Where Freedom Breathes

World Dharma Publications

What you are about to read is a fictional dialogue—between myself and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi—from my recent book, the second in a trilogy. These dialogues are fictional only in the narrowest sense. This excerpt is drawn from many sources across time: from earlier books I have written or co-authored, including The Voice of Hope, which Daw Suu and I created together in 1995–1996; from conversations we shared; from dialogues with the late Venerable Sayadaw U Pandita, the Buddhist meditation teacher we both studied with; from her talks, writings, and published articles; and from deep, sustained research into the consciousness of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi herself—her relationship to Dhamma, revolution, freedom, her father, nonviolence, and reconciliation.

It also arises from years of collaborative investigation and witness alongside trusted friends, mentors, and colleagues working closely with senior members of the National League for Democracy, committed to preserving primary truth against distortion. All of it arises from more than forty years of work, witness, and direct involvement in Burma’s struggle for freedom.

I share this excerpt because it touches, in an essential way, the heart of my love for Daw Suu, for the people of Burma, and for the immeasurable gift I received from the culture itself. That gift was formed during the brief yet formative years I spent as a bhikkhu (Buddhist monk) at the Mahasi Sasana Yeiktha in Rangoon, practicing Satipaṭṭhāna insight (vipassana) meditation under my preceptor, the late Venerable Mahasi Sayadaw, and later under his successor, the late Venerable Sayadaw U Pandita. Those years shaped not only my understanding of Buddhism, but my understanding of conscience, dignity, and moral courage.

This work also carries the long and intimate association I shared with Daw Suu herself, and with many of her mentors and closest colleagues—U Tin Oo, U Win Tin, U Kyi Maung, U Win Htein—as well as with countless women and men of the National League for Democracy and the wider movement: students and elders, villagers and prisoners, whose lives illuminated what I consider one of the greatest revolutions I have ever known. As Daw Suu and her colleagues called it, the Revolution of the Spirit.

That work was also made possible through the tireless contribution of my colleague and co-author Fergus Harlow, whose commitment to the people of Burma helped bring the voices and lived words of former political prisoners into the world—most fully through our four-volume series Burma’s Voices of Freedom (2020), a body of testimony shaped by decades of listening, care, and moral fidelity.

I have often said that while Daw Suu is a practicing Buddhist, she is also, in an essential sense, trans-Buddhist. She rooted her understanding of freedom not only in Dhamma, but in the moral clarity of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that all beings are born equal in dignity and rights. Conscience and dignity, as she lived them, exist both within and beyond philosophy, psychology, meditation, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity—outside religion, yet intimate to all of it. That quality was something I came to love deeply about Burma, and about Daw Suu herself.

In sharing this excerpt, my hope is simple: that it may offer some small but meaningful support to the beloved people of Myanmar as they struggle—daily and courageously—for what many elsewhere take for granted: the oxygen of freedom, democracy, mutuality, and peaceful coexistence.