King Saw Lu and the World Around Him (Pdf; 1362Kb)
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1 King Saw Lu and the World Around Him Dr. Lilian Handlin Independent Scholar 2 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 monarch 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 title features in the Mon, Pali 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 merit this kind of treatment. Introduction The Myittha stone is innovative and unprecedented – king 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 stupa – 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 kings 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. 4 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 stupas, 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 Buddhaghosa, 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 U Kala Much about the Myittha inscription remains problematic – its reading is insecure and two of the five languages may or may not be Burmese and Sanskrit. 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. 5 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 Theravada Buddhism 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.