Akron Mon Community Brings Buddha Relic

ေကာန္ဂေကာံမန္ဍဳင္အၾကန္ေကတ္ဏင္ဓါတ္က်ာ္ၾတဲ

The Mon People and Language

There are a million+ Mon-speaking people living in Burma today.

 The Mon, a member of the Mon-Khmer family belonging to the Austroasiatic group, were the oldest inhabitants of both old Siam (Thailand) and old Burma (Myanmar). They had kingdoms both in old Siam and old Burma, flourishing from the sixth to the eighteenth centuries. They were in contact with India from very early times. They were regarded as a seafaring people and pioneers in wet-rice cultivation. It is widely known that the Mon people played a significant role in spreading and propagating Indian civilization in Southeast Asia during the early centuries of the Christian Era. The classical period of Mon history came to an end in 1757, when the Burman warrior-king, Alaungpaya (aka) Aung Zeya, conquered the last sovereign Mon kingdom of Hamsavati (aka) Pegu, which covered the whole of today’s lower Burma. Over the period of two and a half centuries since the fall of the last Mon kingdom, it has been supposed that Mon was a dying language and the people in the twilight of their history.

Mon civilization was among the most distinctive and influential in precolonial Southeast Asia. Significant aspects of the language, art and architecture, political and legal arrangements, and above all the religion of the great Thai and Burman civilizations were derived from the earlier Mon society, which acted as a vector in the transmission of Theravada Buddhism and Indianized political culture to the region. For more than a thousand years, neighbouring societies have been deeply influenced by Mon cultural, religious and political concepts. It is this phenomenon that gives the Mon a special place in the history of Southeast Asia. Mon has been a literary language since at least the sixth century – i.e. well before the ancestors of the Thais or Burmans reached modern-day Thailand or Burma. With the exception of the long-departed Pyu, the Mon was the first literate culture in Burma. The Burman/Burmese script is derived from the Mon, as are some aspects of the Thai.

Like the Burmans and Thais, the Mon are a lowland people. However, over the centuries, many have fled or been displaced within their traditional homelands. Thus recent Mon history has much in common with that of the Karen and other ethnic minority groups. The Mon, along with other ethnic non-Burman minority groups, have long sought to define themselves in opposition to the Burman majority, which has dominated the central government in Rangoon since Burma’s independence from the British in 1948. The Mon people have struggled to defend their historical Mon identity from assimilation into that of the Burman majority. Although during the late 1950s and early 1960s, U Nu’s elected civilian administrations allowed the Mon a degree of cultural and political freedom, since 1962 Mon identity has been under direct assault from the successive military governments. Mon language teaching has been banned from state schools and all but the most apolitical cultural celebrations have been repressed.

Over the last four decades of the military rule in Burma, it has suppressed any voice of opposition in the country by means of oppressive laws and decrees. The right of the citizens freely to take part in the government of their country is non-existent in Burma. Gross human rights violations by the Burmese Army such as forced labor, including forced portering labor for the military, forced relocation and population displacement, indiscriminate shooting and killing, torture, rape, summary or arbitrary execution, arbitrary confiscation of land, looting and plundering etc. – have been common in the outlying rural ethnic non-Burman areas or the war zones.   

The ethnic non-Burman peoples of the country, including the Mon, have systematically been deprived of their birth rights to teaching and learning their own ethnic languages and to preserving their own cultural heritage. The ethnic non-Burman people are not allowed to study their own ethnic languages in state schools, whereas Burman/Burmese is made the only official language in the country and taught as a major subject from kindergarten through university. For two and a half centuries since the fall of the last sovereign Mon kingdom, the Mon Buddhist monasteries served as the only places keeping old Mon palm-leaf manuscripts and as the only schools teaching the basic Mon literature to Mon children.

Over the last three decades, patriotic Mon youth and monastic communities have taken a united effort in realizing a self-help summer Mon literacy movement throughout Mon State, teaching tens of thousands of Mon children and adults the basic Mon literature each year (80,000 students according to the 2009 statistics). This self-help Mon literacy movement provides the only glimmer of hope for the Mon people in the country to learn their own language and literature. Even this self-help Mon literacy movement is not allowed to continue and grow freely under chronic Burman-dominated military rule. 

The last sovereign Mon kingdom of Hamsavati (aka) Pegu was invaded and annexed by the neighboring Burman kingdom in 1757. Since then, the Mon have become a people without a country. Ven. Akworh, the Mon priest from a town nearby Pegu who was the most famous Mon writer of his time and who also experienced the ruthless genocidal atrocities inflicted upon the Mon people by Burman King Alaungpaya, stated that Alaungpaya was a most blood-thirsty king who executed tens of thousands of innocent non-combatant Mon people – including men, women, children, and over 3,000 Mon Buddhist monks in most cruel methods -- including trampling by elephants or burning to death in several stockade-inferno holocausts. The Burman king also destroyed almost all the Mon palm-leaf manuscripts and stone inscriptions. Hundreds of thousands of the then Mon populace fled into Siam (Thailand) for safe haven, taking along with them the surviving palm-leaf manuscripts. All these palm leaves have been kept at the several Mon Buddhist monasteries in Thailand until today.

Mon is a rich and mature language developed a thousand years earlier than the Burman/Burmese written language. After the invasion of the Mon kingdom in Suvanahbumi (aka) Thaton in 1057 A.D., Burman King Anawratha took a community of Mon Buddhist monks together with the Buddhist literature and established the Buddhist religion in Pagan. The Mon scriptures were well kept in a brick building called Pitakataik. The Mon language was used as an official court language for over half a century by the successive Burman kings in Pagan, since the Burman/Burmese language was still in its infancy and the Mon literature at its height. For millenia when the Mon people lived in their own sovereign country, the Mon literature flourished in full bloom, with so many professional monk and layman writers.