Sayadaw


A sayadaw is a Burmese Buddhist title used to reference the senior monk or abbot of a monastery. The word is a combination of Sanskrit word "acharya" 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, a qualified name, or by the name of his monastery. Thus, venerable Mingun Sayadaw, who served as "Chief Respondent" at the Sixth Buddhist council in Yangon, could be addressed as:
  • Mingun Sayadaw 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" and "Treasurer of the Dhamma"

List of prominent Sayadaws

The following is a list of some prominent sayadaws in recent Burmese history.