Singapore Special Report: Part 2

Buddhist worshippers pay homage to monks at the [Myanmar] Buddhist Temple in Singapore. Pic: James Pitkin

SINGAPORE – Multi-coloured lights swirl behind the head of a Buddha image, while a handful of worshippers sit in meditation on the floor below. The silence is broken only by a woman’s voice as she chants a prayer.

It’s a scene typical of many Myanmar religious sites. But this is the heart of Singapore – where city residents have built a temple to promote Myanmar’s unique brand of Theravada Buddhism.

For the city’s Myanmar residents, the [Myanmar] Buddhist Temple is a place to meet friends, educate their young, give thanks for good fortune, and pray for support in a strange land.

“Because we’re in a different country here, sometimes we’re confused, or we’re in a dangerous position,” said Ko Latt, a 30-year-old electrician who gave an offering at the temple last month. “So we come to pray here, and we feel better.”

The temple is just one sign that Singapore’s Myanmar community is growing both in size and influence. Migration began en masse when Myanmar joined ASEAN in 1997. Now academics and residents put their numbers at 50,000 or more, in a city of 4.4 million.

Myanmar residents have taken over three floors of a downtown shopping mall in Singapore, filling opening shops that sell Myanmar goods and help workers send money home to Myanmar.

Winged lions guard the entrance to the [Myanmar] Buddhist Temple. Pic: James Pitkin

The mall is where the city’s Myanmar residents do business. The temple is where they celebrate birthdays, honour the dead, give thanks for promotions and accumulate religious merit for the next life.

Built in 1991, the temple has all the trappings of a typical Myanmar shrine – elaborate wrought-iron fixtures line the multi-level roofs, and fierce winged lions guard the door.

But inside the three-storey building is a mix of Myanmar worshippers and Chinese-Singaporean Buddhists. The two groups play an equal role in running the temple, combining to donate S$3000 (US$2000) a month to cover maintenance.

In a sign of the temple’s Chinese influence, worship-pers light incense sticks, say a prayer and place them in a sand-filled urn at the door before stepping inside – a practice typical in China’s Buddhist temples.

Tan Geok Koon, editor of the temple’s monthly newsletter, said Chinese-Singaporeans make up about half the temple’s worshippers and half of its governing board. “They don’t regard it as a [Myanmar] temple but as a Buddhist temple,” he said.

But the temple’s roots are planted firmly in Myanmar.

The centrepiece of the main prayer hall is a three-metre (10-foot) sitting Buddha that originally stood on Sagyin Hill outside Mandalay. In 1916 it began a two-year journey to Singapore – pulled by water buffalos to Mandalay, taken by train to Yangon and finally shipped by sea to Singapore.

Tan Geok Koon said the statue’s owners lost their house and the Buddha was left homeless. So in 1991, local residents pulled together S$3 million to build the temple to house it.

Today, he said, about 1000 people use the temple – teaching weekly Buddhism classes, sharing the temple’s kitchen and extensive library, finding peace in the third-floor meditation hall and making offerings to the four residents Myanmar monks.

For Myanmar residents, the temple is an important social centre and a way to keep their Myanmar identity in a diverse and global city.

Ma May Thu takes her two children to the temple’s dhamma classes, where monks teach the tenets of Buddhism and how to recite scriptures in Pali language.

Before the lessons, she worried that her kids were losing touch with their Buddhist background in Singapore.

“They didn’t know how to say their prayers, and it’s hard to teach them at home,” she said. “Now they know the basics of Buddhism. That’s important for Buddhist parents like us.”

On a Sunday morning last month, a group of Myanmar geologists in Singapore gathered at the temple, cooking pots of curry on a patio out back.

The feast was for their families and the monks in memory of Dr Ba Than Haq, former chair of Yangon University’s geology depart-ment, who died three years ago.

“He was a very good man, a sort of father to us,” said Kyaw Naing Oo, a land surveyor from Yangon who has worked in Singapore for 10 years. “So we do this each year, to keep his memory.”

He said he brings his family to the temple every two months – or whenever life in Singapore demands it.

“Sometimes we get stressed out. We have a lot of difficulties,” he said. “So we come and we pray for what we want.”