Shwezigon Pagoda

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At the foot of the golden bell, where the last terrace meets the plain, a company of small figures stands with their faces tipped upward. They are worn smooth in places by the gold leaf that pilgrims press onto them, and they do not look at the visitor; they look at the great gilded mass rising above their heads, toward the relic chamber sealed inside it. These are the Thirty-Seven — the spirits of the Burmese sacred world, the fire-lord of the mountain and the executed brothers and the drunkard-lord among them — set here not as rivals to the Buddha but as his devotees, ranked below him and turned toward him. A king who found he could not forbid their worship gathered their images instead and stood them at the base of his reliquary, in the posture of homage. The pagoda that rose over that gesture is the Shwezigon, and the arrangement made at its foot has organized the whole spirit religion of Myanmar ever since.

The mound at Nyaung-U

The stupa stands on the eastern edge of the Bagan plain, near the town of Nyaung-U, on rising ground between the villages of Wetkyi-in and Nyaung-U in what is now the Mandalay Region of central Myanmar. Its coordinates place it at 21°11′43″N 94°53′38″E — a short way from the loop of the Irrawaddy, within sight of the vast field of temples that the kings of Bagan raised across three centuries. The name is a plain compound in the Burmese manner: shwe, gold, joined to zigon, understood in the tradition as a sand-bank mound or hillock, so that the whole reads as something like “the golden mound.” Whether the ground was chosen for an older sacred association or simply for its command of the plain is not recoverable; what the tradition preserves is that a mound here was raised into gold.

The documented history, so far as the record and the chronicles permit it to be reconstructed, turns on a single reign and its sequel. Anawrahta of Bagan (r. 1044–1077) is remembered as the founder of the Pagan Empire and, in the phrase the Burmese still use, the father of the nation. In 1056 a Mon monk, Shin Arahan, drew him to Theravada Buddhism; the following year, in May 1057, his armies took the Mon city of Thaton, and the transmission of the Mon Buddhist learning northward into the Irrawaddy heartland is reckoned the turning point of early Burmese history. It was after this that Anawrahta undertook his great reliquary. Work on the Shwezigon began around 1059–1060; he raised the lower square terraces, but the pagoda was still unfinished at his death some eighteen years later. His son Kyansittha (r. 1084–1112/13) completed the bell and the upper works, and the dedication is placed in the tradition at 1102. Kyansittha’s building activity at Bagan is attested outside the chronicles as well: stone inscriptions in the Mon language, set up in his name, survive within the pagoda’s compound and in the wider temple field, so that the historical figure and the chronicle-figure can, for once, be laid alongside one another.

What the stupa was built to hold belongs to a softer register. The tradition names its relics as physical remains of Gautama Buddha — most often a bone and a tooth — with the tellings varying in the particulars: a collar-bone and a frontal bone brought from Prome, a tooth sent from Ceylon by its king, a replica of the great tooth relic. That the Shwezigon enshrines relics of the Buddha is the settled belief of the site; which relics, and by what route they came, is exactly the kind of detail that the chronicles fix confidently and the historical record cannot confirm. It is best held as the tradition’s account of its own foundation rather than as a documented inventory.

The act that gives the Shwezigon its particular place in the Burmese sacred world sits in the same double light. The chronicles and the scholars who have read them hold that Anawrahta, having tried and failed to simply abolish the worship of the spirits his people had always served, chose instead to draw that worship inside the Buddhist enclosure. He had images of the Thirty-Seven Nats set up at the Shwezigon, arranged as worshipers of the Buddha whose relics the pagoda contained, and over them he placed a Buddhist deity — Thagyamin, the Burmese Sakka, the reformed Indra who kneels to the Dhamma — as king of the whole company. The exact original placement of those images is genuinely contested in the record. Sources speak variously of the figures on the lower terraces, of guardian nats set within the enclosure walls as thathanasaun — keepers of the Buddha’s teaching — and of the images as they are found today, gathered into a small hall beside the platform. What is not in doubt is the directional logic of the arrangement, and that logic is what the site has carried for nine centuries.

The Shwezigon Pagoda at Nyaung-U, Bagan — a solid gold-leaf-gilded bell rising from five square receding terraces, the form copied across Myanmar for a thousand years. Civilgyi, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The bell and the door

The Shwezigon teaches first through its shape. It is a solid stupa, not a hollow temple — a gilded bell some 48.8 meters (160 feet) high, rising from five square terraces that recede as they climb, the whole gathered inward toward the finial and its crowning hti, the tiered metal umbrella. Below the bell the profile passes through octagonal and circular bands, so that the eye is led from the squared base through a softening of angles into the pure curve of the dome. This is the classic Burmese silhouette, and the Shwezigon is reckoned its prototype: the form that later builders repeated, at every scale, from village pagodas to the great gilded stupas of Yangon and Mandalay, for the better part of a millennium. To stand before it is to stand before the original of a shape one has already seen a thousand times across the country. The pagoda is a solid mass, not an enterable hall; the pilgrim’s whole business is the circuit of its base, the barefoot walk clockwise around a center that cannot be entered because a relic, not a room, is what it holds.

The monument reads, in its furnishings, as a compressed image of the Buddhist cosmos. Set into four porticoes at the cardinal points are tall standing Buddhas, bronze figures of some twelve to thirteen feet, each with a hand raised in the gesture of reassurance, the abhaya “fear not.” They are the four Buddhas of the present world-age — Kakusandha, Konagamana, Kassapa, and Gautama — so that the pilgrim circling the base passes, one after another, the whole living lineage of awakening that this eon has produced. Around three of the terraces run glazed terra-cotta plaques, several hundred of them (the counts given run to some five hundred fifty), each illustrating a scene from the Jataka, the tales of the Buddha’s former lives. The stupa thus offers, in gilt and glaze, the reach of the Buddhist story from the deep past of the bodhisatta’s earlier births to the four awakened ones of the present, all of it gathered up into the sealed relic at the center.

And at the base of all this — at the threshold, where the sacred mass meets the ordinary ground — stand the nats. This is the door in the wall, and it is the reason the Shwezigon matters beyond its architecture. In the frame of the tradition the arrangement is not a compromise but a theology, and a durable one. The nats are not denied and not expelled; they are admitted, on terms. They are powerful beings, but worldly ones — spirits still caught in samsara, most of them human beings who died hard and violent deaths and were fixed by that death into spirithood, able to help and to harm but not themselves beyond suffering. The Buddha is beyond them, and beyond the whole wheel they still turn on. To set their images at the foot of his reliquary, faces raised, is to state the entire relation in stone: the nats real and to be reckoned with, but ranked below and turned toward the one who has passed out of their condition altogether.

This is the gesture that lets a Burmese Buddhist keep both devotions in one life without contradiction. The householder who hangs a coconut in the eastern corner of the house for Min Mahagiri, the fire-lord who guards the home, and who then takes refuge in the Buddha, the Dhamma, and the Sangha, is not a lapsed or a lesser Buddhist practicing two half-religions. The two are one practice, and the Shwezigon is where that unity was first given a public form. Over the company the tradition sets Thagyamin — the deva-king already known to the whole Buddhist world as Sakka, the reformed storm-god who clears the road for the Buddha’s own feet — precisely because a king who is himself a disciple can head a company of spirits without turning them against the religion they now stand inside. Beneath him the older host answers, led in the earthbound register by Min Mahagiri, the lord of the great mountain at Mount Popa, where the Thirty-Seven are imagined to keep their court.

The elevation of Thagyamin has left a physical trace at the Shwezigon that pilgrims are still shown. A carved wooden figure of the deva-king at the shrine of the thirty-seven is held by tradition to be some nine hundred years old, roughly the age of the pagoda itself, and a life-size stone image of him there is reckoned the earliest known depiction of Indra in Burma — the king of the gods rendered as the oldest and most durable of these images, fitting for the figure the whole scheme was arranged around. In the festival iconography he rides the three-headed white elephant and carries the conch and the yak-tail whisk of the herald; the same Thagyamin descends each New Year, at Thingyan, to write the year’s deeds in his two books. The place where the nats were set to worship the Buddha is thus also, in the tradition’s own account, the place from which the whole ordered world of nat-and-Buddha in Myanmar was first arranged — the threshold and the source at once.

Nat images in a shrine beside the platform of the Shwezigon — the spirits Anawrahta set at the foot of the reliquary, moved to their own hall but never expelled. Richard Mortel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The doorway of the nats

The colonial and modern scholarship took the Shwezigon, almost from the moment it began to describe the nat cult at all, as the key exhibit for Anawrahta’s absorption of the spirit religion — and as the type-site of Burmese sacred architecture besides. Sir Richard Carnac Temple, whose The Thirty-Seven Nats: A Phase of Spirit-Worship prevailing in Burma appeared in London in 1906, set out the official list of the Thirty-Seven and read the ring of images here as a deliberate royal act; Maung Htin Aung, in his studies of what he called the folk elements in Burmese Buddhism, followed him in treating the arrangement as an accommodation rather than a muddle — the king drawing spirit-worshipers, as the phrase in this reading has it, through the doorway of the nats and on toward the Buddha. Their account is the source of the line so often attached to Anawrahta: that men would not come for the sake of a new faith, so let them come for their old gods and be gradually won over. The sentiment is carried in the chronicle-and-scholarly tradition and is repeated across the modern literature; it is not a verbatim inscription of the king’s, and is best read as the tradition’s compressed statement of a policy rather than as words recovered from his mouth.

That reading has been tested and extended rather than overturned. Melford Spiro’s Burmese Supernaturalism of 1967 studied the living cult as a coherent system held alongside canonical Theravada Buddhism, not as a survival awaiting extinction; the later fieldwork of Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière has traced how the pantheon actually works in the festivals and the households of the present. What this scholarship converges on is what the Burmese tradition itself presents: that the two devotions form one religious life, and that the Shwezigon is the monument where their joining was first built into stone. It also insists, as the tradition never hid, on how much remains genuinely variable below the surface of the official scheme. The canon of the Thirty-Seven is not fixed; the lists differ from telling to telling, a spirit dropping out here and another entering there, and the towns and names in a given legend shift with the teller. Several of the Thirty-Seven are bound directly to Anawrahta’s own reign and to the executions it carried out — the two brothers whose great August festival still fills Taungbyon among them — a matter the tradition holds soberly, without spectacle. The membership of the list is one of the openly contested things in the whole cult, and the Shwezigon fixes the arrangement’s logic without fixing its roster.

The pagoda has never stopped being a working sacred site, and its later history is legible in its surface. A severe earthquake in 1975 badly damaged the spire and the dome, as it did much of Bagan; in the restoration that followed, devotees donated more than thirty thousand plates of copper and gold, and the re-gilding was carried through in 1983–1984, the bell returned to the blaze that gives it its name. Each year, in the Burmese lunar month of Nadaw, around November and December, the Shwezigon holds one of the country’s great pagoda festivals: pilgrims come from across Myanmar to offer flowers and incense and water, to fill alms bowls for the monasteries nearby, and on the full-moon night to carry candles and set off fireworks in procession around the platform. Since 6 July 2019 the pagoda has stood within the Bagan zone inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, the recognition arriving twenty-four years after the property was first put forward.

The nats are still there. Moved from the terraces into a hall of their own beside the platform, worn bright where hands and gold leaf have touched them, they keep the posture the king assigned them nine centuries ago — faces raised toward the bell, ranked below the Buddha, admitted at the threshold and never once put out of the door. A pilgrim who comes to the Shwezigon for Min Mahagiri and stays to circle the four standing Buddhas is doing exactly what the arrangement at its foot was built to make possible, and has made possible, without a break, since Anawrahta first set the spirits down in the shadow of the gold.

→ Related: Min Mahagiri · Thagyamin · Popa Medaw · Shwepyin Brothers · Ko Gyi Kyaw · Mount Popa · Taungbyon · Bagan · The Burmese · The Mon · The Pyu