A sayadaw (, ; , and alternatively spelled ''hsayadaw'', ''sayado'', ''sayāḍo'' or ''sayāḍaw'') is a Burmese Buddhist title used to reference the senior monk or abbot of a monastery. The word is a combination of
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...
word "
acharya
In Indian religions and society, an ''acharya'' (Sanskrit: आचार्य, IAST: ; Pali: ''ācariya'') is a religious teacher in Hinduism and Buddhism and a spiritual guide to Hindus and Buddhists. The designation has different meanings i ...
" (teacher) and the Burmese honorific "taw," which is used to denote nouns of religious or royal significance. Some distinguished sayadaws would often be referred to as a ''sayadawgyi'' (, as a sign of reverence. The terms "sayadaw" and "sayadawgyi" originally corresponded to the senior monks who taught the former Burmese kings. These sayadaws may be influential teachers of
Buddhism
Buddhism, also known as Buddhadharma and Dharmavinaya, is an Indian religion and List of philosophies, philosophical tradition based on Pre-sectarian Buddhism, teachings attributed to the Buddha, a wandering teacher who lived in the 6th or ...
and also important meditation practitioners. They usually are abbots of monasteries or monastery networks with many resident monks and a lay following. In modern-day Myanmar, monastic abbots are required to have passed monastic examinations.
In Burmese Buddhism, several honorific terms exist for Buddhist monks, reflecting their achievements and how many
vassa
''Vassa'' (, , both "rain") is the three-month annual retreat observed by Theravada Buddhists. Taking place during the wet season, Vassa lasts for three lunar months, usually from July (the Burmese month of Waso, ) to October (the Burmese ...
s they have passed. The most frequently used terms, which are used as prefixes to the monks' Dhamma name, include:
*"Bhaddanta" ဘဒ္ဒန္တ
*"Ashin" အရှင်
*"Shin" ရှင်
*"U" ဦး၊ ဥူး
*"Upazin" ဥပဇင်း
*"Sayadaw" ဆရာတော်
*"Sayadawgyi" ဆရာတော်ကြီး
A sayadaw may be known by his
dharma name
A Dharma name is a new name acquired during both lay and monastic Buddhist initiation rituals in Mahayana Buddhism and Pabbajjā, monastic ordination in Theravada Buddhism (where it is more proper to call it Dhamma or Sangha name). The name is ...
(), a qualified name, or by the name of his monastery. Thus, venerable
Mingun Sayadaw
The Venerable Mingun Sayadaw U Vicittasārābhivaṃsa (, ; 1 November 1911 – 9 February 1993) was a Burma, Burmese Theravāda Buddhist monk, best known for his memory skills and his role in the Sixth Buddhist Council.Sixth Buddhist council in Yangon, could be addressed as:
* Mingun Sayadaw (in reference to his home monastery at Mingun) မင်းကွန်းဆရာတော်
* U Vicittasārābhivaṃsa ဦးဝိစိတ္တသာရာဘိဝံသ
* Sayadaw U Vicittasārābhivaṃsa ဆရာတော်ဦးဝိစိတ္တသာရာဘိဝံသ
* Mingun Sayadaw U Vicittasārābhivaṃsa မင်းကွန်းဆရာတော်ဦးဝိစိတ္တသာရာဘိဝံသ
* Tipitaka Sayadaw U Vicittasārābhivaṃsa တိပိဋကဆရာတော်ဦးဝိစိတ္တသာရာဘိဝံသ
* tipiṭakadhara Dhammabhaṇḍādharika Sayadaw U Vicittasārābhivaṃsa, တိပိဋကဓရဓမ္မဘဏ္ဍာဓရိကဆရာတော်ဦးဝိစိတ္တသာရာဘိဝ့သ reference to being the first monk to be awarded the titles "Bearer of the
Tripiṭaka
There are several Buddhist canons, which refers to the various scriptural collections of Buddhist sacred scriptures or the various Buddhist scriptural canons.