Vasipake Sayadaw

Bhaddanta Vimala Ashin Kovida (Burmese: ကောဝိဒ; born 14 May 1957), best known as Vasipake Sayadaw (Burmese: ဝစီပိတ်ဆရာတော်), is a Burmese Buddhist monk, astrologer and occult practitioner.[1] He is believed to be the Senior General Min Aung Hlaing's astrological adviser. He is famous for his vow of silence. Vasipake played a major role in the 2021 Myanmar coup d'état.[2]

Bhaddanta Vimala Ashin
Kovida
ကောဝိဒ
Personal
Born14 May 1957 (1957-05-14) (age 66)
ReligionBuddhism
DenominationTheravada
Dharma namesKovida
TempleThiladhamma Gonethar Tawya Monastery, Keng Tung

Life

His origin is very unclear.[1]

Sayadaw is the abbot of Thiladhamma Gonethar Tawya Monastery in Keng Tung. Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has been his follower since 2006, when he was serving as the commander of the Myanmar military's Triangle Region, which oversees eastern Shan State. Some people believed that he is to be Min Aung Hlaing's spiritual cover. He has ties with Sitagu Sayadaw.[3][4]

In February 2020, Sayadaw was with Min Aung Hlaing and his wife Kyu Kyu Hla when they placed the "Hti" umbrella on top Bagan's most powerful ancient Htilominlo Temple. The meaning of the temple name is "need the royal umbrella, need the King". He was following in the footsteps of some of Myanmar's most powerful political figures including his predecessor, Senior General Than Shwe. Many people believed that the ceremony was a yadaya and seeking divine blessings for his glory.[5]

Sayadaw has been accused of providing the coup leader Min with his astrological advice for the takeover. He has been accused of advising the senior general to tell security forces to shoot protesters in the head. Most of the anti-regime protesters killed in the early days of the junta crackdown had bullet wounds to the head.[5][6]

Protesters hung sayadaw's pictures with woman's htameins

He became one of the main targets of the protesters and was singled out for criticism at anti-regime protests, with some protesters attaching photos of him to htamein (women's sarongs) and hanging them in public places to express their wrath. Seeing the pictures of the monk he venerates attached to htamein, Min Aung Hlaing ordered his troops to take the women's garments down and publicly announced in his state-run newspapers that anyone committing the act would be charged with insulting Buddhism.[4][7]

On 18 December 2021, together with Min Aung Hlaing, he placed a new diamond orb, the highest part of Kyaik Devi Pagoda built by a Mon King centuries ago. Given the presence of his astrological adviser, Burmese people naturally conclude the aim of the ceremony, in which the general breathed new life into the ancient temple, was seek divine blessings to sustain Min Aung Hlaing's rule in the country.[2]

Books
  • ဂုရုကျွန်းတိုင်နှင့် ကံကောင်းခြင်း (December 2009)[8]
  • ဆရာသခင်နှင့် ခရီးသွားခြင်း (2010)
  • ငှက်တေလေအိုနှင့် ဂန္ထဝင်လွမ်းချင်း (2010)
  • ဂြိုဟ်ပြာပြာ (2010)
  • ကြံသကာထုပ်လေးများ နောက်ကွယ်မှာ… (2011)
  • သဲရဲတိုက် (2011)

References
  1. "တာချီလိတ်မြို့ မဟာမြတ်မုနိဆရာတော်၏ အန္တိမအဂ္ဂဈာပနအတွက် ဝစီပိတ်ဆရာတော် ဦးဆောင်၍ ဆပ်ကော်မတီများ၏ လုပ်ငန်းညှိနှိုင်းဆွေးနွေး". Tachileik News Agency (in Burmese). 22 October 2019. Archived from the original on 10 June 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  2. "More Than Meets the Eye: Myanmar Junta Leader's Renovation of Pagoda". The Irrawaddy. 20 December 2021. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Retrieved 21 December 2021.
  3. "ကျိုင်းတုံမြို့ ဝစီပိတ်ဆရာတော် မွေးနေ့အလှူပွဲသို့ တပ်မတော်ကာကွယ်ရေးဦးစီးချုပ် တက်ရောက်ပူဇော်". Kanbawza Tai News (in Burmese). 14 May 2017. Archived from the original on 10 June 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  4. "မြန်မာတို့နှင့် လောကီအစီအရင်များ". The Irrawaddy (in Burmese). 2021-04-16. Archived from the original on 2021-06-10. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  5. "Criticized, Myanmar's Influential Monk Close to Coup Leader Breaks Silence on Killing Protesters". The Irrawaddy. 2021-03-05. Archived from the original on 2021-06-10. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
  6. "要闻分析 - 联合国缅甸事务特使：我直接听到来自缅甸人绝望的乞求". RFI - 法国国际广播电台 (in Simplified Chinese). 2021-03-06. Archived from the original on 2021-06-12. Retrieved 2021-06-12.
  7. "ကျိုင်းတုံမြို့မှ ဝစီပိတ်ဆရာတော် လုပ်ကြံခံရ၍ မင်္ဂလာဒုံဆေးရုံသို့ ပိုဆောင်သည်ဆိုသည့် သတင်းမှာ အမှားသာဖြစ်". Tachileik News Agency (in Burmese). 28 May 2021. Archived from the original on 10 June 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2021.
  8. "U Kovida Book Lists". Myanmar Bookshop. Archived from the original on 2021-06-10. Retrieved 2021-06-10.
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