The Mon

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In the archaeological museum at Bagan stands a squat pillar of sandstone, a little over a meter and a half tall, its four faces close-written in four different hands. One face carries Old Burmese; one Pali, the scripture-tongue of Theravada; one the extinct language of the Pyu, the walled-city people who held the valley before the Burmese came; and one Old Mon. The four texts say very nearly the same thing — a prince’s record, dated to about 1113, of a golden Buddha given in his father’s memory — and because they say it four times over, this stone did for the lost Pyu language something like what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian: it gave modern scholars a key. What is easy to miss, reading the four columns, is the order of teaching they preserve in stone. When Bagan first set its own tongue in letters, it did so in an alphabet learned from the Mon, beside the Pali the Mon had carried north, on a slab that treats Mon as one of the languages of record. The Bamar of the Irrawaddy came to their scripture, their script, and much of their temple-craft through the older Buddhist people of the south — and the Mon are that people.

Myazedi pillar A, dated c. 1113, on display in the Bagan Archaeological Museum; its four faces bear the same donation record in Old Burmese, Old Mon, Pali, and Pyu. James Miles, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The land of the Raman and its many names

The Mon call themselves Mon, and reach the record as one of the earliest peoples of mainland Southeast Asia. Their neighbors have named them otherwise, and the names carry history. The Bamar long called them Talaing (တလိုင်း) — a word now widely felt as a slur, its origin uncertain, though some trace it to Telinga or Kalinga in southeastern India, a hint of the old sea-trade with the subcontinent that shaped so much of Mon life. In Pali the Mon country is Ramaññadesa, “the land of the Raman,” a name given formal currency under the later Mon kings and carried in the Buddhist chronicles; Europeans, meeting the Mon when Pegu was their capital, called them Peguan. The self-name is the one to keep. The others are context, and one of them is a wound.

What sets the Mon apart from most of their neighbors is audible in the first sentence any of them speaks. Mon belongs to the Monic branch of the Austroasiatic family — the Mon-Khmer stock — kin to Khmer and, more nearly, to the small Nyah Kur language of Thailand; and unlike Burmese, Thai, Lao, and Vietnamese, which are tonal, Mon is not a tonal language. It distinguishes words by voice quality, by a breathy or a clear register on the vowel, rather than by pitch. Linguists read that Austroasiatic footing as the trace of a very old movement of peoples into the region, deep in prehistory, before the Tibeto-Burman and Tai speakers who now surround the Mon arrived to fold them in. The Mon are, in the linguists’ reckoning, among the substrate of the mainland — a people already long settled when the valley’s later languages came down the rivers.

Their old footprint was wide. Across the Chao Phraya basin of what is now central Thailand flourished the Dvaravati culture, a network of moated Buddhist towns at its height around the sixth and seventh centuries CE, whose art and inscriptions are Mon; in the northern Thai uplands stood the Mon kingdom of Hariphunchai, at present-day Lamphun, which kept its independence into the thirteenth century. In Lower Burma the chief Mon seat was Thaton, near the Gulf of Martaban — a port-kingdom that tradition folds into Suvannabhumi, the “land of gold” to which, the Pali sources say, the Buddhist emperor Ashoka sent missionaries in the third century BCE. Whether Thaton itself was that golden land is not something the record can settle; what the record does show is a people placed early on the trade-roads that ran west to India and Sri Lanka, and reached by those roads before their inland neighbors were.

It was along those sea-lanes that the decisive thing came. Through contact with South India and with Sri Lanka, the Mon took up Theravada Buddhism and an Indic script — a form derived from the Pallava letters of the Tamil south — earlier than the peoples around them, and became one of the region’s primary centers of the Theravada. By the time the Burmese of Bagan met them in force, the Mon already held scripture, an alphabet, and a settled monastic learning. The Bamar, newer to the dry valley upstream and still finding their religious footing, encountered in the Mon of the south a people who already possessed what a Buddhist kingdom would need. That asymmetry is the hinge of the whole Mon story, and it turned on a single campaign.

The chronicle account, in the Glass Palace Chronicle tradition, is vivid and much dramatized. King Anawrahta of Bagan, converted (so the tradition holds) to Theravada by a Mon monk named Shin Arahan, is said to have asked the Thaton king Manuha for copies of the Buddhist scriptures, and, refused, to have marched south. Thaton fell after a three-month siege, dated in modern reckoning to 17 May 1057, and Manuha — his throne-name Makuta, worn down in Burmese to Manuha — was carried north a prisoner. The chronicles pile the spoils high: thirty complete sets of the Tipitaka, they say, borne away on Manuha’s thirty-two white elephants, along with the king, his court, and a train of Mon monks, scholars, and craftsmen. How much of that is remembered fact and how much is the color a court history adds to a founding is genuinely debated by historians; the white elephants and the thirty canons belong to the chronicle’s telling, not to any independent record. What is not in doubt is the broad direction of the transmission. The learning moved from the Mon to the Bamar, and 1057 is its traditional turning-point.

The Buddhist teachers of the Bamar

Within the Nat sacred world of the Burmese — the living religion of the powerful spirits, held alongside the Buddhism of the monasteries — the Mon occupy a particular and honored place: they are the people from whom the Bamar received the faith itself. That is no small station, because the Buddhism the Mon carried north is the very frame within which the Thirty-Seven Nats are held. The spirits are not venerated against the Buddha but beneath and around him, and the order that arranges them so is the Theravada order the Mon transmitted.

The tradition remembers the transmission in named figures and concrete gifts. The monk Shin Arahan, a Mon from Thaton, is held to be the teacher who turned Anawrahta to the Theravada and became the presiding cleric of his reign — the man through whom the conversion of the Bamar court is told. Mon monks and scholars, in this account, taught the Bamar the Pali language and opened the scriptures to them. Mon craftsmen, architects, goldsmiths, and wood-carvers, carried from Thaton, are credited with the first great age of building on the plain of Bagan: between roughly 1050 and 1085 they helped raise the early temples of what would become one of the densest fields of Buddhist monuments on earth. And the Mon script shaped the Burmese alphabet, the earliest firm evidence of Burmese writing dating to about 1058 — the year after Thaton fell — set down in letters descended from the Mon. The Myazedi stone, half a century on, still ranks Mon among the languages a royal donation is recorded in.

Here the syncretism at the heart of Burmese devotion comes into focus, and it is best stated plainly, because it is a coherent theology and not a confusion. The same King Anawrahta who conquered Thaton and made Mon Theravada the creed of his realm is also the king whom tradition credits with gathering the Thirty-Seven Nats and setting their images at the Shwezigon Pagoda, his golden reliquary near Bagan — placing the old spirit-lords set in the posture of homage to the Buddha rather than in rivalry with him. Over them he set Thagyamin, king of the nats, who is himself Sakka, the Indra of the Indian order, given a Buddhist rank. So the Mon gift and the Nat cult are not competitors in this world but two courses of one wall. The Buddhism the Mon taught is precisely what the nat-veneration is held within; Thagyamin at the head of the spirits is a figure of the Buddhist cosmos the Mon helped carry north; and the household fire-lord Min Mahagiri, whose coconut hangs in the house-corner, keeps his place under that same Dhamma. The full account of how Anawrahta folded the spirits into the Buddhist order belongs to the story of the Shwezigon and of Bagan; what belongs to the Mon is the prior gift, the letters and the liturgy and the temple-craft, without which there would have been no Buddhist frame for the spirits to be folded into. The Mon stand in the sacred landscape as the source-people of the scripture, the alphabet, and the architecture through which Bamar Buddhism — and with it the sanctioned place of the nats — took its lasting form.

Three registers of claim run through this, and an honest telling keeps them apart. That the Mon held Theravada Buddhism and an Indic script early, and that Bamar Buddhist and literary culture drew heavily on Mon models, is scholarly consensus, grounded in inscriptions and in the descent of the script. That Shin Arahan converted Anawrahta, that thirty canons rode north on thirty-two white elephants, that the transmission happened in the sudden, dramatic form the chronicle gives it — these are chronicle-tradition, read critically; behind the drama most likely lies a longer, quieter passage of learning that a founding-story compresses into one reign and one siege. The broad fact of Mon cultural priority, though, is not what the debate is about. On that the tradition and the scholars agree.

Eclipse, endurance, and a living people

The afterlife of the Mon is a story of political eclipse laid over cultural endurance. After 1057 Thaton faded, and its captured king became a figure of sorrow in the tradition. Manuha, held at Bagan, is credited with building the temple that still bears his name at Myinkaba, dated by his own inscription to 1067 — a rectangular hall in which colossal seated Buddhas are wedged into chambers so cramped that the images seem to strain against the walls. Tradition reads that tightness as a portrait of his captivity, and the Glass Palace Chronicle has him raise the images “stricken with remorse,” praying that in no future life should he be conquered by another; he is sometimes called, in later memory, Burma’s first political prisoner. Mon letters, meanwhile, kept their prestige. The Myazedi inscription of about 1113 — the prince Yazakumar’s record of merit under King Kyansittha, a ruler himself close to the Mon world — carries its proclamation in Old Mon beside Old Burmese, Pali, and Pyu, and in doing so both attests the standing of Mon in the twelfth-century court and, centuries later, handed modern scholars the parallel text that let them begin to read Pyu at all.

Sovereignty returned to the Mon after Bagan itself fell. When the Pagan realm broke apart at the end of the thirteenth century, a leader remembered as Wareru founded a new Mon kingdom, seating it first at Martaban — Mottama — in 1287, and his successors moved the capital to Bago, the city Europeans knew as Pegu. This was Hanthawaddy, and it endured from 1287 to 1539, reaching its height in the fifteenth century under rulers such as Queen Shin Sawbu and the scholar-king Dhammazedi, when Pegu was among the most powerful and prosperous of the post-Pagan states and a renowned center of Theravada learning, its ships trading across the Bay of Bengal. Its emblem was the hintha — the hongsa, a mythological water-bird — which Mon State and the Bago Region of Myanmar still bear today. Hanthawaddy fell to the Burmese Toungoo dynasty in 1539, but Mon power was not quite finished: a Restored Hanthawaddy rose against a weakening Toungoo court in 1740 and for a moment carried its armies as far as Ava. It was the last Mon polity. Alaungpaya’s rising Konbaung dynasty broke it, and the capital Pegu fell on 6 May 1757 — the end of Mon independence and of centuries of Mon dominance in Lower Burma. Mass migration to Siam followed the defeat, and Burman settlement gradually reduced the Mon of the delta to a minority. When the British later took Lower Burma, they adopted “Talaing” from Bamar usage, fixing the pejorative in the colonial record.

And yet the Mon are not a closed chapter. They are a living people, present in the world now — around 2.6 million of them, by common estimate: some 1.8 million in Myanmar and about half a million in Thailand, with diaspora communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Scandinavia. In Myanmar their heartland is Mon State, with communities in Kayin State, in Tanintharyi, and in the Irrawaddy delta; in Thailand they cluster in provinces such as Pathum Thani and in Phra Pradaeng near Bangkok, descendants in part of those who fled the fall of 1757. Their language lives too, though under pressure: an estimated 800,000 to a million people speak Mon, and UNESCO’s 2010 Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger listed it as “vulnerable” — the mild end of the scale, but a warning all the same, as Burmese and Thai crowd the young toward the majority tongue.

Mon women in traditional dress. Rockrangoon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Against that pressure the Mon have organized a self-conscious revival. Mon national and mixed schools, and state-wide Mon-language courses launched in 2015, teach the script — that same Indic-derived alphabet the Bamar once learned from Mon monks — to a new generation. Mon National Day, kept on the full moon that marks the traditional founding of Hanthawaddy, gathers communities on both sides of the border. The crocodile xylophone, the kyam, a long zither-body carved in the shape of a crocodile and struck like a xylophone, keeps a distinctively Mon voice in the region’s music; Mon dance and Mon traditional games carry the heritage forward, some of them recognized as intangible cultural heritage. The hintha still spreads its wings on the flag of the state. The people who taught the Bamar their letters and their liturgy, whose kingdoms rose and were conquered and rose again across seven centuries, hold their language and their festivals in the present tense — teaching the alphabet once more, on ground where the four-scripted stone at Bagan still records that theirs was among the first tongues the valley wrote.

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