There were several small birds in the cage, waiting to be let out

I found myself walking through Yangon, the former capital of Myanmar. As I approached the vicinity of Shwedagon Pagoda—the country’s most revered Buddhist sanctuary—my eyes caught sight of a pitifully cramped birdcage sitting on a street corner. Inside the wire-mesh enclosure, dozens of tiny, sparrow-like birds were packed tightly together, their small bodies incessantly jostling against one another. These birds were not destined to become cherished household pets, kept for the beauty of their morning song. Instead, they were staged on the pavement as a sort of "merit commodity," waiting for a passerby to purchase their freedom and send them into the open sky.

Beside this cage of packaged karma, the vendor sat with an air of profound boredom. In the Buddhist regions of Southeast Asia, there exists a remarkably convenient doctrine: by releasing a captive creature, you earn spiritual merit that will eventually come back to bless you. A customer hands over a small stack of banknotes, lets a bird escape the cage, and walks away having scored invisible points for their next life. Meanwhile, the vendor pockets the cash to secure his dinner for the night. It is a flawlessly engineered, win-win transaction. Here on the streets, a system has been perfected where one can swiftly buy salvation with cash.

This transactional path to virtue is by no means exclusive to Myanmar. I recall seeing a man with an identical cage outside a Chinese temple in Ho Chi Minh City, and another stationed near Bangkok’s famous Erawan Shrine. I even encountered vendors selling birds for liberation in Jakarta; it is a resilient, widespread industry deeply rooted across Southeast Asia. Even back home in Japan, we have Hojoe, an ancient, elegant ritual of releasing captured fish and birds in accordance with Buddhist teachings. Yet, watching someone pay a stranger to release a bird that the very same stranger just caught, I couldn’t shake a certain skepticism. It feels less like a pure act of mercy, and more like a beautifully orchestrated cycle of arson and firefighting.

Shwedagon Paya on Google Map

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