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Home , Alaungsithu, Atthakatha, Buddhist kingship, Cariyapitaka, Regnal title, Saw Lu

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King and the World Around Him

Dr. Lilian Handlin Independent Scholar

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ABSTRACT The conference’s theme is Pagan’s interaction with the wider world and how sometimes dimly perceived and hard to trace interactions shaped the kingdom’s history and self- awareness. This theme prompts my reexamination of a shadowy figure in Pagan’s past - - the second attested Saw Lu, target of hostile accounts in historical narratives, whether composed by foreign or Burmese scholars. Contextualizing the Mitta Stone inscription, discovered in 2013, considering the conference’s agenda, might provide a necessary corrective. The inscription also relates to how Pagan interacted with the world beyond its sovereignty and how its self-perception as a defender of the Buddha dhamma informed the kingdom’s development. That the inscription concerns Saw Lu is indisputable – his regnal features in the Mon, and Pyu segments. The stone engraving - legal document and carte d’visite – commemorates a substantial donation, costly Buddha statues, land, slaves and cows, on behalf of the Triple Gem and wish fulfillment. Karmic inexorability mitigated by an ameliorative technology. Nothing much new here, except that Saw Lu’s predecessors did not leave us such statements. But for centuries Saw Lu’s Indic counterparts did – which makes it highly likely that Saw Lu was harnessing a foreign import on behalf of local needs that either did not exist in the past, or else did not this kind of treatment. Introduction

The Myittha stone is innovative and unprecedented – Anawratha for all his greatness, real or retroactively ascribed, substantiated his piety in other ways, such as votive tablets, and- more articulately- through the sponsorship of at least one giant – the Shwehsandaw. Saw Lu’s written statement, by contrast, as well as other evidence discussed below is therefore more startling. This may well reflect the vagaries of what survives for future historians to work with. Perhaps what has been lost is evidence of long term changes that likely began decades before Saw Lu’s accession to the throne, and are nowadays clearly visible in what we know about his successor, king Kyanzittha. These developments do become more tangible in Saw Lu’s s day, which is why we perhaps need to contextualize their significance during the years of his monarchy. What the trends show is a confident political entity with very far flung connections, especially to north east India, a mature grasp of Pagan’s ideational matrix – articulated in terms of the Pali dhamma, and the institutionalization of practices that were to influence how the Burmese related to the wider world ever since. In short, it is during Saw Lu’s rule that one can for the first time identify some of the coping mechanisms this society provided for royal subjects to make sense of their lives and how the kingdom as a political entity related to its surroundings. As Pagan’s social and ideational conceptions were grounded in a vision of the cosmos and the sasana - of which Pagan regarded itself a pivotal component - the kingdom’s horizons were extremely broad. This sense of a wider

3 world and its importance was built into how the dhamma was conceived locally, making Pagan from an early stage of its evolution open ideationally to the world of which it was a part. That world, to begin with, was extremely large, since the entire cosmos was a known component of how the dhamma was believed to rule the universe. In more comprehensible and down to earth terms, this also meant awareness of surrounding territories. When at a somewhat later date, images in Pagan temples presented what contemporary Sri Lankans and Chinese looked like, the structures’ donors evinced their sense of being part of this wider domain that impinged on them in the most profound ways.

Figure 1 – Chinese and Sri Lankan worshippers of the Buddha’s Eye Tooth relic (13th century CE, Temple IIMP1077) On the one hand, such images likely reinforced a sense of otherness - this was not the way one’s Pagan neighbors looked – but on the other the fact that these foreigners were worshipping fervently the same relics as the ones Pagan hoped to acquire for their kingdom, reinforced a sense of commonalty, of shared ideas that informed the meaning of the term sasana. Pagan’s attention to the Mahavamsa, the Sri Lankan commentarial – historical text, as well as other Pali Daw sources, informed the Buddha’s local devotees about the relics’ dispersal following his parinibbana and how their presence availed worshippers’ protection and apotropaic remedies associated with their veneration. From these sources Saw Lu’s subjects learned how their own corner of the universe was part of a larger entity blessed by a dhamma that explained how that universe functioned.

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Almost all donative stones from the Pagan period conclude with a merit sharing clause, the good gained from the performance of appropriate deeds to be distributed among all sentient beings. However interpreted, recognition of being part of an entity way beyond the limits of one’s kingdom, was inherent in how Pagan viewed the world. References to the four tooth relic , commemorating the dispersal of the Buddha’s post cremation remains already early in the 12th century Lokahteikpan, indicate a sense of being part of a very broad entity informed by the Buddha’s Teachings.1 Saw Lu’s donative stone inscription and all others like it surviving from the Pagan and later periods attest to a sense of mutual responsibilities and shared interactions, between individuals, their families, the kingdom as a whole, in fact all levels of the universe.

That sense of being a component in a great sasana blessed by a Buddha’s dhamma required involvement in its maintenance, in the hope that it would last – as one inscription said, quoting , for 5000 years.2 In this enterprise also, Pagan was not alone, conscious that others anticipated doing their part on behalf of its endurance. In Saw Lu’s days, an innovative method materialized exploiting an architectonic form to advertise royal merit further insuring the sasana’s survival. Whereas Saw Lu’s predecessor opted for solid stupas to demarcate Pagan’s confessional affiliation, the appearance of hollow structures offered new possibilities. Saw Lu seems to have been the first king to recognize their potential. Myittha Stone inscription and Much about the Myittha inscription remains problematic – its reading is insecure and two of the five languages may or may not be Burmese and . Be that as it may, the stone spotlights what was a failed regime according to U Kala, who cemented Saw Lu’s inferior standing in Burmese history. His influence was such that all subsequent scholars accepted U Kala’s assessment, often uncritically. That influence stemmed not from U Kala’s scholarly achievement, however great it may have been – but because he had no rivals. His was and remains the earliest extant, most detailed account of Burma’s past, and though parts of that account were dismissed by modern investigators - because they did not share U Kala’s understanding of the forces that shaped human destinies – much that seemed plausible was inserted into the authorized Burmese historical narrative. Including U Kala’s assessment of Saw Lu’s reign. Why U Kala composed his Saw Lu narrative as he did is unknown and none of what are presented as facts in his account can be otherwise substantiated. We need to ask why U Kala shaped his narrative as he did. Did he inflate 11th century Mon upheavals because the 18th century was shadowed by their later permutations? Why did U Kala locate Saw Lu’s execution by the rebel Nga Raman where the Great Bird’s head, slain by

1 Ba Shin 1962: plate 12c. 2 Mayongu: 13th century.

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Pyuzawhti, was supposed to be buried? That this Pyuzawhti victory resonated is evident from its commemoration in a late 14th century Sagaing structure, a reminder that revered constructions dedicated to housing a Buddha statue, from very early on not only serviced contemporary needs, but featured on their walls themes, depictions and narratives only tangentially related to the story of the structures’ occupant.3 Reading the content of a Saw Lu endowed Pagan structure in light of such possibilities, reformulates his reign’s significance and shows how his kingdom situated itself in a world governed by the dhamma and how that wider world impinged upon Pagan’s practices. . And where did U Kala’s information come from, given that for his 15th century predecessor, Saw Lu merited less than one line.4 As the introduction to a recent informative translation of part of his opus says, the sources U Kala relied upon are no longer extant, we don’t even know what they were.5 U Kala’s narrative was also informed by what was about to be called and the contours of a nation state. In other words, he wrote in a setting using concepts and ideas that would have been utterly foreign to earlier centuries, and was thus examining these centuries through a distorting lens. Sadly for Saw Lu, U Kala’s influence was substantial. When U Kala’s 20th century successors reconstructed Saw Lu’s reign – the latter was read as a titanic struggle between center and peripheries also on behalf of a Theravada orthodoxy. These more recent investigators were also somewhat careless in how they read the historical record, in treating a very early and deeply pre-modern setting, as if its concerns and issues somehow resembled those of later periods. 6 The result was unkind to Saw Lu. U Kala’s merciless verdict resembles what has been said to one of the Simpsons - “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.” Saw Lu, in one Pagan era inscription compared to a lion reigning in the forest, became in later centuries worse than a weasel. As a final insult, he was called min lu lan, young but also by implication petty monarch.7

The Actual Saw Lu But what would Saw Lu’s reign signify if we ignored the chronicles? The reader may ask – who cares? Perhaps Hans Georg Gadamer, the great 20th century German philosopher, was right when he said that knowing nothing about Achilles is a triviality because what mattered for two millennia of western thought was Homer’s creation.8 Achilles is the hero of the Trojan War, subject of the Iliad, the greatest ancient Greek epic.

3 Charney 2006: 73ff. 4 Aung Thwin : personal communication, June 14, 2014. 5 Tun Aung Chain 2016. 6 Charney 73; Tilman Frasch 1996: 83, 96 – 100. 7 Frasch, 96. 8 Vilhauer, 2010: 37ff.

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Much scholarship written over the centuries, assessed his significance. But we actually know nothing about him, most scholars assuming he never existed in the first place, that the story is just a great myth magnificently handled by an ancient poet. Saw Lu has not been the subject of such attention, but the issues are somewhat similar. A historian like me thinks that somewhere amidst the rubble of centuries lurks a real Saw Lu, who deserves reconsideration, which in light of what might be his accomplishments, and the long-range influence they had on his kingdom, merit reconsideration. Because if we focus on the admittedly pitifully constraining evidence for Saw Lu, important facets of his reign emerge. They raise new questions about Pagan, its place in the kingdom’s contemporary world, and the influence practices evolving during his kingship had on subsequent decades. The answers proposed below may be all wrong, but the questions are worth asking. The Myittha stone‘s multiple languages, if indeed they are contemporaneous, indicate an early cultural symbiosis usually attributed to Saw Lu’s successors.

Figure 2 Saw Lu inscription (After U Win Maung (Tampawaddy)) That symbiosis is sheltered under a dhammic umbrella for whose spokes both Pali and perhaps Sanskrit served in tandem. The name Saw Lu, according to earlier scholarship, also hints at Nanchao and Yunnan connections, broadening – if true, this umbrella’s radius. 9 All this implies that Saw Lu’s reign already had extensive links not only to the shadowy and less identifiable world where the Pali informed bodhisatta path was being formulated, but to the more immediate settings for which it is usually Kyanzittha, with his Bengali wife, contacts with a Cola , and Bodhgaya renovations that gets all the credit. Both reigns attest to Pagan’s far flung contacts, and not only with or

9 Luce 1970: I: 26, 28, 46, 49.

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Bodhgaya. The resulting networks have been labeled Buddhist, religious, cultural, or ‘interstate,’ even generating what one scholar has called a Buddhist International. Contemporaries would not have recognized any of these terms, given among much else hazy notions of what constituted “ borders” in a world where “ states’ had yet to exist and where “Theravada orthodoxy” may have prevailed though what this meant remains moot.10 As the story of the Four Eye Teeth relics, depicted in Pagan structures, indicated, knowing one’s geography mattered. The dispersal of the Buddha’s relics blessed the world with four of his eye teeth. Pagan knew from the Pali Daw, the Mahavamsa and Buddhaghosa that one was in the supra mundane world, in Tavatimsa, another in the world of the Nagas. But two were in the human world, one in Lanka with which as several scholars have shown Pagan maintained extensive, continuous and influential contacts. The Mahavamsa, which Pagan had from early on – it is imaged in the early 12th century Myinkaba Kubyaukgyi - taught the kingdom how relics needed to be treated in a proper sasana domain, how the dhamma moved in the human world, how the Buddha’s visits blessed Lanka with special dispensations, and how shared explanations for the human condition mitigated differences between kingdoms. But the fourth relic was, as numerous endowment decors evidence, grounded for Pagan in the Pali Daw and Buddhaghosa again, in what was called Gandhara. But where exactly that was, remained nebulous. One early solution in Pagan was to reference China, which in turn commenced a search after the right term for the region, attested since the late 12th century.11 Both in real and ideational terms, the outer world was a pressing concern in Pagan since the 11th century. A short reign is insufficient for heavy duty ideational developments, but long enough for traces of their presence to become identifiable. They are visible in three evidentiary bits, of which two are securely associated with Saw Lu . One is the novelty of his regnal title, the second is that it is apparently Saw Lu and not Kyanzittha, who names the ceremonial center Arimaddana, and thirdly, one Pagan edifice, traditionally called the Nagayon and deemed Kyanzittha’s, is more likely to be Saw Lu’s. The significance of these three bits of historical debris has not been recognized - a closer look is needed because they touch directly on this conference’s topic – they attest to early, influential and substantive links between Pagan and surrounding regions, especially to the west. Adaptation India always loomed large on Pagan’s horizon, it was known as Gotama’s birth place, where the language of his instruction was once believed to have been spoken, where the teachings Pagan revered were first delivered and where in concrete terms, as scholars have known for a long time, architectonic techniques and stylistic art patterns that would

10 For a different reading Miksic and Geok Yian Goh 2017: 364 – 370. 11 Goh Geok Yian 2010: 125 – 152.

8 inform Pagan’s endowments originated. The latter’s presence in the Nagayon evidences a possible dating for when this influx materialized, usually assigned to the end of the 11th century. But such developments need years to mature, and the structures constructed in the post Nagayon decades evince a more advanced adaptation stage when some of the problems first contended with in the décor of the Nagayon were resolved. The process had to begin somewhere, however, and if the Nagayon is dated two decades earlier, its content turns out to be a reasonable example of what an initial adaptation stage likely necessitated.12 That adaptation stage required the recasting of imagery , invented for non Pali informed bodhisatta paths, to meet the requirements of Pagan’s venerated, Pali dhamma version . The earliest evidence for this process to have materialized is the Nagayon’s interior décor. Furthermore, this occurred against the background of Saw Lu’s unprecedented self-designation, the regnal he adopted, and Pagan’s renaming that endowed the kingdom with an internationally resonant appellation. These latter changes, coupled with how the Nagayon’s interior was conceptualized, were significant moves. Saw Lu may not have been their instigator - – but they surface in his time. His title and grand vision of Pagan’s prowess parallel the Nagayon’s innovations and transformative impact. In hind sight, which is always twenty-twenty, this short period has left evidence of contentions with ideational developments that retrospectively denote a transformative period when new ideas were being aired and implemented, a transitional phase between the relatively opaque Anawratha accomplishments, however solid in Burma’s mythology, and the massive evidentiary record that Kyanzittha’s and ’s inscriptions confirm. Neither would have been able to embark on their undertakings had the ground not already been prepared in Saw Lu’s days. Myittha and the Hinterland If we listen to what a scholar called social history’s whisperings13 a different Saw Lu emerges. The Myittha inscription itself is an innovation - Saw Lu’s predecessors didn’t set up donative stones . The Myittha’s coherent and multi lingual format is all the more astonishing. If one of the languages is Sanskrit, that too is odd since in Pagan, Sanskrit, unlike Pali, is rare. And why set up a multi lingual inscription in Myittha ? A possible answer is to advertise royal generosity by showing how various populations basked in its glow, yet another bit of historical debris testifying to what Pagan was, a multi ethnic kingdom whose inhabitants had contacts with their kin populations, in southeast Asia and the region as a whole. This was especially the case with India from which not only ideas but their transmitters, whether astrologers, court advisors, workers, artisans

12 For a different reading Galloway 2013: 159 – 174. 13 Ali 2007: 388.

9 and artists came from. The recourse to Pyu suggests the survival of their independent identity, on par with the Mon. As for the trans regional languages, they demonstrated the broad contours of Saw Lu’s ideational capital and perhaps contact with regions where donative stones were inscribed in Sanskrit, not Pali or local vernaculars. The Myittha inscription informed the hinterland that the king’s fulfillment of his obligations met his subjects’ most profound needs. And that all was well in Saw Lu’s world. As is often the case with government propaganda, it was probably a lie - according to the Chroniclers these are days of rage. If news of the supposed Mon rebellion reached Kyaukse, perhaps the inscription meant to forestall local discontent exploiting Arimaddana’s disarrays by highlighting the benefits of an approved coping mechanism . That mechanism’s potency was grounded in its universalist claims, encasing the cosmos as a whole, also attesting to the broad lenses through which Pagan viewed itself in it. Saw Lu’s piety’s Indic sources are mirrored in the king’s self-definition, maharaja sri bajrabharana . He called himself “lord of the three worlds, fortunate shining one, bearer of the thunderbolt, the divine.”14

Figure 3 Saw Lu’s regnal title and votive tablets, Archaeological Museum

By contrast, his father was the more modest “great king Sri Aniruddha the divine.” 15 Such designations articulate what has been seen as Buddhist kingship short on genuine ideological foundation. But I don’t think it was short for Saw Lu’s advisors. The designation indicates a broad-based kingship concept, seamlessly fusing Pali and Indic -Sanskrit

14 Luce, I, 46; II, 10 – 12. 15 Ibid., III, 10ff.

10 elements, and indebted to the wider world from which came the textual sources substantiating royal claims.

Re-branding and a new conceptual selfie Pagan grammarians and commentators thereupon had their hands full, adapting their imports to local concerns as they needed to do to make the dhamma relevant not only to the universe as a whole and the Buddha sasana, but to the corner in which Saw Lu reigned and his subjects lived.16 Pagan in this sense was always part of that broader world, which it defined by recourse to the ‘taya’ its monks propagated, and the sasana its kings sustained, on whose behalf Saw Lu’s meritorious deeds , replicated by all of his successors, materialized. The presence of this vernacular Burmese term ( taya) already in the early 12th century Lokahteikpan structure indicates how far the indigenization process had come shortly after Saw Lu’s reign. Saw Lu’s identification with the supramundane clothed him, via Buddha epithets, with supernatural power. The new conceptual selfie expanded Anawratha’s self- divinization by specifying its attributes, also providing a template Kyanzittha and his successors imitated when they appropriated what were Buddha attributes on their own behalf. In the Mahabharata and the Puranas, Yadu dynasty’s Vajra succeeded his father, king Anawratha, an interesting coincidental parallel for Pagan. The epithet is central to the path, connoting the thunderbolt’s annihilation of the kilesa(s) (unwholesome qualities) , embodying the Buddha’s powers as Vajrapani, or in the Tantric form of Sakyamuni as Vajradhara.17 These beings’ and terminologies’ meager Pali presence indicates alternative sources stitched into Saw Lu’s catholic self- definition bolstered by foreign derivatives, further underscoring the far flung though difficult to identify contacts Pagan maintained with its surrounding world. Having rebranded himself, Saw Lu thereupon did likewise for his kingdom. The ceremonial center‘s new trade mark reflected the power of names to manifest the hitherto hidden, a potent concept that also originated in the Indian subcontinent. A Saw Lu inscription referencing the “excellent city of Arimaddana” was found in early 20th century Burma. 18 In Indic fashion, the ceremonial center’s

16 Ruiz Falques 2017. 17 Venkatacharya 1965: 300. 18 Luce I: 46.

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Figure 4 Arimaddana stone (after U Mya) designation applied to the kingdom as a whole.19 The inscription’s readable slivers, in Pali, said “The excellent lord of the three worlds, bearer of the Thunderbolt, famous in the world… like a lion in the forest, reigned in the excellent city of Arimaddana.” 20 Saw Lu clearly did not think small, and his ideational advisors by harnessing Pali and Sanskrit sources ( difficult for us to identify precisely) provided the vocabulary – which survives in titles and names - recycled on the king’s behalf to communicate his ambitious self- definition. Arimaddana

. For Saw Lu, the royal abode was thus the city of Indra, whose epithet - the crusher of enemies – this is what Arimaddana means - survives in the Mahabharata. Pagan as Arimaddana signified claimed authority, the bearer of the thunderbolt its appropriate king.21 The vajra was also the god’s weapon, one reason Saw Lu’s advisors perhaps twinned the terms. Saw Lu’s identification with Indra likewise echoed the Mahavamsa. There he was Lanka’s and the dhamma’s protector – Saw Lu thereby made him Arimaddana’s guardian as well. Kyanzittha thereupon had other ideas, and opted for to fulfill that task, an indication that his advisors were aware of Saw Lu’s choice,

19 Sircar 1965: 377. 20 Luce 1965: 2:272: Bulletin de la Commission Archaeologique de l’indochine Anne 1909: 236. 21 Sircar 348 ff.

12 and by choosing another protector, asserted Saw Lu’s successor’s right to implement new very long distance foreign policies affiliating their dynast with other supramundane protectors. Perhaps Indra had failed in his assigned role, given Saw Lu’s reign’s tribulations – trying Vishnu in the job would be an improvement, and one that also would differentiate Pagan from Sri Lanka that resolutely stuck with Indra. This too attests to Saw Lu’s impact – had his choices been less influential, his successor would not have bothered embarking on a different path. Neither king, however, seemed to believe that his kingdom could go it alone – in this pre-modern world, supra natural powers were needed to safeguard domains, another indication of how concerns with the wider world informed its fortunes.

The recourse to Indra’s patronage and its referential multiplicity reminds us of the diverse strands enmeshed in Pagan’s Pali materials, themselves the creation of manifold settings, whether in south east Asia, northeast India or Lanka. On a micro level, such interactions also recall Naomi Appleton’s and others’ recent scholarship, regarding these divinities’ “Buddhist” trajectories.22 Saw Lu’s and Pagan’s appellations likewise encourage revisiting Pagan’s contacts with Bengal, the Indian northeast and beyond , to balance the rich scholarship on Pagan’s southern, Sri Lankan and Mahavihara links.23 The ’s association between Arimaddana and Pyuzawhti had a long history showing how localized stories of origins intertwined with pan-regional mythologies. Reading the Myittha inscription and contending with the problematics of Saw Lu’s reign has implications far exceeding its content and Kyaukse setting. The Nagayon and Saw Lu Ceremonial center and tributary territories were also linked by royal donations, as the Myittha stone attests. This brings me to the third Saw Lu move prompting my reevaluation, another bit of historical debris attesting to Saw Lu’s importance and how it illuminates Pagan’s sense of itself in the world. The link credits Saw Lu with building Pagan’s Nagayon. Unfortunately, dating 11th century Pagan structures is a crap shoot since they share difficult to date similarities. This article argues that the Nagayon, bypassing Anawratha’s preference for stupas was an influential development dateable to Saw Lu’s reign, that its decor attests to early contentions with how to make the dhamma tangibly visible and subject to the gaze, and to choices that influenced how the Burmese made their Buddha path recognizable in the public square. The Nagayon is the now earliest surviving Pagan hollow structure of a type contemporaries called gandhakuti,24 and later udessikka cetiya,25 featuring highly

22 Appleton 2016. 23 Chen 2002: 293. 24 Shwegugyi 1920: 69; Strong 1977: 390 – 406. 25 Handlin 2017.

13 textualized décors. Changing terminology attests to changing ideas – Pagan monarchs had the temerity to think they could duplicate their revered Buddha Gotama’s private – perfumed - chamber, which their more diffident successors in later periods did not share – their term for Buddha shrines indicates the more modest sense of creating a suitable, material setting where a Buddha statue would dwell. The Nagayon’s décor is an early interpretation of the Buddha biography adapted to a gandhakuti’s display opportunities. Its inscriptions are in Mon that in last century’s scholarship was invariably linked to Kyanzittha. Why that should have been the case remains a mystery – others could write in Mon too, and perhaps Saw Lu did. Monopolies on inscribed languages are notoriously shaky, and why structures privileged one language rather than another need not have reflected who was at the helm at the time – as the Myittha’s Mon face attests. Michael Aung-Thwin’s 'The Mists of Ramanna' has reopened political and scholarly polemics regarding these early years’ interpretations, their acrimony indicative of how problematic construals remain embedded in the Burmese historical narrative. This article’s reattribution of the Nagayon to Saw Lu advantages that book’s critique of received wisdom, to reassess this king’s contribution to Pagan’s artistic and ideational evolution. The Nagayon is the first Pagan instance of how Gotama biography’s sub chapters were composed on the basis of Teachings bequeathed by the Buddha to the world or attributed to him subsequently. The structure is today the earliest surviving example of how that biography stitched together multiple Pali resources, and made their doctrinal content known, partly by obviating narrative formats. This pattern thereupon included hundreds of identical images inscribed with sutta titles.

Figure 5 Nagayon panels underneath an image presencing Dipankara’s prediction regarding ’s future

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The choice was a temporary game changer that was imitated in one early 12th century endowment (Alopyi-gu-hpaya) though the almost contemporary Myinkaba Kubyaukgyi and Pathothamya, dated to the next four decades, prove that other patterns were also in circulation. That idea – that the Buddha’s pronouncements merited special treatment and exposure, remained influential however for the next two centuries, though the suttas’ images migrated to the structures’ highest tiers, largely invisible and often recovered only in the 21st century when cleaning, as of the 13th century Sabwetin, exposed their presence and inscribed import.

Figure 6 Alopyi-gu-hpaya suttas panel (Photo by the author) The Nagayon pattern precedes these other permutations, prompting my Saw Lu link. Its configuration combined non-narrative, identical panels, inscribed with the Teachings’ titles, and more narrative content. The titles attest a broadly based textual foundation, and an initial attempt to make its sub chapters visible and subject of endowment decors. The currently available Pagan evidence indicates that contemporaries found this pattern ultimately insufficiently informative, and thus inefficacious. This can be concluded from the fact that this pattern had few successors, and was superseded already in the Nagayon itself, as can be seen in its big story telling panels recounting important Jatakas or sub chapters of the Gotama biography. In the Nagayon, story telling lived cheek by jowl with commemorations of Buddha instruction. .

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Another oddity about the Nagayon is the absence of the Vessantara Jataka , and presence of an extended Chadantha Jataka version. The bodhisatta path that encompassed the story of the Buddha Gotama was structured among other ways, according to the fulfillment of the Ten Perfections, without which Buddhahood was unattainable. This scheme was known in Pagan thanks to a companion text of the , the Cariyapitaka, that was part of the Pali Package as Pagan had it from the second half of the 11th century. Though the Buddhavamsa eventually received pride of place in the Gotama biography formulation, its presence was facilitated by the antedating Cariyapitaka that grouped select previous Gotama lives in association with personal qualities whose attainment signified Buddhahood.

In the scheme of the parami(s)’ accomplishments outlined in the Cariyapitaka, the Chadantha is an important component, placed on par with the Vessantara, perhaps attesting to this Pali text’s utility already during Saw Lu’s reign. More secure evidence of its presence now survives, however, only in the 13th century Thambula, where its availability is inscribed, and in the Penanthagu, also from the 13th century, where images of how select jatakas were harnessed to illustrate the perfections’ path in the course of Gotama’s previous lives feature on the endowment’s walls – in association with the Footprint and its signs. The link clarified what perfections availed – a supra normal body whose physical features were unlike any other beings’, denoting a Buddha’s uniqueness. In the Pali canon these marks were one way in which heretics were persuaded of the errors of their ways.26 In the Nagayon the Buddhavamsa was incorporated in its entirety, in 28 sculptures accompanied by visual narratives in their praedellas, commemorating Buddha Gotama rebirths and reception of the prediction regarding his future Awakening. The likelihood of contemporaries being familiar with the Cariyapitaka, and its valorization of the Chadantha story is thus plausible. Be that as it may, the Buddhavamsa’s presence was another precedent setting practice - almost all subsequent Burmese shrines incorporated the Lineage in its entirety into their decors. The decision to feature the Buddhavamsa as the introductory framework encompassing the rest of the immensely complicated Gotama story was thus very influential. It thereby injected the all-important temporal dimension into the narrative that facilitated the incorporation of other episodes, generating possibilities for the creation of a unifying story telling. Crediting the Nagayon to Saw Lu conflicts with the early chronicles where Saw Lu either built nothing, or did so only in the hinterland.27 It also conflicts with the Nagayon’s traditional attribution to Kyanzittha. 28 But the Nagayon’s content, and programmatic outline fit an intermediate period, advancing beyond Anawratha’s stupas and

26 Analayo 2017. 27 Michael Aung Thwin, personal communication, June 14, 2014. 28 Luce I: 50ff.

16 foreshadowing Kyanzittha’s hollow structures – generating an early programmatic design to be superseded as its inadequacies became evident .

Figure 7 Anawratha’s Shwehsandaw stupa and jataka plaques

The Nagayon marked a major advance over Anawratha’s endowment that demarcated the kingdom’s confessional affiliation mainly by the structure’s overall – and immensely

17 resonant – shape, associated with the Buddha’s parinibbana. To elaborate on its significance, jataka plaques were affixed but their abstract depictions, and lack of inscriptional guidance, suggest that engagement with their content was not a desideratum. Perhaps it was not regarded as necessary. The Nagayon’s by contrast highly articulate, visually and inscriptionally, décor, signifies an advanced development encouraging engagement with content and thus knowledge. The move was influential - as the recent, Indian government sponsored partial cleaning of the Ananda, attributed to Kyanzittha, revealed . The Ananda featured yet another and very different decorative pattern but the link between story telling depictions and images denoting the delivery of particular teachings survived the dynastic change. Saw Lu’s choices were consequential because they turned gandhakuti(s) into visual libraries, where texts featured in imaged formats. Subsequent endowments indeed exhibited as one scholar said, “wider Buddhist horizons,” but their forerunner was the Nagayon.29 Without the Nagayon, there would have been no Pathothamya, Ananda or Myinkaba Kubyaukgyi. The Nagayon’s ambitious program presented for the first time a visualized dhamma nested in what John S. Strong felicitously named Buddha bioramas.30 In so doing, the structure inaugurated a serviceable iconotext. That iconotext resembled a puzzle composed from movable parts. The parts were particular teachings and narrative episodes, strung together along an unimaginably long temporal continuum. That continuum encompassed the trajectory of an entity ultimately reconstituted as the Buddha Gotama . Burmese shrines contended with the complexities of making this sensible for the next millennium. But all of them thereby underscored the dhamma’s far reaching sway and their royal sponsors’ outward orientation. The Nagayon also exemplifies the initial reframing of imported Indian stylistic patterns, and the reformulation of imagery invented initially for Tantra and paths, on behalf of Pali sources.31 In the process, a major Pala innovation, focalizing the Eight Life Scenes - pilgrimage sites in the Pala realm, was re interpreted.32 It is a testimony to the assurance usually not associated with Saw Lu’s reign, that such major ideational manipulations materialized and that his contemporaries felt confident in their performance. During Saw Lu’s reign, this tightly compressed Buddha biography was greatly expanded to encompass subchapters derived from canonical and commentarial sources, universalizing that biography’s Indic geographical and ideational orientation – by articulating what was its pivotal concept – that the dhamma, though originating in India, ruled the world as a whole, its Pagan segment included. Pagan knew about the

29 Luce I:298. 30 Strong 2004: 51. 31 Dutt 1962: 373; Bagchi 1993: 96 ; Kim 2013. 32 Kinnard 1996: 281 – 300.

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Buddha’s visits to Lanka, courtesy of the Mahavamsa, and the presence of his relics in Pagan endowments materialized him in their own realm. He may have once upon a time lived elsewhere, but for Saw Lu’s subjects, he had become part of their own world too. The move legitimized also supplementary Buddha biography trajectories, like the Seven Post Awakening Weeks,33 the Rainy Retreats compilation, later the Eight Victories, and always the stories of the bodhisatta in the lives of Gotama’s 27 predecessors, to tame what remained forever after a work in progress. The Saw Lu endowment is a moment frozen in time, testifying to the first instance when this ambitious agenda came to be part of Pagan’s consciousness, informing the extent of its conceptual geographical parameters.

Most significant was the Nagayon’s presentation of the entire Buddhavamsa text in its program, recognizing the significance of Gotama’s Lineage for everything else on display. That component of the Khuddhaka Nikaya was even more important, in terms of what it presenced, than the ubiquitous Jatakas with which Pagan was obsessed. That was the case, because the Buddhavamsa in the context of shrine decors instantiated the immensely long time frame of the bodhisatta path, at the core of all Pali daw teachings. The text injected the all-important narrative temporality that enabled making sense of everything that followed. The Buddhavamsa narratives are a very difficult concept to explicate, but by recourse to the Buddhavamsa, devotees were instructed on how the bodhisatta path progressed along multiple worlds blessed by the presence of Gotama’s predecessors, and thereby his own multiple lives en route to Awakening. 34 Interpretations of how this was accomplished thereupon moved with the times, acquiring multiple trajectories, different inscriptional patterns and locations. Pagan and its successors’ vision of the universe and the world required a temporal framework that injected a sense of periodicity into the overall narrative – which the Buddhavamsa availed.

In the Pali world, a cardinal Buddhahood requirement was the bodhisatta’s reception of a prediction from a living Buddha regarding what would happen down the long road to Awakening. So important was this chapter of the Buddhavamsa that already during Saw Lu’s reign, the Dipankara Buddha episode and the story of Sumedha became detached from the Buddhavamsa context, and featured as a free-standing component, to underscore its import. That move is visible for the first time in the Nagayon, also indicating how particular episodes could be detached from their narrative context and made to stand alone which was greatly influential as the Gotama story was manipulated to meet

33 Bopearachchi 2016. 34 Appleton 2010.

19 contemporary needs. The Nagayon panel of the Dipankara prediction is a masterpiece of textual and visual narrativity, showing sophisticated pictorial techniques that cleaved closely to the written text. The image among much else features pots and dishes crashing around at the crucial moment of the prediction’s appearance in the human world, when the universe as a whole shakes in response to its significance. Exactly as the Buddhavamsa text said. This too testifies to Pagan’s participation in a boundary crossing ideational world. Elaborate cosmographic depictions concretized visibly the structure of the universe, outlined the ways in which the mundane and supra mundane realms intersected and how what happened in other worlds impinged upon the present one. The Dipankara component of the bodhisatta path was thereupon featured as the opening segment of numerous Jataka grids, where it served as the opening mono scenic frame to explicate the stories that followed. The Dipankara episode was popular elsewhere in Asia in an earlier period, though less as a stand-alone component in the Pali text Pagan privileged to depict all the Buddha’s previous lives – the Jatakanidana . The episode’s interpretation further evidences how Pagan was part of a wider world where Buddha paths were differently conceived and grounded in non Pali materials. But the Buddhist world shared common components, as was the case with Gandhara where this subchapter of the Gotama biography was popular –facilitating interactions between neighboring countries where the bodhisatta path however contoured informed people’s beliefs. Conclusion – integration to meet local needs In the Nagayon, disparate Gotama biographical details were still secondary to the teachings – present in the sutta images. The attempt to link the two, however short lived, was perhaps the most consequential ideational legacy of Saw Lu’s reign. Whether this was a Pagan invention or an imported pattern no longer extant in south Asia is impossible to tell. The Burmese were always conscious that their Pali daw came from elsewhere, but its integration to meet local needs also influenced how it was visualized. The Kyaukse structure that prompted the inscription of the Myittha donative stone likely spread such practices to the hinterland, endowing regions beyond the confines of Pagan with some of the ceremonial center’s prestige. A hollow structure availing donors substantial space on which to inscribe the Teachings was a suitable legacy on behalf of their future rebirths. If this was indeed Saw Lu’s legacy, it was more influential than the grandiosities of his Indic titles, Pagan’s self-designation as Arimaddana and the Nagayon’s about to be superseded decorative program. Saw Lu’s Nagayon legitimized harnessing imported artistic techniques and their alteration on behalf of illuminating the biography of the shrines’ Buddha occupant by making that biography tangibly visible. The recourse to inscriptions to illuminate its imagery was also transformative because it assumed that – regardless of who could read, and how much of this was actually visible, content needed

20 the supplement of inscribed evidence to remain informative. Thanks to Saw Lu’s choices, Pagan remained forever indebted to the wider world but did it, to quote Frank Sinatra, its own way.

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Strong, John S. 2004. Relics of the Buddha. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tun Aung Chain. 2016. U Kala: The Great Chronicle 1546 – 1711 . : Historical Commission. Venkatacharya, Thirumala. 1965. “Some names and etymologies in the anonymous Buddhacarita of the of the Mulasarvastivadin.” East and West 15: 296-308. Vilhauer, Monica. 2010. Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermenetics and the Other. Lanham, Md., Lexington Books. Figures and captions

Figure 1 – Chinese and Sri Lankan worshippers of the Buddha Eye Tooth Relics – Pagan, endowment 1077. Figure 2 – Myittha Stone - after U Win Maung Figure 3 – Saw Lu’s regnal title and votive tablet, Pagan Museum. Figure 4 –Arimadanna stone, after U Mya Figure 5 – Nagayon Samyutta Nikaya depictions and Dipankara panel Figure 6 – Alopyi-gu-hpaya suttas panel Figure 7 – Anawratha’s Shwehsandaw and Jataka plaques