Buddhists make up 90 percent of the population, following the school of Thervada Buddhism.  Other groups, such as Christian and Islamic groups, have trouble obtaining permission to repair existing places of worship or build new ones.  Students and poor youth are pressured to convert to Buddhism, and adherence or conversion is a prerequisite for promotion to senior government and military ranks.

In a traditional village, the Buddhist monastery is the center of life, where monks are worshiped and supported.  Young boys must all enter the monastery for a short period of time, which is compulsory for all boys.  Girls have ear piercing ceremonies at the same time.  Local festivals are held throughout the year, the most important being the pagoda festival.  Many villages have a guardian nat, and superstition and taboos are commonplace.

Here is a brief summary of the fables of Thervada Buddhism:

Theravada (pronounced terra-VAH-dah), the "Doctrine of the Elders," is the school of Buddhism that draws its scriptural inspiration from the Tipitaka, or Pali canon, which scholars generally agree contains the earliest surviving record of the Buddha's teachings. For many centuries, Theravada has been the predominant religion of continental Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka.

The Buddha — the "Awakened One" — called the religion he founded Dhamma-vinaya — "the doctrine and discipline." To provide a social structure supportive of the practice of Dhamma-vinaya, and to preserve these teachings for posterity, the Buddha established the order of bhikkhus (monks) and bhikkhunis (nuns) which continues to this day to pass his teachings on to subsequent generations of laypeople and monastics, alike.

As the Dhamma continued its spread across India after the Buddha's passing, differing interpretations of the original teachings arose, this led to schisms and many different sects of Buddhism. One of these schools eventually gave rise to a reform movement that called itself Mahayana (the "Greater Vehicle") and that referred to the other schools disparagingly as Hinayana (the "Lesser Vehicle").  What we call Theravada today is the sole survivor of those early non-Mahayana schools.  
 
After the Buddha's death the teachings continued to be passed down orally within the monastic community.  By 250 BCE the Sangha had systematically arranged and compiled these teachings into three divisions: the Vinaya Pitaka (the "basket of discipline" — the texts concerning the rules and customs of the Sangha); the Sutta Pitaka (the "basket of discourses" — the sermons and utterances by the Buddha and his close disciples); and the Abhidhamma Pitaka (the "basket of special/higher doctrine" — a detailed psycho-philosophical analysis of the Dhamma). Together these three are known as the Tipitaka, the "three baskets." In the third century BCE Sri Lankan monks began compiling a series of exhaustive commentaries to the Tipitaka; these were subsequently collated and translated into Pali beginning in the fifth century BCE. The Tipitaka plus the post-canonical texts (commentaries, chronicles, etc.) together constitute the complete body of classical Theravada literature.

No one can prove that the Tipitaka contains any of the words actually uttered by the historical Buddha. This is not a deterrent for practitioners, because the Tipitaka is not regarded as gospel, to be accepted purely on faith. Instead, its teachings are meant to be assessed firsthand, to be put into practice in one's life so that one can find out for oneself if they do, in fact, yield the promised results. It is the truth towards which the words in the Tipitaka point that ultimately matters, not the words themselves.

The Four “Noble Truths”
Shortly after his “awakening,” the Buddha delivered a sermon where he laid out the essential framework upon which all his later teachings were based. This framework consists of the four “noble truths,” four fundamental principles of nature that emerged from the Buddha's assessment of the human condition.  The four “noble truths” are dukkha (suffering; discontent; stress); the cause of dukkha (craving for sensuality, for states of becoming); the cessation of dukkha (relinquishment of that craving); and the path of practice leading to the cessation of dukkha, the “noble eightfold path” of right view, right resolve, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration.  Because of our ignorance of these “noble truths,” he asserted, we remain bound to the wearisome cycle of birth, aging, illness, death and rebirth.  As long as we remain ignorant of this principle, we are doomed to an aimless existence: happy one moment, in despair the next, enjoying one lifetime in heaven, the next in hell.  The Buddha claims he discovered that gaining release requires assigning a specific task to each “noble truth,” which paves the way for awakening.

And the little dog laughed to see such sport; and the dish ran away with the spoon.  No more a fairy tale than the “Christian” lie, “God loves everybody.”

While the Buddhists of Burma claim to be free of any form of discrimination, and to believe in equal rights and opportunity; the generals and monks bear rule over the people of Burma with conflict and tyranny, using this ridiculous false religion and the superstition it evokes to retain power and gobble up all the resources of this distraught land.