WITHIN one or two blinks I realised I had lost my parents. I was alone, among many, many people I didn’t know on the platform of Shwedagon Pagoda – the place Rudyard Kipling described as “a beautiful, winking wonder that blazed in the sun” in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches – Letters of Travel (1899).
Shwedagon’s beauty was lost on me this time, however. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I began to cry out loud. The strangers around me appeared to get even bigger. I could hardly see anything through my tears but felt a man catch hold of me with his giant hands. I struggled to escape but so forceful were his squeezes that all my efforts to escape were in vain.
“Hey... don’t be afraid. Where’re your parents?”
More people crowded around us and everyone comforted me. The man took me, the child who uttered no word but only cried, to the pagoda trustees office. In front of the office was a pandal being used as a donation counter, inside the office was a lady with glasses inviting well-wishers with the PA system.
“No worry, boy. Don’t cry. I will call your dad and mom here with this microphone, you see?” she said.
Her charming voice and sweet face comforted me a lot. By this stage my face was wet with tears and patches of thanaka my mother had put on my face earlier was almost gone. Drinking the juice she gave me, I forgot everything and stared at the lady as she called through the PA system, asking my parents to pick me up at the pandal. My weeping was over but sobbing remained.
“Mum...”
I trotted to my mum as she appeared before the pandal. It was one of the happiest moments in my life – all my sorrow, discomfort and agitation went away.
This was the first experience of Shwedagon – terrifying but short, alone and separated from my loved ones. I don’t remember how old I was at the time.
This bitter experience has not stopped me from visiting Kipling’s “golden mystery” many times. The stupa has its special charms. If Mahamuni Pagoda is the heart of the people of Mandalay, then I’d say Shwedagon is the eye of Yangonites, gazing out across the flat, sprawling city. But it’s not just special for the residents of Yangon – Shwedagon is also the most revered Buddhist site in the country.
For the children in Yangon – who have less room to play than most of their counterparts – it is a place where they can run about freely. I was no exception and would always play with my companions whenever we visited the golden stupa. When we got tired, we would lie on our backs and look up at the glittering spire or twinkling stars in the cloudless sky.
It was during these visits as a child that I heard the story from some elders of how Shwedagon came into existence. Traditionally, it is believed that two brothers named Taphussa and Bhallika from Yangon, then called Okalapa, travelled to India and encountered the Guatama Buddha, who had just gained enlightenment weeks before. The Buddha gave them eight hairs from his head.
When the king of their native land heard this news, he held a grand ceremony to welcome the brothers and the hairs back to Yangon. When he searched for a place to host the hairs, King of Celestial Beings helped him excavate a secret place where the relics of three former Buddhas were buried: The walking stick of Kakusandha, water filter of Konagamana and the lower robe of Kassapa.
The sacred hairs and relics were buried in a chamber at the same spot as the older relics, on top of Singuttara Hill. Upon the relic chamber, multiple pagodas of silver, tin, copper, lead, marble, iron and gold were built one on top of the other to enshrine the relics.
To me, an interesting part of that story was the mechanical guardians set up in the relic chamber, ready to unleash weapons on unscrupulous people who attempted to plunder its relics.
Also interesting is the story of Maung Kan, a hero who tried to steal the sacred hairs of the pagoda. Originally a Myanmar native, Maung Kan travelled to China and fell in love with the king’s daughter, so the story goes. When the king learned of Maung Kan’s magic spear, he promised to give Maung Kan his daughter’s hand if he could bring back the hairs from Shwedagon Pagoda.
Maung Kan is said to have travelled from China to Shwedagon beneath the ground. When he got to the chamber, he could stop the guardians with help of his magic spear. As he came close to the hairs, a beautiful goddess appeared before him and snatched his spear. Without it, Maung Kan became powerless and died while trying to escape from the chamber. His body was transformed into a stone statue, according to the story.
As well as mythical tales, Shwedagon is also intertwined with historical events. Several members of the nationalist movements that rose under the British colonial rule set up camp in the pagoda compound. In 1920, a group of senior students from Rangoon College, as Yangon university was then called, decided to boycott the British-proposed University Act, which they believed only benefited the elite and entrenched colonial rule.
In 1936, hundreds of students from the same university camped on the pagoda’s platform in a second protest against the British government. In 1939, waves of oilfield workers from central Myanmar joined with local peasants at the lower parts of Shwedagon to call on the government to meet their demands for better living conditions.
In 1946, amid escalating calls for independence, General Aung San, the architect of modern Myanmar and the father of Nobel-laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, delivered a historic speech to a mass rally calling on the public to launch a general strike should the British not grant the country freedom from colonial rule.
Visiting Shwedagon and reflecting on its mythical and historical past, the significant role it has played in Myanmar culture, has been a ritual of mine since childhood. But unlike my childhood visits when I would run about and hear the legends, on my present day visits I’m more likely to be found sitting quietly in a corner, listening to my inner thoughts. I particularly enjoy listening to the tinkling of the small bells in the hti (topmost structure resembling an umbrella).
Most foreigners, like Rudyard Kipling, are usually impressed by the large scale of Shwedagon. After visiting Yangon, then Rangoon, in the 1880s, he wrote that when seeing the stupa for the first time it was as if “a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon”.
Three centuries before Kipling, an Englishman named Ralph Fitch was astounded when he saw Shwedagon in 1586. “It is called Dagonne, and it is of a wonderful bignesse, and all gilded from the foot to the toppe ... it is the fairest place, as I suppose, that is in all the world”, he later wrote.
Even today, when I talk to Westerners they say they were impressed by the huge scale of the gold-covered stupa. But they also comment on the pagoda platform and Shwedagon’s surroundings, variously describing the area as “public”, “lively”, “quiet”, “genuine” and “individual”.
To me, as a person having grown up under the pagoda’s dominance, the scale of Shwedagon is not what awes me most. It also strikes me as a public, lively, quiet, genuine and individual place.
A Canadian friend of mine once said: “The moment I stepped inside, I felt my heart was home. I think this place has a lot to teach the West.”
I’m not sure what he expects the pagoda to teach the West. Often when I think of Shwedagon, I remember the people I have visited the stupa with and in particular the ones who can no longer accompany there. The pagoda reminds me, it implores me to explore the core idea of Buddhism: anicca – impermanence.
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