The Burmese

← Encyclopedia

In the corner of an ordinary house, above the reach of the children and near the eastern post, hangs a green coconut. It is wrapped in a strip of red cloth and a strip of white, dabbed with perfume, its long stem left on — the on-daw, the offering-coconut. It is not decoration and it is not fruit set out to ripen. It is a seat kept ready for a guest: Min Mahagiri, the Lord of the Great Mountain, the guardian who keeps the household from his place in the corner. The family that hangs it will also, most of them, keep the fasting days of the Buddha, feed the monks who pass at dawn with their bowls, and count their merit toward a better birth. The coconut and the alms-bowl are not two religions in one house. They are one life. The people who live it call themselves the Bamar (ဗမာ) — Burmans, in the older English — and they are the majority of the land the river built.

That land is the valley of the Irrawaddy, the Ayeyarwady, which runs the length of modern Myanmar from the northern hills to the delta on the Andaman Sea. The Bamar are its dominant people: roughly sixty-eight percent of the country’s population, some thirty-five million by the figures associated with the 2014 national census, and the keepers of the tongue — Burmese, a Tibeto-Burman language of the Sino-Tibetan family — that serves as the country’s official language and its common speech. To say “Bamar” is to name the ethnic majority, not every citizen of Myanmar; the Shan, the Karen, the Rakhine, the Kachin, the Chin, the Mon, and dozens of smaller peoples share the state and do not share the name. But it is the Bamar whose language, whose Theravada Buddhism, and whose calendar of merit and spirit-lords give the modern nation its dominant character, and whose long descent this account follows.

Down out of the hills

The Bamar did not rise in the valley they now hold. In the scholarly-consensus account, the ancestors of the Mranma — the older self-name preserved in the chronicles — were highland people who moved south out of the borderlands to the north, the Tibetan and Yunnan marches, across roughly the seventh through ninth centuries CE. They came down the river into a country already long inhabited. The ancient Pyu had built walled brick city-states across the dry zone of Upper Burma for the better part of a thousand years — Sri Ksetra, Beikthano, Halin — irrigating the plains and raising stupas, a sophisticated urban civilization the incomers found in place. In the lower country, toward the sea, the Mon held their own kingdoms and would prove the teachers from whom the Bamar received the letters and much of the Buddhism that shaped them. Into the middle Irrawaddy, in the arid tract where the river makes its long bend, the Mranma settled the ground that would become Bagan — Pagan, in colonial spelling — growing it from a ninth-century settlement into the seat of a kingdom.

The living tradition tells the descent differently, and it is worth hearing on its own terms. The Burmese chronicles — above all the Hmannan Yazawin, the Glass Palace Chronicle compiled at the court in the 1830s — reach back through long king-lists to legendary founders, tracing the line of Bagan to a Buddhist dynasty out of India and beyond. Read critically, as tradition-history rather than as annal, these chronicles braid remembered event with legend; the dates of their earliest kings, a figure such as Thinlikyaung under whom the household nat is said to have come to the mountain, sit outside what the archaeology can confirm. It is with a later king that the Bamar enter documented history as a unifying power. Anawrahta, who reigned at Bagan from 1044 to 1077, first gathered the Irrawaddy valley and its periphery under a single throne and founded the kingdom that later ages would call the Pagan Empire — the first of the great Burmese states, and the charter to which the others looked back.

The Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady) at Bagan, in the dry zone of the middle river — the heartland the Mranma settled and the axis of the Bamar country. Jakub Hałun, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

From Bagan the Bamar heartland held through the dynasties that followed the Pagan kingdom’s fall. The Toungoo house (Taungoo, 1510–1752) reunified the Irrawaddy lands under Tabinshwehti and his successor Bayinnaung, whose armies reached from Manipur to the marches of Siam and Laos in what was, at its height, among the largest empires Southeast Asia had seen. After its collapse the Konbaung dynasty (1752–1885) rose as the last royal house of Burma. It is the Bamar as a people, more than any one dynasty, that this account holds in view: a people continuous with the river and its dry central plain across a thousand years of thrones raised and thrones lost, and living there still.

The Buddha, and the lords of the land

The Bamar are overwhelmingly Theravada Buddhist, and have been the country’s principal Buddhist people since the eleventh century. The Buddha’s Dhamma orders their cosmos and their conduct. It fills the monasteries that anchor every quarter and village, sets the fasting days and the rains-retreat, governs the merit-making — the alms, the gilding, the building — by which a life is weighed toward a better birth, and marks the lunar calendar of festivals. A Bamar Buddhist’s account of the world is the great architecture of the Dhamma: karma and rebirth, the long climb of many lives toward release, the supramundane path that leads out of the round of suffering altogether.

Alongside that path, and within it, the Bamar keep the nats — the nat, the spirit-lords of the land, and above all the company known as the Thirty-Seven (နတ် သုံးဆယ့်ခုနစ်ပါး). This is not a survival grudgingly tolerated beneath the “real” religion, nor a confusion to be corrected. It is a second register of the same devout life, and it answers to a different order of need. The Buddha’s path is supramundane; it does not concern itself with whether the harvest comes in, whether the child recovers from fever, whether the traveler reaches the next town, whether the house stands through the storm. For those near and pressing things there are the nats — powers within this world, to be honored, appeased, and turned to, lords of place and household and calamity who move where human petition can reach them. To feed the nat in the corner is not to lapse from the Buddha. The two devotions are held together, and a Bamar who keeps both would not recognize a quarrel between them.

The pantheon has a king. Over the Thirty-Seven stands Thagyamin (သိကြားမင်း), the ruler of the nats — Sakka, the Sakra of the Buddhist heavens, the deva that Indian tradition knows as Indra, folded into the Burmese order at its summit. Once each year, at the water-festival of Thingyan that opens the Burmese New Year, Thagyamin descends to the human world to take account of it. In the tale told to children he carries two books: the names of those who did good go into a volume bound in gold, the names of the wicked into one bound in dog-leather, and fortune for the coming year follows the writing. The nat who keeps the house is Min Mahagiri (မင်းမဟာဂီရိ), the Lord of the Great Mountain, for whom the perfumed coconut hangs in the corner and who is also the fire-lord of Mount Popa, the volcanic height that is the home of the nats. He is one of a wronged company. The tradition tells his story, in its many tellings, as that of a blacksmith of terrible strength — Maung Tint De in the common version — burned to death on a tree by a king who feared him, and so passed into the ranks of the spirits.

It is a defining mark of the Thirty-Seven that most of them died as he did. They are, for the most part, remembered as men and women who met violent or unjust deaths — the sein-thei, the “green death” of those cut off before their time, often at the hand of a king or a lord. Because their dying was wrong, their spirits do not rest easy; they linger about the places of their death and their power, potent and dangerous and needing the offerings a Bamar knows how to give. This shapes the whole pantheon into a company of the wronged. Among the most thronged are the Shwepyin brothers, two executed brothers of part Indian-Muslim descent whose great festival fills the village of Taungbyon near Mandalay each August; the flower-eating Popa Medaw, the ogress-mother of the mountain whose pilgrimage draws crowds to Popa; and Ko Gyi Kyaw, the drunkard-gambler lord who patronizes the raffish and the reckless. The membership of the list is not fixed. The canon of the Thirty-Seven is genuinely variable — the names on it, and the towns and turns within any one nat’s legend, differ from teller to teller and from place to place, and the tradition itself affirms as much.

The greater nats are served at their festivals by the nat kadaw (နတ်ကတော်) — the “spirit-spouses,” the mediums who at the nat pwe, the spirit-festival, call a nat down to enter them and to dance and speak among the living to the beat of the hsaing waing ensemble. The office was long hereditary, passed from mother to daughter; in recent decades it has drawn many of the acault, the transgender and gay men who are held to be the nats’ own chosen, and who as mediums command a respect and a standing that the wider society has often withheld from them otherwise. The anthropologist Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière, whose fieldwork on the nat pwe and the nat kadaw is the fullest modern study of the cult in practice, reads these festivals as the living heart of the tradition — the point at which the spirit-lords are not merely recalled but present. What passes between medium and nat at the height of the pwe belongs to that gathering; it is described here at the distance of the public record and no closer.

What Anawrahta folded in

The act the tradition remembers as the founding of the whole arrangement is Anawrahta’s. In the scholarly-consensus account, the king was converted to Theravada Buddhism by a Mon monk, Shin Arahan, out of the lower country, and worked to draw his people away from the older Ari establishment — a Buddhist clergy of central Burma whose monks the reformers charged with drinking liquor, presiding over animal sacrifice, and other laxities. The conquest of the Mon city of Thaton in 1057, in the traditional account, brought scriptures and learned monks north and gave the reform its momentum. Anawrahta made Theravada Buddhism the religion of his kingdom, and it has been the religion of the country ever since.

He did not, however, try to abolish the nats. The tradition holds — with the chronicles as its witness — that the king, unable to draw his people from the spirit-lords they loved, chose instead to bring the lords inside the Dhamma. He fixed the official roster of the Thirty-Seven Great Nats and set their images at his great Shwezigon Pagoda at Bagan, arranged in postures of homage to the Buddha, and placed over all of them Thagyamin, the Buddhicized king of the devas — so that the nats stood within the Buddhist order as its servants and protectors, not against it. The chronicle puts the strategy in the king’s own mouth: men will not come for the sake of a new faith, so let them come for their old gods, and be won to the greater truth once they are through the gate. Read as tradition-history, the saying compresses a longer and untidier process into a single royal decision. But it names a real and lasting theology, not a mere trick of state. The synthesis it describes has held for nine centuries, and the household that hangs the coconut and feeds the monks is its direct inheritor.

The dynasties after Bagan carried the Bamar heartland down to the modern age, and the ending was hard. Britain came against the Konbaung kingdom across the three Anglo-Burmese Wars, from 1824 to 1885, taking the country in pieces and annexing Upper Burma and its capital in the last of them; the final king, Thibaw, was deposed and sent into exile in India, and the millennium of Burmese monarchy ended. Colonial Burma was governed for decades as a province of British India. Independence came on 4 January 1948, when the Union of Burma was constituted as a republic outside the Commonwealth — the modern state within which the Bamar remain the majority people, through the long decades of military rule and turmoil that followed.

The colonial period also gave the nat cult its first outside chroniclers. Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats, published in 1906, cataloged the pantheon and its images for a British readership, and its plates remain among the earliest systematic records of the figures; later scholars read the cult more closely and from nearer to Burmese life. Maung Htin Aung’s Folk Elements in Burmese Buddhism (1962) argued for the depth and coherence of the spirit religion held within the Buddhist frame, against any reading of it as a mere residue; Melford Spiro’s Burmese Supernaturalism (1967) set out its workings in the anthropological terms of its day; and Brac de la Perrière’s later fieldwork carried the study into the festivals themselves. All of them note, and the tradition affirms, that the Thirty-Seven are no closed canon — that the list and the tellings shift with the teller and the region, and that the cult preserves, in ways still argued over, an older stratum of Burmese religion whose exact reach before the Buddhist synthesis remains genuinely contested.

Min Mahagiri, the Lord of the Great Mountain and guardian of the Bamar household, as figured in Sir Richard Carnac Temple’s The Thirty-Seven Nats (1906) — among the earliest systematic records of the pantheon for outside readers. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The festivals have not stopped. Each August the nat pwe at Taungbyon fills the village north of Mandalay for the executed Shwepyin brothers, drawing the mediums and the pilgrims and the merchants in their thousands; the road to Mount Popa carries its own crowds to the flower-eating mother of the mountain; and Thingyan still opens the year with water thrown in the streets and Thagyamin come down to read his two books. The Bamar country is, at once and without contradiction, a Buddhist land and a land of the spirit-lords. The monk with his bowl passes the house at dawn; the coconut hangs in the corner through the day; and the family inside understands both as owed, and gives to both.

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