We started our day with a visit to Shwezigon Pagoda, the model for thousands of later temples throughout Myanmar. Like Shwedagon in Yangon, this pagoda is surrounded by a terrace with a wide variety of other structures: meditation halls, stupas, and other shrines. It is a long-held conviction that the Burmese king who founded Bagan, Anarawatha, wished to make Theravada Buddhism the state religion of his kingdom.
So he did what all kings worth their salt do: he conquered the Mon kingdom to the south and brought back the Tripitaka, or “Three Baskets,” often known as the “Pali Canon.” These texts form the core of all Buddhist practice in Southeast Asia. The three baskets are the “Vinaya Pitaka,” which contains the rules or discipline of the sangha, the monastic community that includes both monks and nuns; the “Sutta Pitaka,” the discourses and sermons of the Buddha; and the Abhidhamma Pitaka, treatises that interpret and elaborate Buddhist doctrines, with special emphasis on mind.
This same tradition suggests that Anarawatha sought to encourage his people to adopt the new religion by combining it with the animism that was widely practiced: the worship of 37 “deities” called Nats. He set out statues of the Nats on the steps of the Stupa at Shwezigon, encouraging a syncretism that endures to this day. The Nats are now housed in a separate shed.
The pagoda, begun in the reign of Anarawatha around 1070, was completed by his son Kyansittha in 1101. Side shrines contain two original Buddhas notable for their feminized bodies, typical of the Buddhas of the early Bagan period.
From Shwezigon we went to Gubyaukgyi, a much smaller pagoda that contains beautiful and remarkably preserved frescos.
The image of the sole of the Buddha’s foot is at the apex of the arch, and the walls are covered with Jakata stories, that is, stories from the previous lives of the Buddha. There are 547 such stories, each presenting a virtue that the Buddha acquired on the way to his enlightenment.
The temple is also famous for the theft of a series of images by a German engineer named Thomann around 1900; they sit in a German museum, which refuses to repatriate them.
After these introductory visits, we arrived at the “big one,” Ananda Paya, one of the largest and certainly the most beautiful of all of Bagan’s temples. Its white stucco exterior and tall, golden corn cob steeple is visible from every point of the archaeological zone.
The interior of the temple is fascinating. It has two ambulatories filled with niches containing Buddhas in every possible mudra, and large Buddhas at the ordinal points, each guarded by Bodisatvas, or humans on the way to enlightenment. Two of the Buddhas are original.
We had arrived in Bagan at the beginning of the “Ananda Festival,” a kind of combination carnival and week of religious devotion. People from all over the region had set up a vast shanty town. And monks recited the dharma 24 hours a day; the amplified sound was what we had heard the first night in our hotel.
We had a very nice lunch in a lovely spot right on the river, and then retreated to the hotel for some R&R. Some of the travelers took a longish walk from the hotel grounds to the Bagan Thande, where we had stayed in previous years. David, Rory, and I hopped on electric scooters and took off into the archaeological zone. We were soon cruising down the long dusty road to Sulimani Pagoda, for my money the second most beautiful in Bagan.
Back on our bikes, the three Vesperados headed to Thatbinyu, the tallest of Bagan’s pagodas, and walked around it before we had to return to get on the bus.
The bus picked us up shortly before 5 for a sunset viewing of the pagodas. In previous years, tourists were allowed to climb up the terraces of certain Pagodas–and especially Shwesendaw–to view the sunrise and sunset. That practice has now been forbidden–whether because of liability issues or to protect the pagodas is unclear–and we watched the sunset with 2000 of our closest friends from a man-made mound before returning to the hotel for dinner.
