Episode #619: “My motto is love is the most powerful magic,” says Elizabeth Yee, a Burmese medical doctor, writer, and activist who joined the Civil Disobedience Movement after the 2021 coup. Now living in Thailand, she works with the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP) on mental-health and psychosocial support, while also branching into art.

As a child, Elizabeth devoured Chinese martial-arts novels that inspired her belief in justice and self-discipline. The work of one Burmese author, a physician-novelist, persuaded her to enter medical school, where she had the thought to “become a doctor and then write a lot of books.” Supported by Chinese-Burmese parents who broke with tradition to favor their daughter— based largely on her father’s belief that she was the reincarnation of his father— she excelled and became an assistant surgeon. Yet she rebelled against Myanmar’s military-controlled, politically-entangled medical system. She refused to take its restrictive exam and instead studied for the UK’s MRCP (Membership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians) qualification.

During the COVID pandemic, she began exploring digital education and saw the regime’s inefficiency firsthand. When the coup erupted, she resigned to join the protests. She was cited under Article 505A—effectively her arrest warrant. She fled her Yangon apartment and went underground while continuing to provide medical aid at demonstrations. Eventually, she fled to the countryside. After a year treating rural villagers, she crossed into Thailand, determined to stay there and not to abandon the revolution.

At AAPP, she combines medicine, psychology, and activism, learning from political-prisoner survivors and discovering feminism, which she defines as “justice with love.” She is now a dedicated artist, using AI to help compose music, and creating paintings that express her feelings and passions around the themes of feminism, ecology, and resistance. Art, she says, is both healing and defiance. “We need to fight until we are done,” she says quietly, “because there are so many unjust things.”

Episode #618: U Jāgara’s journey into Burmese Buddhism provides valuable exploration of meditation traditions and their adaptation to modern contexts. In this fourth appearance on the platform, he begins by talking about Ledi Sayadaw, a Burmese monk who revitalized Theravada meditation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, making it accessible to both monks and lay practitioners through his teaching and writings. U Jāgara emphasizes Ledi Sayadaw’s dynamic and personalized approach to teaching, contrasting it with the standardized method of S.N. Goenka, highlighting the flexibility of Burmese Buddhism in addressing varied, spiritual needs.

U Jāgara also explores the tension between universal accessibility on the one hand, and preserving the nuanced richness of Burmese traditions on the other. He contrasts Goenka’s singular focus on sensation-based vipassana with Ledi Sayadaw’s multifaceted approach, which integrates textual study, personalized meditation, and understanding foundational Buddhist principles such as dependent origination and the analysis of the four elements. He believes that these distinctions underscore the need to find a balance between authenticity and modernization in Burmese Buddhism, as well as in the global mindfulness movement.

He delves into Pa Auk Sayadaw’s teachings, which emphasize deep concentration (samathā) to achieve profound insight (vipassanā) into dependent origination and karmic causality. While controversial to some, Pa Auk’s methods resonate deeply within Burmese cultural and religious norms and enrich the ongoing dialogue among practitioners worldwide about the relationship between concentration and insight.

U Jāgara reflects on the need to balance textual study with meditative practice, cautioning against overemphasizing either. He discusses the resilience of Burmese Buddhism even amid socio-political challenges. And he advocates for a deeper engagement with the ethical and philosophical dimensions of one’s practice as a transformative journey toward self-understanding and compassion, in contrast to the belief that reliance on a single meditation technique can have the same effect. U Jāgara’s narrative underscores Burmese Buddhism’s enduring relevance and adaptability.

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.