by Norman Lewis
The special sanctity of the Shwedagon arises from the fact that it is the only pagoda recognised as enshrining relics not only of Gautama, but of the three Buddhas preceding him. Those of the Master consist of eight hairs, four of them original, given in his lifetime, and four others, miraculous reproductions generated from them in the course of their journey from India. These, according to the account in the official guidebook, flew up, when the casket containing them was opened, to a height of seven palm trees. They emitted rays of variegated hues, which caused the dumb to speak, the deaf to hear, and the lame to walk. Later, a rain of jewels fell, covering the earth to knee’s depth. The treasure buried with these relics was of such value that, centuries later, the report of it reached the ears of the King of China, who made a magic figure in human form, and sent it to rob the shrine. This creature, says the chronicle, was so dazzled by the pagoda’s appearance, that it hesitated, and while in this bemused state was attacked and cut to pieces by the Shwedagon’s spirit-guardians. It was the habit of the Burmese kings to make extravagant gifts for the embellishment of the Shwedagon, diamond vanes, jewel-encrusted finial umbrellas, or at least their weight in gold, to be used in re-gilding the spire. The wealth that other Oriental princes kept in vaults and coffers was here spread out under the sun to astound humanity. Two of the three greatest bells in the world were cast and hung here. Both were seized by foreigners – one by the Portuguese, and one by the British – and both, causing the capsizal of the ships that carried them away, were sunk in the river. Shinsawbu, Queen of the Talaungs, won so much respect by building the great terrace and the walls, that the most flattering thing the Burmese could think of to say about Queen Victoria was that she was a reincarnation of this queen.
* * *
Early on the morning of Good Friday, when the festival was at its height, I took a car out to the pagoda to gather a few last-minute impressions of the Burmese en fête. The Shwedagon lies three or four miles to the north of the town. The last quarter of a mile I covered on foot, while ahead a volcano of gold rose slowly up from among the trees, into the dusty blue of the sky. Pilgrims, when afar off, prostrate themselves in the direction of this cone as it comes first into sight. The road was lined with shrines and monsters. Streams of jeeps 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 at the pagoda before the ceremony began. The boys wore expensive imitations of the old Burmese court dress, with gilt helmets and epaulets like sprouting wings, and their attendants struggled to hold golden umbrellas over their heads.
I left my shoes with a flower-seller at the entrance to the covered stairway, bought some flowers from her, and began to climb the steps. There were two or three hundreds of them, left purposely rough and uneven – like the pavé in a French village – to ensure a slow and respectful approach. All the way up, there were stalls selling flowers, gongs, votive offerings, and ugly toys. Barefooted crowds were climbing and descending the steps with the murmuring of hushed voices, and the rustle of harsh, new silks. The air was full of the odour of flowers standing in vases. From somewhere above, light was spreading down the dark shaft, and from its source, too, the sound – like a deep, melodious breathing – of gongs.
Coming out of the cavernous approach on to the wide, glistening expanse of terrace, I plunged suddenly into the most brilliant spectacle I had ever seen. Fitch, a merchant adventurer, who had surveyed without comment the splendours of the Venice, the Ormuz, the Goa and the East Indies of his day, had stood here in admiration, although unable to refrain from a sour aside on the vanity of consuming gold in such a way. The terrace is flanked by shrines, with a press of guardian ogres, fabulous beasts, and mild-faced, winged gorgons squeezed in between and behind them; and then, in the immediate background, rises a golden escarpment, a featureless cliff of precious metal, spreading a misty dazzlement, in which the crawling shapes of pilgrims, sticking on their gold-leaf, are black, vaguely seen insects.
The innumerable foreground shrines were banked with flowers, and decked with the votive parasols which usefully protect an image from the sun in a tropical country, and often replace the candles necessary to light its cavern in the north. Round the glittering pyramid went Rangoon’s Easter-parade of the gay and the devout. When they wanted to pray – which they did most poetically, with offerings of flowers held between the clasped palms – there were hundreds of images to choose from, of gold, of silver, of marble or wood. (Like most peoples who incline themselves before images, Buddhists insist with the gravest emphasis that they are not worshipping the material object, but the great principle it represents.) People worshipped individually, or in groups, in the large shrines or out in the hot sunshine of the terrace, prostrating themselves vaguely towards the spire of the pagoda. 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 petrol cans) from the sellers and pouring it over the images that sat in the hot sun; by re-lighting candles that had gone out, and replacing parasols that had fallen down; by taking up the deer’s antlers provided, 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 troublous times Buddhists from all over the East, journeying as freely as did European pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela and Monte Sant’ Angelo, visited the Shwedagon for this festival. Now, apart from the Burmese, there were only Tibetans, whose tenacious piety nothing could daunt.
* * *
A few hundred yards from the foot of the pagoda, the Government had organised a secular festival, a combination of a pwè and industrial samples-fair, that was not quite successfully one thing or the other. At night it came to vociferous life beneath the golden symbol of renunciation shining in the moonlit sky above it.
There was an open-air theatre with an actress and two clowns, but it was not very good. Perhaps the atmosphere was wrong. The formal organisation seemed to have stripped the thing of its spontaneity. Although the loudspeakers poured out a tremendous babel of noise, and the lights hurt the eyes, this could not compare for authentic quality with the pwès got up by the neighbours of the various districts of Kemmendine.
I spent half an hour watching the boxing, noticing that pongyis were allowed in to see this ungodly spectacle without charge. Half the audience were members of the yellow robe. The boxers came out and prostrated themselves, foreheads touching the ground, to their corners; the obeisance was returned by their seconds. The challenger then executed a very slow war-dance to the music of drums and flutes, stopping occasionally to beat himself on the chest in the Tarzan manner. After that the opponents advanced towards each other with ballet steps, like Ramayana champions about to hurl fiery javelins. 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. But this exuberance soon died down, as it does in fighting-cocks too. 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, when he was roughly interrupted by a forthright Westernised fellow who said, ‘Nothing is debarred to them. They may even kick each other in the sensitive parts.’
At midnight a straight theatrical show started in one of the tents, and I sampled an hour of a performance that would go on all night. The first scene showed a young 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. It was most baffling. But 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 favour 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 flashback, not only to the characters’ pasts, but to their previous incarnations! But also, alas, how it holds up the action!
* * *
Much of the industrial section of the festival could not have been more boring. As most native Burmese industries are still in the planning stage, there was little to see. One booth gave a soap-making demonstration; another tried to extract drama from the workings of an automatic self-photographing machine; a third displayed a revolting collection of Kewpie dolls, under a banner which said, ‘Burma makes fine rubber toys’. But there was one exhibit – and it was the main one – which amply compensated for the dullness of the rest. This was the pavilion the Government had taken for its anti-corruption campaign. The Burmese have no objection at all to the washing of dirty linen in public, and at this time Burmese newspapers were full of stories of the various rackets practised by Government officials. The current scandal was over import-licences, in which, it seemed, a great trade was going on. They were usually obtained by persons who had no experience whatever, and no capital, but who happened to have a friend or relative in the Government. Sometimes such shadow-firms, with accommodation addresses, turned out, upon investigation, to be conducted by the wives of the high officials themselves. In any case, the licence when granted was sold to a firm of established reputation, usually at a price equal to the landed value of the goods – ninety per cent of which, however, was paid by the intermediary, or shadow firm, as a bribe to the official granting the licence. As an immediate result of this system, the prices of the imported goods affected were enormously increased, usually to double the normal figure, or more. What was more pernicious in the long run, from the national point of view, was that although in a desperate financial condition, Burma found itself importing all kinds of useless luxuries upon which this toll could be levied. One of the letters published in the press instanced the licences granted to import silk from Japan, which Burma, as a silk producer, does not require. The importers turned out to be a timber-cutting company and a flour mill.
In the Anti-Corruption Pavilion, these manipulators were dealt with, with a hint of defeatism, perhaps, as far as this life went. Seeming to resign themselves to the wicked man’s prosperity in this world, the Burmese Government had set themselves to show what awaited him in the next. For their illustrated fable they had chosen a mild fellow of average virtue and weakness, lifted from a comic-strip or toothpaste advertisement, and his downfall was ascribed to the promptings of an ambitious wife, a fact which drew much protest in the Rangoon press from feminists.
In the first of a series of pictures he is shown relaxing from departmental cares in the surroundings of a modest home, listening thoughtfully to the pleadings of his wife, who, seated on the arm of the sofa, bends over him to pour the poison of covetousness into his ear. In Picture Two, he has already sold his soul to the devil. The furniture has been modernised, and there is a big radio-set on the table. The honest mediocrity of his appearance has been rectified. He wears a made-up turban. His wife – since the dress of Burmese women has reached an apex of taste which no mere access of ill-gotten wealth can assail – is as before; but there is a twinkle of gems at her throat. Picture Three. Having overeaten, the husband dies of an acute attack of indigestion. His soul is seen leaving his body. In a vertical position, and respectably clothed, it floats upwards, and is about to pass through a modernistic candelabra. Four. A judge of hell receives him, in appropriately Dantesque surroundings: a rocky area, where huge vultures perch at intervals. The judge is dressed, with the solid conservatism of the last generation, in the Burmese equivalent of a morning suit and top-hat. Picture Five. It now comes to light that the young man has only once accepted a bribe and, most fortunately, it is also discovered that the link connecting soul and body is not quite severed. He is to be given another chance. But to make sure the warning has not been lost, the judge first takes him on a brief, conducted tour of hell, which is organised, on Gilbert and Sullivan lines, to make the punishment fit the crime. Thus arms-traffickers are chased by ravening hounds across a landscape set with bayonets. Corrupt Public Works Department officials are run over by ghostly replicas of their steamrollers. Excise men who have succumbed stagger blindly through a ravine seething with the fumes of noxious liquors. Co-operative officials who misappropriate rations queue up, ration card in hand, for molten silver to be poured down their throats. Railway executives who sell privilege tickets and take bribes for freight priorities are flogged by demons with lengths of rail. Meanwhile, as the final vision reveals, the unfortunate young man’s wife has already remarried, and is busily engaged in spending his loot with her new husband.
First reaction to this morality: if a Burmese evil-doer could really be deterred by such propaganda – and the Government evidently thought he could – it showed that heaven and hell were nearer to a Buddhist than I had ever suspected. Secondly, I found it hard to think of the Burmese woman, outwardly so tranquil and so demure, in the role of a Lady Macbeth.
* * *
The organisation of such a show struck me as a praiseworthy and heartening attitude on the part of the government of Burma, which, whatever its failings, possesses in full measure the politically saving grace of self-criticism. They knew that their administration was riddled with corruption, and instead of trying to hush it up, they gave it all the publicity they could. And that, it seemed to me, was the quickest way to mend matters.
No one could have been more cheerfully frank about their shortcomings and their failures than the Burmese. Were things better in the British times? Nine out of ten of them laughed out loud at the absurdity of such a question. ‘Better? … Why even bring it up? Everyone was well off then. We didn’t know how well off we were.’ The Burmese seem to be above nursing old scores, and they either forget or pretend to forget the other side of the picture – the disdains and exclusions by which it was made clear to them that they were regarded, in their own country, as an inferior people. The Burmese never bitterly remind the British visitor of this, and he is freely welcomed by them within the portals of those institutions from which they were debarred.
But in any case these were the minor irritations of the skin, which did not amount to much, except as symptoms of a deep-seated ailment. What was really wrong was that under colonial tutelage the Burmese or any other people lost – or as in this case were in the process of losing – their national character. The only culture they could rebuild for themselves was never much more than a poor, provincial imitation of that of the occupying power. Colonies – and Burma was an example – were sometimes prosperous, but colonial prosperity is a wretched substitute for lost nationhood. Before they could be real Burmese again, and not – at least, so far as the upper classes went – imitation Englishmen, the Burmese had to stand on their own feet, and left to fend for themselves. Whatever the temporary material consequences, I regard it as the greatest possible good fortune for them that this has happened.
* * *
And now on the eve of my departure from Burma, I re-gathered my impressions in an attempt to form some kind of personal estimate of this fascinating country’s prospects. From my record of the present-day somewhat chaotic travelling conditions, the reader may have deduced a pessimism which would not be altogether justified. The Burmese nation stands upon foundations, both economic and psychological, of peculiar solidity. These provide a resilience which has pulled it safely through several historic crises of the gravest kind.
To deal with the psychological aspect; Burma has, in the first pla
ce, the extreme fortune to be entirely free from the damaging myths of colour, race and caste, that bedevil the internal relationships of so many nations. Secondly, it has freed itself from Western domination almost with the ease of removing an unwanted garment. As a result, no trace of bitterness remains, and a Westerner can travel with at least as much safety as a Burmese from one end of the country to the other, meeting, as I did, with nothing but the most genial and touching hospitality. Then, once again, owing to the nation’s background of Buddhist indoctrination it is free from the delusion – the bane of the West, and much of the East – of the supreme value of material accumulation. There is some corruption and money-grubbing in high places, but real prestige in Burma – and it is very real – lies not with the millionaire, but with the penniless monk. On the national scale this means that there is no reason why the Burmese should not avoid or bypass that grim interlude in human development heralded in the West by the Industrial Revolution, and rest content to live within their present very adequate means, leaving Tennessee Valley Projects and their like to those who believe that the kingdom of heaven on earth will be here when every family has its refrigerator, as well as two cars in the garage. I state here my sincere belief that the average Burmese peasant working his own land, lives a fuller and happier life, and is a more successful human being than the average Western factory hand or office worker. His work is creative, free of clock-punching and deadly routine, and allows him an enormous amount of leisure, which he consumes with expertness and relish. From the leisure aspect only, it is the difference between filling in coupons, and keeping one’s own fighting-cocks; between standing in the four and sixes on Sunday afternoon, and the full-blooded pleasures of a three-day pwè.
