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To help make his definition stick. U Nu challenged the Communists to free elections; they declined. He put his old playwriting "talent and inspiration" to work, dashed off an eight-scene morality play called The People Win Through, in which villainous Communists shoot the hero at the end. In this play (required reading in Burma's secondary schools), U Nu lets his characters speak his message. A Civil Servant complains: "Communists mustn't breathe through their own noses . . . They know perfectly well that white is white, but their bosses tell them that white is black: black it is for them . . ." A Guer rilla explains: "I'm fighting the Communists ... to prevent the people from being led about on a nose rope like castrated cattle." And A Refugee returns to report: "The Communists have given us a New Order . . . Break wind and you're hauled off to the people's court . . ."
"Thadu, Thadu, Thadu." The unique factor of Burma's counterrevolution—and the one that owes most to U Nu—is its Buddhist revival. "Karl Marx had very limited knowledge." says U Nu, "which is not equivalent to one-tenth of a particle of dust beneath the feet of Lord Buddha."
For more than 2,000 years, Buddhism has tended to unify Burma's different peoples; every Burmese village has its monastery, almost every hill its crowning pagoda, gold-leaf or whitewashed in the sun. "We will suffuse the whole world with loving thoughts," teaches Buddha the Guide, and the voices of authoritarians, like Mao Tse-tung, ring strangely in the Burmese consciousness. "We want to take the enemy's eyes and ears and seal them." cries Mao Tse-tung. "We want to throw them into utter confusion, driving them mad."
U Nu, son of a merchant who sold religious articles, brought sacred Buddhist relics back from Ceylon and sent them on a 20-city tour of Burma; he built a great Peace Pagoda seven miles from Rangoon, then spent $6,000,000 on two dozen more buildings, including a man-made cave, to accommodate the Sixth World Buddhist Council. He ordered department heads to dismiss civil servants 30 minutes ahead of time if they wished to meditate; he put his own Cabinet to work beside the laborers on pagoda construction. He remitted prison sentences of convicts who passed exams in Buddhism.*
U Nu gets up each morning at 4 o'clock to meditate for a couple of hours. For a while he became a total vegetarian, but the effect of his denials grew so marked—his eyes almost failed him last year—that doctors persuaded him to take "a little fish." In 1950, then 43 and the father of five children, U Nu chose to enter the state of Bramachariya, or sexual abstinence, which is considered "extraordinary" in that Buddhism does not require such abstinence of its lay supporters. One day in Parliament, U Nu introduced a bill for the promotion of religion. Unanimously the M.P.s passed it; in unison they intoned. "Thadu, Thadu, Thadu," which amounted to a vote of confidence in U Nu's religious leadership. Thadu is the Burmese word for both "Amen" and "Well done."