Taungbyon

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The road runs north out of Mandalay into paddy country, and after ten or twenty kilometers — the sources give the distance both ways, and it hardly matters to the walker — it comes to a stream called the Shweta and a village on its east bank. For most of the year Taungbyon is an ordinary place, a scatter of houses among the fields of Madaya Township, close enough to the city that a motorbike makes the trip in under an hour. Then, once a year, in the swelling heat of the fifth Burmese month before the monsoon fully breaks, the road fills and does not empty for a week. Tens of thousands come up it, on foot and by bus and truck and cart, to a village whose two lords were beaten to death for playing at marbles instead of laying their share of bricks in a king’s pagoda — and who, killed, are said to have stopped the royal barge on the water below until the king who killed them relented and gave them this ground for their own.

The enshrined images of the Taungbyon nat brothers, the Shwepyin lords, at their shrine in Madaya Township, Mandalay Region. Zin Win Hlaing, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The stream, the village, and the ground of a death

The place is plainly locatable. Taungbyon — also written Taung Pyone — is a village of Madaya Township in the Mandalay Region of central Myanmar, standing on the east bank of the Shweta stream, or chaung, at roughly 22.1 degrees north and 96.1 degrees east. How far it lies from Mandalay depends on who is measuring: the reference sources put it at about ten kilometers north of the city, the travel accounts at about twenty. What is not in doubt is that it sits inside the old royal heartland of the Irrawaddy, close to the seat of the last Burmese kings, on ground the chronicles remember as a domain of the crown. Inscriptions record donations by the royal family here and speak of a king’s dike; a line of Bagan-era forts once ran along the river nearby. This was never merely a farm village. It was, in the tradition’s own memory, a place the kings knew and used, which is why the story the village tells about itself is a story about a king.

The king is Anawrahta of Bagan, who reigned from 1044 to 1077 and whose long shadow falls across the whole Burmese spirit world. He is the founder-figure of the first great kingdom of the Irrawaddy, the ruler credited with drawing the older spirit-lords into the frame of Theravada Buddhism rather than trying to abolish them — the deliberate and durable arrangement, told in full at the Shwezigon Pagoda where the images of the Thirty-Seven Nats were set kneeling in homage before the Buddha, and in the life of the Burmese people who keep both devotions as one. Taungbyon holds a single episode of that larger history, and holds it fiercely: the deaths of the two brothers, and the founding of their shrine on the ground where they died.

The two are the Shwepyin brothers — the elder Shwe Hpyin Naungdaw, honored as Min Gyi, the Great Lord, and the younger Shwe Hpyin Nyidaw, honored as Min Lay, the Little Lord. Their full legend belongs to their own telling: they were the sons of Byatta, a strong man of Indian-Muslim descent whom Anawrahta made his flower officer, sent daily to gather blossoms on the far mountain, and of Me Wunna, the flower-eating mother of the peak who became Popa Medaw of Mount Popa. Raised as pages and grown into soldiers of extraordinary strength, the two brothers came at last to the pagoda that Anawrahta was raising at Taungbyon, where every man of the royal following was set to lay his bricks into the rising wall — and where the brothers, careless in the way of the very strong, played instead at their game and left their share unlaid, so that the finished stupa carried a gap the exact size of the bricks they had not set. For that the king had them killed.

The rest is the founding charter of the site. Put to death on this ground, the brothers did not disperse. Made nats — the powerful spirits of the violently and untimely dead, whose grievance fixes them into the landscape rather than sending them on — they seized the king’s own barge on the river as he made to depart, holding it fast on the water until Anawrahta understood what he was dealing with. He relented. He granted the two the fief of Taungbyon, the very village of their dereliction, and raised for them the nat palace, the spirit-palace, that anchors the site to this day. The chronicle-history behind the individual legend is genuinely contested — whether these were historical men, how much of the tale is the tradition’s memory of its own origins rather than a record a historian can confirm, is among the open questions of the whole cult. What is not contested is that the village has kept the shrine, and the fief, for the nine centuries since.

The lord who must be housed

What Taungbyon holds and teaches, within the frame of the living tradition, is the double face of the nat. A nat born of a green and violent death is a real and present power, and its power runs two ways. Unhoused and unhonored, the wronged spirit is dangerous — it can wither a household, sour a venture, and, in the founding case, stop even a king’s boat on open water. Housed and honored, given a palace and a name and its due of offerings, the same spirit turns guardian: a lord who protects the village, grants favor and safety and success, and keeps his strength turned toward those who feed him rather than against them. The shrine is the instrument of that turning. It is not a memorial to two dead boys but the residence of two living lords, and the whole apparatus of the site exists to keep them content in it.

They are venerated for exactly the character the legend gives them — vigorous, rowdy, appetitive young men who died at the flood of their strength, and who are addressed as such. The offerings answer to it. Toddy and other liquor go to the Brother Lords, as befits two carousing warriors; so does roasted hare, the rabbit that is theirs by right, and fowl. The one thing pointedly kept from their table is pork, held back in memory of their Muslim father Byatta — a plain and honored feature of the worship that reaches, without a word said, back through the brothers to the shipwrecked strangers from beyond the bay. To feed the lords correctly is to remember whose sons they were.

A nat kadaw (spirit-medium) at a nat pwe in Myanmar, 1989 — the mediumship that stands at the heart of the Taungbyon gathering. Wagaung, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The palace itself is not one building but a complex. At its core stand two pavilions: one where the images of the brothers and the lesser nats of their company are kept through the year, and a second used for the ritual bathing of those images during the festival. Around them lies a ring of secondary palaces, the smaller shrines of the attendant spirits, raised along the road that runs toward the canal and the river; the present ring was built out in the mid-1980s as the cult swelled. The whole is served by hereditary guardians — the keepers of the nan, the palace — who claim their office by descent, some tracing their line to two princesses said to have been set over the shrine by Anawrahta himself. The guardianship passes down within families, so that the tending of the lords is itself an inheritance, held as land is held.

And it is held not against the Buddha’s religion but inside it. The most telling thing about Taungbyon is not the shrine standing alone but the shrine standing among the pagodas — the Sudaungbyi stupa attributed to Anawrahta among them — the two devotions built into a single ground. The brothers’ endowment includes paddy fields, and the income of that paddy is spent, on the full-moon day of the festival, on feeding some two hundred Buddhist monks. Here the arithmetic makes the theology plain: the rice grown on the executed nats’ own land goes to the alms-bowls of the monks, and the spirit cult and the Buddha’s teaching sit not in rivalry but side by side, one economy, one living devotional world. A Burmese Buddhist who comes to petition the Brother Lords has not stepped outside the Buddha’s frame; he keeps the nats as he keeps Min Mahagiri in the corner of his house and honors Thagyamin at the New Year, each spirit within the one encompassing order.

The full moon of Wagaung

The village keeps three commemorations of the brothers across the year — a departure for the war in December, a return in March, and a disappearance in August — but it is the August one that fills the road. Held around the full moon of Wagaung, the fifth month of the Burmese calendar, roughly in August, the Taungbyone festival is widely reckoned the largest and most important nat pwe in Myanmar. Its core runs from about the eighth waxing day of the month toward and past the full moon, eight or nine days altogether, and in that span the ordinary village of a few thousand swells to hold the tens of thousands who converge on it. A pagoda association, organized in 1991, now marshals the swelling event; the bamboo pavilions and the stalls go up along every approach.

The ritual week has an old and exact shape. The opening days are given to homage — the formal paying of respects to the nats. A night of the royal council follows, the spirits met in a kind of court. Then comes the ceremonial bathing of the images, the washing of the statues in the second pavilion; then the enthronement, the lords set again upon their seats. At the center of the week falls the hare hunt, the rite that carries the brothers’ own appetite into ceremony: sacrificial hares are borne in procession and carried seven times around the nat palace in an anti-clockwise direction, swung back and forth seven times, and then roasted and eaten — dressed as a salad by the dignitaries of the festival, who take the meat, in the reckoning of the rite, to take on something of the brothers’ power. A tree-felling follows, and the send-off of the Pakhan nat, and on the last day the gilding of the statues, the images newly gold for the year to come. The whole sequence is described here at the distance of the public record, as the calendar the festival keeps, not as any instruction in its working.

At the living heart of it are the nat kadaw, the spirit-mediums — the term means, literally, a spirit’s wife, one married to a nat — through whom the brothers are made present to the crowds who bring their petitions. To the driving strains of the hsaing waing, the Burmese percussion orchestra, the mediums call the lords down and give them a body for a while, dancing in possession in elaborate costume; some hold hereditary ministerial and queenly ranks within the cult, offices as inherited as the guardianship of the palace. What passes between medium and nat in those hours is the working core of the devotion and belongs to those who keep it. The petitioner’s part is to come, to offer, and to ask — for a safe house, a good harvest, a venture’s success, a favor from lords who are believed to grant and to withhold.

The mediumship has long been, and is increasingly, a calling of women and of transgender women and gay men — the acault, who have held a recognized and respected place in the cult as the nats’ own officiants. A senior medium has put the proportion of men among the mediums at around seventy percent. That has made Taungbyon something more than a shrine. In a country where such lives are otherwise lived under pressure, the festival has become, as the reporting and the scholarship both note, one of the rare open spaces where Myanmar’s LGBT community can gather and be seen — a place, in the words carried out of it, where freedom and happiness are briefly at home. The claim is made plainly here and left plain: the festival is that space, and the mediums are handled by their own tradition with a dignity the outside world has been slower to extend.

The gathering has drawn a long documentary record. The colonial catalog found the brothers already at the height of the pantheon: Sir Richard Carnac Temple set the pair down with plate and legend in The Thirty-Seven Nats of 1906, and it is from that survey that the Western account of the cult descends. Maung Htin Aung read the tradition from within it in Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism of 1962; Melford Spiro set the legends beside the working religion of the villages in Burmese Supernaturalism of 1967, recording, as a factual part of the tradition, that the brothers’ father and uncle were remembered as Muslim traders — their names given in some tellings as Abraham and Ibrahim. The anthropologist Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière has made this festival in particular the ground of sustained fieldwork, reading Taungbyon as the place where locality and nation meet in the cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords — a village rite that draws the whole country to itself.

And it is, today, two things at once. It is a solemn devotional gathering, its calendar of homage and bathing and enthronement kept as it has been kept; and it is a vast fairground laid over the same days — vendors and folk-drama, gambling stalls and drink and revelry, the whole crowded commerce that any great gathering pulls to itself, so dense that police and the Red Cross and firefighters are kept on standby through the week. The two faces of the festival mirror the two faces of the lords it honors. The rowdiness is not a corruption of the rite; it is of a piece with spirits who are themselves rowdy, liquor-loving, and quick — young men given a village for a week and honored, each year, in the manner they would have chosen. When the last statue is gilded and the road empties, the paddy stands as it did, the monks have been fed from the brothers’ own fields, and Taungbyon settles back into the plain to wait out the year until Wagaung comes round again and the two lords are once more given their ground.

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