FACTBOX: Myanmar's Buddhist monks
(Reuters) - Following are five key facts about Myanmar's Buddhist monks, the engine of protests six months ago against decades of military rule and deepening poverty.
-- At any one time, there are 500,000 Buddhist monks, novices and nuns in Myanmar, a nation of 53 million people. Around 90 percent of the population are Theravada Buddhist, the rest being Muslim, Christian, Hindu or animist.
-- Monks are supposed to stay out of temporal affairs such as politics, but have a long history of protest, starting with the Young Men's Buddhist Associations (YMBAs) set up at the end of the 19th century to counter Burma's British imperial rulers.
-- The campaign against British rule became known as the "Shoe Question" since British officials refused to remove their footwear when entering temples, a sign of grave disrespect.
Violence erupted in Mandalay in 1919 when monks tried to expel a group of shoe-wearing British from a pagoda.
-- In line with the Buddhist philosophy of removal from earthly desire, everything a monks owns or consumes is supposed to be donated by the lay community.
In practice, this means monks going out every morning to collect alms -- mostly food -- from near their monasteries.
The system makes them a key barometer of the economy, since people struggle to give them enough to eat in lean times.
In return for alms, the monk bestows on the donor the "merit" that will eventually help him or her achieve nirvana, or release from the cycle of rebirth.
-- Men are supposed to enter the monkhood twice in their lives, once as a novice aged between 10 and 20, and once as a fully ordained monk any time after their 20th birthday.
(Reporting by Ed Cropley; Editing by Michael Battye and Megan Goldin)
