The Shwepyin Brothers

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The pagoda at Taungbyon stood finished but for a gap. Every retainer in the king’s train had been set to lay two bricks into its rising wall, and every retainer had laid them — save two. The two were boys, sons of a strong man out of the sea and an ogress off the mountain, raised as pages in the royal household. On the day the bricks went up they were at their marbles in the dust and did not stop for the masonry. When the scaffolding came down, the stupa that King Anawrahta had raised to house a relic of the Buddha carried a hollow in its flank the exact size of two bricks. For that — for a child’s game and a wall left short — the king had them put to death. Out of the killing came two of the mightiest spirits in Burma.

The two brothers and how they reach the record

They are always two, and the tradition names them by their order in the birth. The elder is Shwe Hpyin Naungdaw, also called Shwe Hpyin Gyi, and honored as Min Gyi, the Great Lord; the younger is Shwe Hpyin Nyidaw, also Shwe Hpyin Nge, honored as Min Lay, the Little Lord. Shwe Hpyin carries the sense of gold — the younger’s name is glossed in the record as something like “Goldpot the Younger” — so they are, in the plainest reading of their names, the golden brothers, elder and little. Together they are the Shwe Hpyin Nyinaung, the Brother Lords, or the Taungbyon Min Nyinaung, the Brother Lords of Taungbyon, and it is under that joined title that the cult mostly addresses them, for the two are inseparable in legend, in shrine, and in the great festival that is theirs.

They reach the written record the way the whole Burmese Nat pantheon does, threaded through the chronicles of the Bagan kings and then gathered up, in the colonial period, into a fixed catalog. In the pictorial roster of the Thirty-Seven Nats set down by Sir Richard Carnac Temple in The Thirty-Seven Nats of 1906, the elder brother stands at number twenty-six and the younger at number twenty-seven, the pair of them cataloged as members of the official pantheon. That numbering should not be taken for a fixed thing. The roster of the Thirty-Seven and the details of any one nat’s legend shift from teller to teller and town to town; the canon was never closed to a single form, and where one list seats a nat another moves or omits it. What is constant is that these two are near the top of the pantheon in power and in devotion, whatever their number in a given telling.

Their genealogy runs back through two of the great nat families at once, joining a lineage of the sea to a lineage of the mountain. The father was Byatta, a royal retainer of King Anawrahta remembered in the tradition as a man of Indian-Muslim descent. In the legend he is one of two brothers — Byatta and Byatwi — Muslim traders shipwrecked off the Mon city of Thaton in lower Burma, who came ashore riding a drifting plank. On that coast they found the preserved body of a dead zawgyi, the Burmese alchemist-hermit whose accumulated occult power is said to pass to whoever consumes his flesh; they cooked and ate of it and gained strength past nature. Byatwi was seized and killed by the king’s men and his body buried in pieces about the city wall, but Byatta escaped north to Bagan, where his strength won him a place at Anawrahta’s court. The king made him the flower officer, and each day Byatta bounded the more than thirty miles south from Bagan to Mount Popa to gather fresh blossoms for the palace. On the mountain he loved and married Me Wunna, the flower-eating ogress who kept its slopes — she who, bereaved of husband and sons, would die of grief and become Popa Medaw, the flower-mother of the peak. The two brothers were her sons, born on the mountain and taken young into the royal service. Through their father they carry the memory of the seafaring Muslim strangers of the Bay of Bengal; through their mother, the pre-Buddhist wildness of Popa. They are the meeting of the two.

Me Wunna (Popa Medaw) and her sons, the Shwepyin brothers, at Mount Popa in central Myanmar, 1987. Wagaung, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The green death and the Lords of the green

To understand the brothers as nats one has to understand the manner of their death, because in the Burmese spirit world the manner of a death is the measure of the power it leaves behind. The Thirty-Seven are, for the most part, the ghosts of human beings who died badly — by violence, by injustice, by unbearable grief, cut down at the height of their force with a grievance still unsettled. The tradition calls such an end a green death, an untimely and unripe death, and it does not extinguish a strong being but fixes it, angry and undiminished, into the landscape as a nat that must thereafter be honored and fed. The brothers died the greenest of deaths, and it made them accordingly formidable.

In life they were their father’s sons — strong, bold, and useful to the king as warriors and as infiltrators, agents sent where an army could not go. The great feat the legend credits them with is an act of espionage on Anawrahta’s behalf, in the tale of the Buddha’s tooth. When the king sought a sacred relic from a foreign court to the north — a Chinese or borderland king in the telling — it was the two brothers who slipped past the royal bodyguard by night and, to prove the reach of Bagan, drew three lines of white lime across the sleeping monarch’s body and left a message that Anawrahta’s men had stood over him and spared him. The relic, an eyetooth of the Buddha, came south to Bagan with the brothers’ daring behind it. It is a legend, told as the cult’s own history and not as documented fact; the historicity of the brothers as individuals sits, like Byatta’s and Me Wunna’s, among the genuinely contested matters of the record, the tradition’s memory of its own origins rather than a chronicle a historian can independently confirm.

Then came the pagoda, and the bricks. Anawrahta, home with his relic, raised a stupa at Taungbyon to enshrine it and set every man of his following to contribute two bricks to the work. The brothers, careless in the way of boys who have never yet met the limit of their strength, played at their marbles and laid none, and the finished pagoda kept the gap where their share should have been. The king ordered them killed. The tellings agree that ordinary execution failed on them — so far past nature was the strength they had inherited that the blows meant to kill them did nothing — and that in the end they were destroyed only when their testicles were crushed. It is a sober and terrible detail, held here at the distance of the record; what it marks is the theme the whole cult turns on, that these were beings too strong to die easily, executed at the flood of their power, and that the very difficulty of their killing is why the spirits it produced are so mighty.

For they did not stay dead in any ordinary sense. Manifesting before Anawrahta after their execution, the two brothers did not beg pardon but asked for a domain, and the king — who could not now be rid of them — granted them dominion over Taungbyon, the very ground of their dereliction. There they reign. As nats they are among the Lords of the green, the martial and appetitive spirits invoked for protection and for worldly favor: for the safety of a house, for success in a venture, for force against an enemy. They are addressed not as memories but as living lords who hunger and thirst, who ride and drink and demand their honor, quick to give and quick to take offense. The younger brother’s temper runs through the legend even into eternity — the tradition remembers his unrequited love for a woman named Ma Shwe U, and that in his anger at her refusal he had a tiger kill her, so that a spiritual enmity survives between them past both their deaths. These are not gentle spirits. They are powerful ones, and the whole apparatus of offering and festival exists to keep their power turned toward the household rather than against it.

The offerings set before them carry the memory of who they were. Rich food and drink go to the Brother Lords, as befits two carousing warriors, and the one thing pointedly kept from their table is pork — because their father Byatta was a Muslim, the tradition holds pork away from the brothers’ offerings, a plain and honored feature of their worship that reaches back through them to the strangers from the sea. That single abstention is a piece of the family’s history preserved as rite: to feed the brothers correctly is to remember, without a word said, whose sons they were.

The August that fills the village

The settlement that made room for the brothers within the larger Burmese order was Anawrahta’s own. The king who had them killed is also, in the scholarly record, the one credited with drawing the whole company of the Thirty-Seven under the wing of Theravada Buddhism — unable to abolish the older spirit-lords, he absorbed them, seating their images at the Shwezigon arranged as the Buddha’s devotees and setting the Buddhicized Thagyamin at their head. That considered and lasting settlement, the spirit religion enclosed within the Buddhist cosmos and the two devotions served as one life, is told in full where it happened and in the life of the Burmese people who keep both. What matters for the Brother Lords is that the arrangement gave their fierce local cult a place inside the national religion, so that a Burmese Buddhist may honor the Taungbyon nats and the Buddha together without contradiction, as Min Mahagiri is honored in the corner of the house and Ko Gyi Kyaw at his raffish festivals, each nat within the same encompassing frame.

The colonial archive found the brothers already at the height of the pantheon. Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats set them down with plate and legend as numbers twenty-six and twenty-seven, one of his figures showing the elder standing with his sword shouldered — and it is from that 1906 catalog that the Western record of the pair descends. The scholars who followed read the lists against the living cult: Maung Htin Aung in Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism of 1962, working from within the tradition; Melford Spiro in Burmese Supernaturalism of 1967, setting the legends beside the working religion of the villages; and the anthropologist Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, who has studied the Taungbyon festival closely as a place where locality and nation meet in the cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords. All of them note the same instability in the roster and the same certainty in the devotion: the count of the Thirty-Seven wavers, but the standing of the Brother Lords does not.

Shwe Hpyin Naungdaw (Min Gyi), the elder brother, from Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats (1906). Richard Carnac Temple, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The living center of it all is Taungbyon village, on the east bank of the Shweta stream in Madaya Township, in the Aungmyethazan District of the Mandalay Region, roughly ten to fifteen kilometers north of Mandalay. There the brothers’ nat shrine — a palace of two pavilions holding their images and those of the lesser nats of their company — stands beside the Buddhist pagodas of the site, the Sudaungbyi stupa attributed to Anawrahta among them, the two devotions built into a single ground. A cluster of Bagan-era forts within a few kilometers of the village keeps the memory that this was once a royal domain, the ground the king gave and the ground the brothers claimed.

Once a year the sleepy village becomes the greatest spirit-gathering in the country. The Taungbyon festival is the largest and most important nat pwe in Myanmar, held in the Burmese month of Wagaung, in August, its core days running from about the eighth waxing of the month toward the full moon; the count of days varies with the telling, six in some, eight or nine in others, and the village swells to hold the tens of thousands who come. The year, in fact, holds three commemorations of the brothers — their departure for the war in December, their return in March, and their disappearance in August — and it is the August one, the disappearance, that is the great festival. Bamboo pavilions and stalls go up along the approaches; a pagoda association has organized the swelling event since the 1990s. The cult and its festival grew markedly in prominence after the royal capital was established nearby at Mandalay in 1857, drawing the Brother Lords closer to the center of the kingdom’s life in its last royal decades.

At the heart of the festival are the nat kadaw, the spirit-mediums through whom the brothers are made present. To the driving strains of the hsaing waing, the Burmese percussion orchestra, the mediums call the nats down and give them a body for a while, and the crowds bring their petitions to the Brother Lords through them. The profession is often a woman’s, sometimes hereditary from mother to daughter, and many of the mediums are acault — transgender or gay men who have long held a recognized and respected place in the cult as the nats’ own officiants. What passes between medium and nat in those hours is the working heart of the devotion, and it belongs to those who keep it; it is described here only from the outside, at the remove of the public record, never as an instruction. The festival has its modern strains besides — the commerce that gathers around any great gathering, the pressures of a country lately in turmoil — but the devotion is older and more stubborn than any of them, and the brothers have kept their village for nine hundred years.

Their remembered Indian-Muslim descent, carried in the pork kept from their table, is a plain fact of the living worship, stated here as the tradition itself preserves it. It is worth marking without embellishment: that two of the most powerful and most beloved spirits of Buddhist Burma are, in the cult’s own memory, the half-Muslim grandsons of a shipwrecked trader from beyond the bay, and that their worshipers honor the memory every year in what they will not set before them. The boys who would not lay two bricks in a king’s pagoda are given, each August, a whole village for a fortnight — the small dereliction repaid across the centuries in a devotion no king could have commanded and no king has been able to end.

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