says Min Mitchell, former executive editor at Radio Free Asia, a U.S.-funded news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with restricted media. Min is also the wife of former US Ambassador Derek Mitchell, who represented the American mission during the country's brief democratic opening. Drawing on a career spanning Taiwanese journalism, U.S.-funded international media and China reporting, Mitchell argues that independent journalism provides an essential public service by delivering trustworthy information to people living under censorship, while documenting repression, conflict, and humanitarian crises.

She explains that RFA reports for audiences living in countries where independent information is unavailable or tightly controlled, requiring journalists to adapt constantly as governments restrict the flow of news. Following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup, RFA expanded shortwave broadcasting when internet shutdowns made digital communication unreliable. “Journalism,” she says, “is not just telling news. You also providing people useful information to deal with what is going on the ground.”

Mitchell believes U.S.-funded international media demonstrate democratic values by providing independent reporting rather than serving commercial interests or political agendas. During her years at RFA, covering increasingly authoritarian environments strengthened her conviction that journalists must report facts accurately and without bias. Even as social media, artificial intelligence, and state-sponsored influence campaigns reshape the information landscape, she insists that trusted journalism remains indispensable.

Although concerned by declining global press freedom, Mitchell remains hopeful that societies can reaffirm the importance of truthful reporting and shared democratic values. The quality she returns to most often is resilience. Remembering a Burmese colleague who reassured her after the coup with a simple smiling message, she concludes, “No matter what happens… people have that resilience to get through it, to endure it, and to eventually come out of it.” For Mitchell, that enduring resilience is Myanmar’s greatest lesson.

Episode #614: Richard Evans, an architect who began practice in the S.N. Goenka Vipassana tradition, describes his life as a search for truth grounded in direct experience rather than belief. In this discussion, he presents that search as the thread connecting his early skepticism, his confrontation with anxiety, and his later commitment to meditation as a way of testing what was real.

That search began in childhood, when he attended Anglican church services and felt that something did not add up. He did not accept what he was being told about God and expected some kind of consequence for that disbelief… yet nothing happened. That moment shook his trust in inherited belief and left him looking for something that could stand on its own. As he grew older, that question stayed with him. At one point, while walking down the street, he asked himself what he actually wanted from life; the answer that came was not career or stability, but the need to knowtruth itself.

His own experience of anxiety gave the search greater urgency. He describes this as a serious issue within his family, yet his own experience of it still felt isolating. Over time, however, he recognized that what he was experiencing was not unique; it was a recognition changed his search from trying to understand the world, to finding a way to relate to suffering without avoiding it.

That need led him to Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka, which became the first clearly defined method in his search. The first course was difficult, but it gave him a way to test what he was being told against what he could observe. Later, as his experience deepened, the structure of the practice and the organizational constraints no longer felt sufficient on its own. Conversations with other practitioners helped him refine his understanding, and doubt became less an obstacle than a sign of the edge of what he understood.

He describes his practice now as more self-directed, guided by observation, conversation, and continued inquiry, and no longer compelled to discover a “final answer.”

Episode #613: Mike is a lifelong martial artist who came to Myanmar through martial arts training rather than faith, and yet found himself pulled into a Burmese esoteric world he had not been looking for. The line he returns to as both method and warning is simple: “See things as they are, not as they appear.”

He began formal training in the late 1950s, moving through Japanese systems before encountering Burmese martial arts in the United States decades later. What held him was not spectacle but a demanding structure, built around principles, weapons work, conditioning, and long timelines for advancement. That discipline set the conditions for everything that followed. When he first traveled to Mogok in the mid-1990s, it was not as a spiritual seeker. He describes himself as not religious, and skeptical of claims that could not be tested.

In Mogok, he watched demonstrations that crossed into trance and invulnerability, where practitioners endured blades, flame, and boiling water while in altered states. The moment that stayed with him was not the performance but the logic offered afterward: when trance breaks, the protection leaves. Soon he was questioned about his conduct and invited into initiation rites that tied martial discipline to mental training and vows. The five precepts were treated as a foundational requirement, with specific restrictions on alcohol, drugs, and even meat on the grounds that “wild minds,” when ingested, carried effects into samathā practice.

Back in the United States, the initiation continued working on him, pushing him toward teachers across traditions and into a daily meditation routine he continues to this day, while also deepening a conviction—first raised by teachers in Mogok and later affirmed in other encounters—that he had been Ta’ang in a past life.

That same insistence on unsentimental perception shapes his political reading of Myanmar’s war. Mike rejects neat models that ignore fragmentation and uneven power, and he argues that durable outcomes depend on leverage and enforcement, not slogans. In both arenas, he is arguing for the same discipline: train the mind to stop seeing what it wants to see, or it will keep repeating the same decisions.

Episode #612: “You do create a dependency. You create a long-term relationship that also you can leverage into political influence as well.” Ian Storey, a principal fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore, sees that dependency as the thread connecting Russia’s military, energy, diplomatic and nuclear ties with Myanmar. The relationship is economically small, but it gives Moscow influence in precisely the sectors the military government has needed most since the 2021 coup.

Myanmar began turning toward Russian weapons in the early 2000s after years of heavy dependence on China. Russian fighter aircraft, helicopters and training later became embedded in the military’s capabilities, creating continuing requirements for spare parts, maintenance, munitions and technical expertise. Since the coup, Russia has also supplied oil and refined products, including aviation fuel, while the two governments developed ruble-kyat payment arrangements and other ways to conduct trade under sanctions.

The political exchange is equally transactional. Myanmar’s military government endorsed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while Moscow has provided diplomatic recognition and continued military support. Yet Russia will not sacrifice its wider ASEAN interests for Myanmar, and Storey stresses that the country remains a relatively minor Russian market.

Nuclear cooperation could make the relationship much harder to unwind. After more than two decades of discussions and training, Russia has agreed to provide Myanmar with a small modular reactor, although construction has not begun. If built, the plant would tie Myanmar to Russian financing, operation, fuel and technical services for decades.

Storey doubts Moscow would commit major resources to rescue the military if it faced collapse. Russia remains a secondary power in Southeast Asia, pursuing narrow advantages in arms, energy and nuclear technology. For now, however, those narrow advantages align closely with the military regime’s needs, leaving Myanmar exposed to a partnership that can be deeply consequential without ever becoming deeply committed.

Episode #611: “I always want to be free.” Lienchi Tran, a Vietnamese American meditation teacher, first learned what unfreedom meant in postwar Vietnam. After South Vietnam fell in 1975, her father was sent to a reeducation camp, the family was expelled from Saigon, and the children were scattered among relatives. At night, Tran tied a rubber band around her fingers to keep herself awake while reciting the Buddha’s name and praying for her father’s safety and eventual return.

Raised in Mahāyāna Buddhism and shaped by the writings of Thích Nhất Hạnh, she began meditating seriously as a teenager. Yet an image of a Theravāda monk, seen just before her family emigrated in 1990, opened another direction. In California she found Bhante Khippañño, trained in Mahāsi practice, ordained as a nun, and traveled to Myanmar for an intensive forest retreat under Sayadaw U Paṇḍita. Myanmar felt like a second home, but the freedom she sought did not finally lie in austerity or ordination.

Under Sayadaw U Tejaniya, Tran found a practice built around awareness and wisdom rather than a fixed formula. Eating, engaging in her householder task as an architect, feeling anger, and caring for family could all become part of the same investigation. The task was neither to suppress difficult states nor to make them disappear, but to know what was present and strengthen a different momentum from greed, aversion, and delusion. She applies the same approach to dāna, which she defines as a kind of letting go, and to sīla, which she notes is an examination of the mind before speech or action.

Now a teacher herself, Tran no longer considers robes the measure of seriousness. She remains in the United States to care for her mother, while imagining a return to Myanmar and long practice near Sayadaw U Tejaniya when that responsibility ends. The monastery still attracts her, but not because a nun’s clothing can confer freedom. Practice must proceed through the mind and conditions she actually has, including the attachment she can admit without disguise: the bed at home is still more comfortable than the one at the center.

Episode #610: “I can't leave anymore, because if I were to leave now, I would like never be able to live the same way, because of the comrades who have fallen and the comrades that are still with me… I would not be able to have that guilt with me.”

Dr. Sunshine— a pseudonym that reflects both his warmth and resilience— is a Burmese physician whose life has become deeply intertwined with Myanmar’s modern struggle for freedom and survival.

After the coup, he learned tactical combat medicine to help protesters under fire. Soon he was teaching others—first small groups, then resistance fighters and medics hiding in the jungle. “I’ll shoot him in the hand,” he tells trainees in role-playing sessions. “He will have three minutes until he bleeds out. What are you going to do?”

After fleeing to Thailand, Dr. Sunshine continued traveling through border regions, training men and women from every ethnicity and faith. “We have Muslim soldiers,” he says. “Even during Ramadan, [the non-Muslim PDFs] respect the prayer times and fasting.” He beams when describing this unity: “It’s incredible how everyone comes together inside, even [towards] women and LGBT—they all treat them equally.”

Dr. Sunshine also helps run secret jungle clinics that treat hundreds of displaced people and fighters. “All we’re doing is trying to extend the life of a patient that comes in until they get to a hospital or clinic that can help treat them,” he explains. Supplies are scarce—“I was at one PDF base,” he adds, “they have like four or five hundred soldiers there, and only two tourniquets!”

He admits the toll is immense. “Every time I go in for a training, when I come back, I’ll cry like a baby in my room.” Yet his message remains simple and resolute: “Don’t give up on us. Even just words of support mean everything.”