The Mists of Rämañña Published with the support of the School of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies, University of Hawai‘i The Mists of Rämañña The Legend That Was Lower Burma Michael A. Aung-Thwin University of Hawai‘i Press Honolulu © 2005 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 1009080706 05 654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aung-Thwin, Michael. The mists of Rämañña : the legend that was lower Burma / Michael A. Aung-Thwin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8248-2886-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Burma—History—To 1824. 2. Burma—Historiography. 3. Legends—Burma. I. Title. DS529.2.A86 2005 959.1—dc22 2004029695 University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources. Designed by University of Hawai‘i Press production staff Printed by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group To my father, a Mon Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix 1 Introduction 1 2 The Pyü Millennium 13 3 Rämaññadesa, an Imagined Polity 43 4 Thatôn (Sudhuim), an Imagined Center 79 5 The Conquest of Thatôn, an Imagined Event 104 6 The Conquest of Thatôn as Allegory 119 7 The Mon Paradigm and the Origins of the Burma Script 154 8 The Place of Written Burmese and Mon in Burma’s Early History 179 9 The Mon Paradigm and the Evolution of the Pagán Temple 201 10 The Mon Paradigm and the Kyanzittha Legend 236 11 The Mon Paradigm and the Myth of the “Downtrodden Talaing” 261 12 Colonial Officials and Colonial Scholars: The Institutionalization of the Mon Paradigm 281 13 Without the Mon Paradigm 299 Notes 323 Bibliography 403 Index 425 Preface and Acknowledgments In October 1999 the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the International Institute of Asian Studies and the Research School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies, sponsored a colloquium on “Coastal Burma in the Age of Commerce” in Amsterdam. Invited to present a paper, I submitted “Lower Burma and Bago in the His- tory of Burma,” an essay subsequently published in 2002 in The Maritime Frontier of Burma: Exploring Political, Cultural and Commercial Interaction in the Indian Ocean World, 1200–1800. When I began the paper, I accepted the conventional wisdom of what I subsequently called the “Mon Paradigm.” This thesis, which has been in place for well over a hundred years, asserts that Mon Lower Burma civilized Burman Upper Burma during the most important era of its history, the “classical” period when the kingdom of Pagán emerged to found the “golden age” of Burmese culture. (By Burmese, here and throughout the book, I mean the cultural group, while I use Burman to refer to the ethno- linguistic group.) But as I began my research, I soon realized that the exist- ing primary evidence simply did not support the conventional view, and more recent scientific data only confirmed my initial reaction. This led me to reexamine the Mon Paradigm more thoroughly, and my early, tentative results became a small part of my article for the Amsterdam colloquium. Later I developed that part into a more detailed paper called “The Legend That Was Lower Burma” that I delivered at a conference on “Text and Con- text in Southeast Asia,” held at Yangôn in December 2001. Professionally and personally I had wanted to test my challenge of this sacrosanct thesis before my Burmese colleagues, many of Mon background, who knew the indigenous languages and had an intimate knowledge of the country’s history. The participants included some of the best Burma schol- ars from the country and abroad, along with many other Southeast Asian specialists from Europe, Asia, and North America. The paper intrigued the ix x Preface and Acknowledgments Burma scholarly community, inspiring the Burma Historical Commission to initiate a project designed specifically to investigate my thesis further. As of this writing I have not heard from the Commission regarding its findings, but I would be very surprised if it discovered anything substantially new to contradict my study because the evidence supporting it has been available for some time and is, quite frankly, overwhelming. Indeed, the problem is not the evidence per se but its interpretation. For the past 125 years, analysis of early Burma has almost always occurred within the frame- work of the Mon Paradigm, invariably producing the same conclusions. In this long process of disentangling more than a century of conven- tion, I have incurred many debts of gratitude. First, I wish to acknowledge the role played by the creators of the Amsterdam colloquium, particularly Jos Gommans and Jacques Leder. Without their invitation, I would proba- bly be working on something else entirely, and the Mon Paradigm might have been perpetuated for several more generations. In the same spirit, I would like to thank Daw Ni Ni Myint, historian of Burma and, at the time, director of the Universities Historical Research Centre, which hosted the Burma conference, for giving me the opportunity to present my thesis in what (to me) was a most challenging academic environment. I also owe many thanks to my former student Sun Laichen, now assis- tant professor at the University of California at Fullerton, for translating a crucial Chinese document and providing me with his expertise regarding Chinese sources on Burma in general. In regard to Chinese sources, I also thank Geoff Wade from the University of Hong Kong, currently spending some time at the National University of Singapore. My longtime mentor and supporter Kris Lehman, of the University of Illinois, was, as he has always been, unstinting in his valuable feedback. Professor U Saw Tun of North- ern Illinois University also answered questions regarding obscure or diffi- cult Burmese meanings that only a very few experts like him can elucidate. Another such expert, John Okell, taught me Old Burmese at London Uni- versity’s School of Oriental and African Studies and continues to help whenever I ask. Professor Victor Lieberman, a Burma colleague from the University of Michigan, generously sent me important unpublished sources from his private collection which helped confirm my conclusions and pushed my analysis that much farther; he also provided me with his usual gracious and helpful comments. John Whitmore, a friend and mentor for more than twenty years since he chaired my dissertation committee, who always has time for his students, offered thoughtful constructive criticism that invariably placed the study in a broader Southeast Asia framework. I also benefited appreciably from discussions with Burma scholars U Myint Aung, U Nyein Lwin, Elizabeth Moore, Bob Hudson, and Pamela Gutman, who have done, or are currently doing exciting new work on the period Preface and Acknowledgments xi before Pagán. To Ken Breazeale, historian of Thailand with the East-West Center here in Honolulu, I owe much with regard to information on Thai sources and other subjects that proved to be very helpful. I also wish to thank Professor Lily Handlin of Harvard University, noted American histo- rian-turned-Pagán-art historian (having seen the light), for many things including her tough, close reading of the manuscript. To the staff at both Hamilton and Sinclair Libraries, University of Hawai‘i, who obtained what- ever I wanted via Interlibrary Loan, and particularly to Yati Barnard, South- east Asia Librarian, for her tireless help, I owe much as well. Finally, I wish to express my appreciation to all my formal and informal graduate students at the University of Hawai‘i and elsewhere (including my son, now a histo- rian of colonial Burma with the National University of Singapore), all of whom listened politely and patiently to the “Mists of Rämañña” whenever I managed to corral them instead of running away in terror. I am not certain what my father, Moses Aung-Thwin, would have thought of all this, being Mon himself. But the little I know of him leads me to believe that he would have welcomed an iconoclastic study of this kind. And so it is to his memory that I dedicate this book. 1 Introduction In 1479, when King Dhammazedi of the kingdom of Pegu declared on his Kalyani Inscriptions1 that the legendary Suvan. n. abhümi of Buddhist tra- dition was the Mon kingdom of Rämaññadesa in Lower Burma,2 he inad- vertently created a twentieth-century historiographic issue that I have called the “legend that was Lower Burma,” 3 still with us today. Suvan. n. abhümi, “the land of gold,” was, of course, the region to which the two most famous Buddhist missionaries, Son. a and Uttara, were said to have gone from the Third Buddhist Council of As´oka in the third century BC to propagate the faith, an event long celebrated as the introduction of Buddhism to South- east Asia. This council was perceived by Theraväda Buddhists as the most orthodox of Buddhist councils, so the version of the scriptures the mission- aries carried with them to Suvan. n. abhümi, and therefore also to Rämañña- desa, was also considered the most orthodox. By thus linking Lower Burma with the sacred geography, sacred genealogy, and sacred chronology of As´oka’s Buddhist India, King Dhammazedi, in one stroke, gave Rämañña- desa an antiquity, orthodoxy, and legitimacy it never had. Then for nearly four hundred years Dhammazedi’s attempt to link As´okan Buddhist India with Lower Burma and the legendary foundations of his own kingdom was all but forgotten in the historiography of the country.4 Two and a half centuries later, between 1712 and 1720, a private indi- vidual named U Kala wrote the most comprehensive chronicle of Burma’s monarchy that has survived, the Mahayazawingyi.