Myanmar Pagodas, Shwedagon, Shwezigon & more

Boys about to enter the novitiate

Early on the morning of Good Friday the festival was at its height. The road to the platform was lined with shrines and stalls selling flowers and all kind of other things. Streams of jeeps and pick ups went past, taking early-morning worshippers.

A few of them were disguised with a carnival decoration of cardboard peacocks, and were carrying boys, about to enter the novitiate, to pray there before the ceremony began. The boys wore expensive imitations of the old Burmese court dress, 

Barefooted crowds move in and up the steps with the murmuring of hushed voices. The air was full of the odor of flowers, candles and incense sticks. From somewhere above came the deep, melodious breathing of gongs. Coming out to the platform or terrace a brilliant spectacle comes up.

The before mentioned Fitch, a adventurer, who saw Venice, Goa and the East Indies of his days, had stood here in admiration, although unable to refrain from a sour aside on the vanity of consuming gold leaves in such a way. Coming in from the west entrance, the terrace is lined with shrines, guardian ogres, fabulous

beasts, and mild-faced, winged gorgons squeezed in between and behind them.

In the immediate background, rises a golden escarpment, a featureless cliff of precious metal, spreading a misty heights, in which the crawling shapes of pilgrims, sticking on their gold-leaf.

The innumerable foreground shrines are banked with flowers, and decked with die votive parasols which usefully protect an image from the sun in a tropical country, often replace the candles necessary to light its cavern in the north.

 When they wanted to pray with offerings of flowers held between the palms

hundreds of images and shrines were to choose from, of gold, silver, marble and wood.

Myanmar Buddhists insist with the emphasis that they are not worshipping the material object, but the great principle it represents.

People worshipped Buddha shrines individually, or in groups, in the large shrines or out in the hot sun shine of the terrace, directing themselves vaguely towards the spire. Year old babies were lowered tenderly into the ritual position, where, often unable to

straighten themselves, they sprawled in adoration, until recovered.

On this day there were many ways to acquire merit: by buying water in plastic bottles from the sellers and pouring it over the images that sat in the hot sun; by relighting candles that had gone out, and replacing parasols that had fallen down and striking a gong, and then the ground beneath it, to call the attention of the nats of the earth and sky to the worshipper's prayers.

Until the recent times Buddhists

from all over the East traveling as freely as did European pilgrims to Santiago de Compostella and Monte Sant' Angelo, visited the

Shwedagon for this festival. About 200 meters from the foot of the the Government had organized a secular festival, a combination of a pwe and fair, that was not quite successfully one thing or the other. A very slow dance to the music of drums and flutes, stopping occasionally to beat himself on the chest in the Tarzan manner. Suddenly they went into action, leaping into the air like fighting-cocks. There was much initial flurry, an exciting spectacle lasting a few seconds, when both men tried to floor each other with flying kicks.

A clinch followed with unrestricted use of knees, fists and elbows. The winner is decided when, as a spectator explained, 'the first blood oozes out'. With typical regard for foreign susceptibilities this man was kindly doing his best to outline the rules governing the contest.

At midnight a straight theatrical show started in one of the tents. The first scent: showed a young Myanmar or Burman engaged in the hopeless courtship of a girl who, it was made clear, led him on, only to spurn him cruelly. At first she smiled, but the moment he approached, her smile turned to a grimace of contempt. These tactics were repeated several times. then the scene changed and we were whisked back in  time a hundred years or so, to be present at a function of the court, with our hero in a previous existence as a prince, and the lady who had first been treating him

with such unexplained malice, in the role of a minor lady of the palace.

By their gestures it was evident that the prince had trifled with her affections, and was now casting her off in favor of one more suited to his station. The scene changed again and so did the epoch. What an aid to a flagging plot, to be able to extend the device of the flash-back, not only to the characters' pasts, but to their previous incarnations! But also, alas, how it holds up the action!