Two Sacred Stupas built in Konbaung Dynasty

Written by     - Maung Thar (Archaeology)

          Until now, there still can be seen two prominent stupas under the names of Pahtodawgyi, which were religious edifices of Konbaung Era’s architectural artifacts, in Mingun of Sagaing township and in Amarapura. The Mingun Pahtodawgyi built by Bodawpaya (also known as Badon King—1782-1819) did not come into its completion while the Amarapura Pahtodawgyi was built by Bagyidaw Sagaing King (1819-1837). During the excursion trip of the Royal Bells donated by Kings of Konbaung Dynasty, the writer arrived in Sagaing & Amarapura, where the Royal Bell donated by Bodawpaya “Badon King” was found in the campus of Aungmyay Loka Ceti with the Phahtodawgyi Bell donated by Bagyidaw Sagaing King seen nearby the Pahtodawgyi Ceti in Amarapura.

Sagaing & Amarapura

          Sagaing & Amarapura, the ancient cities of Upper Myanmar are situated on each side of the Ayeyawady River. On the west bank of the Ayeyawady River Sagaing is situated. The River is flowing from north to south, turning westwards just at the south of Sagaing and happening to look like embracing the town. Hence, the riverine Sagaing is metaphorically called ေဇယ်ာကမ္းအလွပန္းခီ်-“a painting which reflects the riverine beauty of Zeyar.” Sagaing is 12 miles far from the west of Mandalay, situated at the lower part of the Minwun mountain range.

          After the downfall of Bagan Dynasty, Saw Yun of Shan Ethnic Origin, the youngest one out of three sons of King Taseeshin Thihathu who founded Pinya Kingdom built Sagaing Kingdom in 677 M.E (AD 1315), ruling Sagaing & its northern part under the name of the King Thiri Athinkhaya/Sri Asinkra. The year of establishment of Sagaing Kingdom had been noted in memorable phrases: “သားတိုးတိုင္း-စစ္ကိုင္းတည္” & “သံတံတိုင္း-စစ္ကိုင္းတည္” which are meant for “Sagaing was built in 677 ME.” The then area of Sagaing which King Athinkhaya Saw Yun built was originally only 833 cubits, but its present area developed into the one of 485.6 square miles, in which a population of over 70000 is residing.

          Sagaing Kingdom had been ruled by 7 kings of the dynasty for some 50 years—8 years ruled by Athinkhaya Saw Yun, 14 years by elder brother named Tayartphyar, for 3 years by Tayartphyar’s son called Shwe Taung Tet, for 10 years by Athinkhaya’s son King Kyaw Swar, for 7 months by younger brother Nawrahta Minye, for 3 years by younger brother Sinphyushin Tayartphyarnge & for 13 years by King Min Pyauk respectively. 

          Likewise the Mingun, the Great Bell & Mingun Pahtodawgyi in Mingun Area situated at 12 miles far from north of Sagaing, it became prominent as a royal city which lasted for 50 years.

          Amarapura built by King Bodawpaya in May 1783 had been the Royal City for two times—from AD 1783 to 1823 under the reign of Bodawpaya & from 1837 to 1857 in the rule of Tharawady. On account of the urban regeneration and urban sprawl of the modern urbanization, Amarapura which is only 6.8 miles far from Mandalay is now becoming the adjoining area with the latter.

          Being situated at the south of Mandalay, Amarapura is also called “South City”. It is famous for the production of silken-ware & brass-ware. In addition, U Pein Bridge (alias) Taungthaman Bridge is a renowned site of tourist attraction. The 6-furlong-long bridge made up of 984 teak posts had been built across the Taungthaman Lake by U Pein, the clerk of city viceroy office under the command of Baganmin, 9^th King of Konbaung Dynasty, reaching its completion in the year, 1851.

Mingun Pahtodawgyi

In ME 1152 (AD 1790), Bodawpaya (Badon King) who founded Amarapura had Mingun Pahtodawgyi built. Especially paying attention to prosperity of his kingdom and propagation of religious affairs in the land, he made concerted efforts for the restoration of Aung Pinle & Nanda Lakes and new embankment of Meikhtila Lke. In his reign, he had statistical analysis renowned as ‘Bodawpaya Sittam’ collected across his kingdom, which was a kind of present days’ demography.

          According to the Shwetaik Original Scroll, Mingun Pahtodawgyi which deeply pious King Bodawpaya built has been learnt to have 293 cubits in diameter and 352 cubits in height  whereas in the stone inscription of Mingun Pahtodawgyi (Mingun Pahtodawgyi 2^nd stone inscription no-220, Maha Muni Pagoda stone inscription building of Mandalay, it has been described that the measurement of Pahtodawgyi is u300 cubits and 2 mai (one mai is equal to 6 inches), from the square-built bottom of the pagoda to its first terrace.

          Nine years after Bodawpaya ascended the throne, the biggest religious edifice of Pahtodawgyi in his territory was built up in Mingun region. Though intended to be built up to 500 feet in height, the pagoda had collapsed at the height of 160 ft, Dr. Than Tun, the historian, wrote.

          According to unconfirmed sources, the construction of the pagoda is presumed to have been suspended in 1174 ME on account of random utterances interpreted as prophecy, “ၾကီး ေလးၾကီး- အျပီးမသတ္-မုဆိုး သံုညအပ္.”  Here, ၾကီးေလးၾကီး means Pahtodawgyi, Great Bell, Great Lion Statue and Great Lake. The scholars construed the random utterance that the King will meet the demise if the King had managed to finish the construction of the pagoda. However, in AD 1819 Bodawpaya passed away, without finishing the construction of the pagoda.

          Bodawpaya built up a replica of Mingun Pahtodawgyi simultaneously. The pagoda of 15 feet in height has been named as Naungdawgyi Ceti. Prior to finishing the construction of Pahtodawgyi, the holy ‘Anaykaja Mingalar Ceremony’ of the Replica was held. By looking at the Replica Ceti all can imagine and worship the real image of the Pahtodawgyi that we will see if the construction had been completed. With a view to hoping for age-long conservation, pilgrims are not allowed to climb up any longer.

          By hanging nearby Pahtodawgyi, Bodawpaya donated Mingun Great Bell which is renowned as the biggest one among the sound-producing bells of the world. The great bell had been cast in Nandawkyun, weighing some 55555 viss (equivalent to 90.52 tons.) The weight of the Great Bell has been recorded as “မင္းျဖဴမွန္မွန္ေျပာ” with 5 alphabets representing for Thursday—Pa,Pha, Ba, Bha, Ma--ပ, ဖ, ဗ, ဘ, မ, so that people can easily memorize its weight.

Amarapura Pahtodawgyi

The real name of Pahtodawgyi situated in the southwest of Amarapura is ‘Maha Vajaya Ramsi’ but it is well-known as ‘Seekhontaw Pahtodawgyi. Nowadays, it is accessible to pilgrims by going along the ‘Hsutaungpyae’ road in Amarapura, and crossing the ‘Shwegugyi’ pagoda compound, from thence going past the rail track at the end of the compound.

          On 7^th June 1819 Bagyidaw Sagaing King succeeded to the throne of Bodawpaya Bagon King, doing meritorious deeds. King Badon donated by constructing ‘Haymamarlar Ceti’ and the Monasteries in the days of his Crown Prince-hood. But, the said Ceti and monasteries burned to the ground. So, the King Sagaing intended to build a Ceti in the original ‘Mango Grove / Thayet Uyindaw’.

          Bagyidaw Sagaing King himself had broken ground to build Ceylon/ Sri Lanka’s Maha Ceti-like ‘Seekhontaw Ceti’ on the open space of 2800 cubits at the south-west of Amarapura Palace on full moon day of Tagu Month following the new year day, ME 1181 (on Tuesday, 28^th March AD 1820.)

          There were terracotta rings of Pagan Era’s handiwork installed around the first terrace of Pahtodawgyi Ceti, with titles and their respective short stories included in 550 short stories of Buddha Life on the slaps of marble around the 2^nd terrace & ‘Sambuddhay Buddha Images sculpted on the 3^rd terrace. The Original Holy Umbrella of Pahtodawgyi was the golden one with 9 tiers. Its height is 18 cubits and its diameter is 12 cubits.

          Relics of Pahtodawgyi had been said to have been enshrined in 4 big repositories and 12 small ones. The bottom of Pahtodawgyi is 120 cubits in diameter and the height of the Ceti is also 120 cubits.

          Location of the Amarapura Pahtodawgyi is one of the 7 royal co-existing places—royal city, royal moat, royal palace, royal religious edifice, royal lake, royal cave and royal repository of the Buddhist scriptures, it was said.

Holy Umbrella of Pahtodawgyi and Earthquakes

On Friday, 22^nd March 1839 (8^th Waxing day of Tagu Month after the new year of ME 1200 a strong earthquake struck Sagaing, making the holy umbrella of ‘Maha Vijaya Ramsi Oahtodawgyi fall down on to the ground. Thus, the Ceti had been void of the holy umbrella for 34 years. According to Myanmar Encyclopedia, it was learnt that King Mindon had the new umbrella of 13 cubits one htwa/ 9 inches in height and 9 cubits 2 mai / 12 inches=1 foot in diameter hoisted in ME 1234.  

          Professor Dr. Than Tun, the historian wrote in his book, ‘Environs of Taungthaman Lake and the historical sites that the expenditure list for repairs and hoisting the umbrella by King Tharyawady has been found. In that book it was also recorded that King Tharyawady, younger brother of Bagyidaw King Sagaing had a new holy umbrella hoisted at Maha Vijaya Ramsi Pahtodawgyi built by his elder brother, in ME 1297.

          Due to the earthquake which struck in ME 1274, the holy umbrella hoisted by King Mindon fell down to the ground. Thus, it was void of the umbrella for 7 years.

          The holy umbrella hoisted by townspeople in Amarapura in ME 1281 was ruined by the quake which struck in July 1956, with ‘from part of the pagoda immediately below the finial when its its shape resembles the fruit of the Indian medlar tree up to part of a Ceti resembling an inverted lotus flower collapsing. In 1959, Bamar Khit U Ohn Khi and wife Daw Khin Khin Lay had a new holy umbrella at the Pahtodawgyi hoisted.

          Pahtodawgyi Great Bell

          At the north-east of Maha Vijaya Ramsi Pahodawgyi , there can be seen a great bell hung on two 5- feet-wide square-built brick posts. The Great Bell was donated by Bagyidaw King Sagaing on Tuesday, 13^th March 1828 (13^th Waning day of Tabaung 1189 ME. Its weight is 1500 viss of pure brass with 5 cubits in diameter and 5 cubits 2 mai / 12 inches in height. In a fetal position on the bell, images of a lion were cast. The Great Bell was named as ‘Maha May Yu Makudaghanda Yarza.’

          According to the present measurements, it is 8 feet 8 inches in diameter and 7 feet 4 inches in its interior diameter of the bell’s mouth. The interior height of the bell is 6 feet 1 inch and it thickness 8 inches. The inscriptions on the bell were written around the bell at the place 29 inches each far from up and bottom, by U Nu, Wetmasook Viceroy who was famous as the 2^nd Nawaday.

          It is regrettable that we no longer can read the bell inscriptions to the full, due to randomly written sketches and letters on the bell in correction pens, as against the warning not to do so. it is essential for us to understand the value of antiques of historical heritage.

          The two kings of Konbaung Dynasty—royal father King Badon & royal son King Sagaing donated one Pahtodawgyi Ceti and one Great Bell on each side of Ayeyawady River, leaving heritages of Konbaung Era to us, hence the need for us to eternally conserve the historical heritages, hand in hand with each other.

Reference:

Myanmar Encyclopedia (volume 6)

Taungthaman Wunkyin & Thamaingwun Nayyarmyar (Ko Pyinnya-Amarapura)

Win Dwe Hnint Tee Khe Thee Min Nay Pyi (Natmauk Tun Shein)

Translated by                    Khin Maung Oo    

ကုန္းေဘာင္ေခတ္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ႏွစ္ဆူ

ေမာင္သာ(ေရွးေဟာင္းသုေတသန)

ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးဘြဲ႕အမည္ျဖင့္ ယေန႕တိုင္ ထင္ရွားလ်က္ရွိသည့္ ကုန္းေဘာင္ေခတ္လက္ရာ သာသနိကအေဆာက္အအုံႏွစ္ခုကို စစ္ ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္ မင္းကြန္းတြင္တစ္ဆူ၊ အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕တြင္ တစ္ဆူ ျမင္ေတြ႕ႏိုင္ၾကသည္။မင္းကြန္းရွိ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရား ဗဒုံမင္း(၁၇၈၂-၁၈၁၉) တည္ခဲ့သည့္ အၿပီးမသတ္ခဲ့ေသာ အေဆာက္အအုံႀကီးတစ္ခုျဖစ္ၿပီး အမရပူရပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးမွာမူဘႀကီးေတာ္ စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း (၁၈၁၉-၁၈၃၇) တည္ထားခဲ့သည့္ ေစတီေတာ္ျဖစ္သည္။

            ကုန္းေဘာင္ေခတ္ ဘုရင္မ်ားလွဴဒါန္းခဲ့သည့္ ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္မ်ား ေလ့လာေရး ခရီးစဥ္အတြင္း စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ႏွင့္အမရပူရ ၿမိဳ႕သို႕ ေရာက္ရွိခဲ့ရာ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ ေအာင္ေျမေလာက ေစတီ၀င္းအတြင္း၌ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားဗဒုံမင္း လွဴဒါန္းခဲ့သည့္ ေခါင္းေလာင္း ေတာ္ ႏွင့္ အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးအနီးတြင္ ဘႀကီးေတာ္ စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း လွဴဒါန္းခဲ့သည့္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္တို႕ကို ျမင္ေတြ႕ခဲ့ရသည္။

စစ္ကိုင္းႏွင့္ အမရပူရ

            စစ္ကိုင္းႏွင့္အမရပူရသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအထက္ပိုင္းတြင္ တည္ရွိသည့္ ေရွးၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္ေဟာင္းမ်ားျဖစ္ၾကကာ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္၏ တစ္ဘက္တစ္ခ်က္တြင္ တည္ရွိေနၾကသည္။

            ေဇယ်ာပူရေခၚ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕သည္ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္အေနာက္ဘက္ကမ္းတြင္တည္ရွိၿပီး ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္သည္ ေျမာက္မွေတာင္ သို႕ စီးဆင္းလာရာမွ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ေတာင္ဘက္တြင္ အေနာက္သို႕ေကြ႕သြားကာ ၿမိဳ႕ကိုေပြ႕ပိုက္ထားသကဲ့သို႕ျဖစ္ေနသျဖင့္ လွပသည့္ စစ္ကိုင္းျမစ္ကမ္းကို ေဇယ်ာကမ္းအလွပန္းခ်ီဟု တင္စားၾကသည္။ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕သည္ မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ႕မွ အေနာက္ဘက္္သို႕ ၁၂ မိုင္ခန္႕ ကြာေ၀းၿပီး မင္း၀ံေတာင္တန္းႀကီး၏ ေအာက္ေျခတြင္ တည္ရွိသည္။

            ပုဂံ ပ်က္ၿပီးေနာက္ ရွမ္းညီေနာင္သုံးေယာက္အနက္ အငယ္ဆုံးျဖစ္ေသာ ပင္းယၿမိဳ႕တည္ တစ္စီးရွင္သီဟသူ၏ သားျဖစ္သူ ေစာယြမ္းသည္ သကၠရာဇ္ ၆၇၇ ခုႏွစ္ (ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၃၁၅ ခုႏွစ္) တြင္ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ကို တည္ခဲ့ၿပီး သီရိအသခၤယာဟူေသာ အမည္ကို ခံ ယူ၍ ေျမာက္ဘက္တစ္လႊားကို မင္းျပဳခဲ့သည္။ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕တည္ႏွစ္ကို “သားတိုးတိုင္း၊စစ္ကိုင္းတည္” ဟုလည္းေကာင္း၊“သံတံတိုင္း၊ စစ္ကိုင္းတည္”ဟု လည္းေကာင္း မွတ္သားခဲ့ၾကသည္။အသခၤယာေစာယြမ္းသည္ ထိုစဥ္က ၈၃၃ တာ အက်ယ္အ၀န္းရွိေသာ စစ္ ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ကို တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့ရာ လက္ရွိအခ်ိန္တြင္ စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕နယ္၏ဧရိယာသည္ ၄၈၅ ဒသမ ၆စတုရန္းမိုင္ ျဖစ္ၿပီး လူဦးေရ ၇၀၀၀၀ ေက်ာ္ေနထိုင္လ်က္ရွိသည္။

စစ္ကိုင္းၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္တြင္ မင္းဆက္ ခုနစ္ဆက္က ႏွစ္ ၅၀ ၾကာ စိုးစံခဲ့ၾကရာ အသခၤရာေစာယြမ္းက ရွစ္ ႏွစ္၊ေနာင္ေတာ္ တရာ့ ဖ်ားက ၁၄ ႏွစ္ ၊တရာ့ဖ်ား၏သား ေရႊေတာင္တက္က သုံး ႏွစ္ ၊အသခၤယာေစာယြမ္း၏သား ေက်ာ္စြာက ၁၀ႏွစ္ ၊ညီေတာ္ ေနာ္ရထာ မင္းရဲက ခုနစ္လ ၊ ညီေတာ္ ဆင္ျဖဴရွင္တရာဖ်ားငယ္က သုံး ႏွစ္ႏွင့္ မင္းေျပာက္က ၁၃ ႏွစ္ အုပ္စိုးခဲ့ၾကသည္။

ႏွစ္ ၅၀ ႀကာ နန္းၿမိဳ႕ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည့္ စစ္ကိုင္းသည္ ေျမာက္ဘက္ ၁၂ မိုင္အကြာရွိ မင္းကြန္းေဒသမွ မင္းကြန္းေခါင္းေလာင္း ေတာ္ ႀကီး၊ မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးတို႕ႏွင့္ အတူ အထူးထင္ရွားေသာ ၿမိဳ႕တစ္ၿမိဳ႕ျဖစ္ေပသည္။

ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၇၈၃ ခုႏွစ္ ေမလတြင္ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရား တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့သည့္ အမရပူရသည္ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားလက္ထက္၊ ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၇၈၃ ခုႏွစ္ မွ ၁၈၂၃ ခုႏွစ္အထိ တစ္ႀကိမ္၊သာယာ၀တီမင္းလက္ထက္၊ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၈၃၇ ခုႏွစ္ မွ ၁၈၅၇ ခုႏွစ္အထိ တစ္ႀကိမ္ မင္းေန ျပည္ေတာ္ ႏွစ္ႀကိမ္ျဖစ္ခဲ့သည္။အမရပူရသည္ မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ႕မွ ၆ ဒသမ ၈ မိုင္ ကြာေ၀းၿပီး ၿမိဳ႕ျပဖြံ႕ၿဖိဳးလာမႈေၾကာင့္ ယခုအခ်ိန္တြင္ မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ႕ႏွင့္ တစ္ဆက္တည္းျဖစ္ေနသည္။

အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕ကို မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ႕၏ ေတာင္အရပ္တြင္ရွိေသာေၾကာင့္ ေတာင္ၿမိဳ႕ဟုလည္းေခၚဆိုၾကၿပီး ပိုးထည္၊ခ်ည္ထည္လုပ္ ငန္းႏွင့္ေၾကးသြန္းလုပ္ငန္းမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ထင္ရွားသကဲ့သို႕ ေတာင္သမန္တံတားေခၚ ဦးပိန္တံတားေၾကာင့္ ကမၻာလွည့္ခရီးသြား မ်ား အၾကား ပိုမို ေက်ာ္ၾကားခဲ့သည္။ ကုန္းေဘာင္မင္းဆက္၏ ကိုးဆက္ေျမာက္ဘုရင္ ပုဂံမင္း၏ အမိန္႕အရ အမရပူရ ၿမိဳ႕၀န္ရုံးမွ စာေရး ဦးပိန္က ေတာင္သမန္အင္းကို ျဖတ္လ်က္ ကၽြန္းသစ္လုံးတိုင္ေပါင္း ၉၈၄ တိုင္ (န၀အ႒ ၊ ဇယေမာင္ပိန္) ျဖင့္ ေျခာက္ဖာလုံ ရွည္လ်ား သည့္ တံတားကို တည္ေဆာက္ခဲ့ရာ ာခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၈၅၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ၿပီးစီးခဲ့သည္။

မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး

            မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးအား အမရပူရကို တည္ေထာင္ခဲ့သူ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားဗဒုံမင္းက ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၅၂ ခုႏွစ္ (ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၇၉၀ ျပည့္ ႏွစ္)တြင္ တည္ထားခဲ့သည္။ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားသည္ တိုင္းျပည္သာယာ၀ေျပာေရး ႏွင့္ သာသနာေရးကို အထူး အာရုံစိုက္ခဲ့ၿပီး ေအာင္ပင္လယ္ကန္ႏွင့္နႏၵာကန္တို႕ကို ျပဳျပင္ခဲ့ကာ မိတၳီလာကန္ကို အသစ္ဆည္ဖို႕ခဲ့သည္။ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရား လက္ထက္တြင္ ယခုေခတ္ သန္း ေခါင္စာရင္းပုံစံ စစ္တမ္းမ်ားကို ေကာက္ယူခဲ့ရာ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရား စစ္တမ္းဟူ၍ ထင္ရွားခဲ့သည္။

သာသနာေရးကို အေလးထားသည့္ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားတည္ထားခဲ့ေသာ မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ေရႊတိုက္စာရင္းမူ ပုရပိုက္ အရ အခ်င္း ၂၉၃ ေတာင္ ႏွင္ ့အျမင့္ ၃၅၂ ေတာင္ ရွိသည္။မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးေက်ာက္စာ(မင္းကြန္း ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ဒုတိယေက်ာက္စာ၊အမွတ္ ၂၂၁၊ မဟာမုနိဘုရားေက်ာက္စာရုံ၊ မႏၱေလးၿမိဳ႕) တြင္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏ အတိုင္းအတာကို စတုရန္း ေလးေထာင့္စပ္စပ္ တည္ခင္းအပ္ေသာဘိနပ္အစ ပထမအာလိန္အခ်င္း သံေတာင္ ၃၀၀ ႏွင့္ ၂ မိုက္ ဟု ေဖာ္ျပထားသည္။

ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားသည္ နန္းတက္ၿပီး ကိုး ႏွစ္အၾကာတြင္ မိမိ ပိုင္နက္အတြင္း အႀကီးမားဆုံးေသာ သာသနိကအေဆာက္အဦ ျဖစ္သည့္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးကို မင္းကြန္းအရပ္၌ တည္ေဆာက္ခဲ့သည္။မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးကို ေပ ၅၀၀ အျမင့္အထိတည္ထားရန္ ရည္ရြယ္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ေပ ၁၆၀ အျမင့္အေရာက္တြင္ ျပိဳက်ခဲ့သည္ဟု သမိုင္းပညာရွင္ ေဒါက္တာသန္းထြန္းက ေရးသားခဲ့သည္။

ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားသည္ မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးတည္ေဆာက္မႈအား  သကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၇၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ရပ္ဆိုင္းခဲ့သည္။ “ႀကီး ေလး ႀကီး၊ အၿပီးမသတ္၊ မုဆိုး သုညအပ္” ဟူေသာ တေဘာင္ေပၚခဲ့သျဖင့္ ရပ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အစဥ္အဆက္ ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ၾကသည္။ ႀကီးေလးႀကီးဟူသည္မွာပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၊ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ႀကီး၊ျခေသၤ့ႀကီးႏွင့္ကန္ေတာ္ႀကီးတို႕ျဖစ္သည္။ထိုတေဘာင္ကိုပညာရွိမ်ား က ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးကို ၿပီးစီးေအာင္တည္ပါက ဘုရင္မင္းျမတ္ နတ္ရြာစံလိမ့္မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း အဓိပၸာယ္ေကာက္ခဲ့ၾကသျဖင့္ ဘိုးေတာ္ ဘုရားက ၿပီးစီးေအာင္ မတည္ခဲ့ျခင္း ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္းလည္းယူဆၾကသည္။ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားသည္မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးၿပီးစီးသည္အထိ မတည္ေဆာက္ခဲ့ရဘဲ ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၈၁၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ကံကုန္ခဲ့သည္။                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားသည္ မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏ ပုံစံငယ္ျဖစ္သည့္ ပုံေတာ္ေစတီကို ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးႏွင့္အတူတည္ထားခဲ့ သည္။ ယင္းေစတီငယ္သည္ ဥာဏ္ေတာ္ ၁၅ ေပ ျမင့္ကာ ေနာင္ေတာ္ႀကီးေစတီဟု ဘြဲ႕အမည္တြင္ၿပီး ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး မၿပီးစီးမီ ပုံေတာ္ ေစတီကို အေနကဇာတင္ခဲ့သည္။ ပုံေတာ္ေစတီကိုၾကည့္ကာ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ၿပီးဆုံးေအာင္တည္ခဲ့လွ်င္ ဖူးေတြ႕ရ မည့္  ပုံသ႑ာန္ကို မွန္းဆ ဖူးေမွ်ာ္ၾကရေပသည္။ မင္းကြန္းပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသို႕ လာေရာက္ၾကသူမ်ားအား ယခုအခါတြင္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ေရရွည္ ႀကံ႕ခိုင္မႈအတြက္ အေပၚသို႕ တက္ေရာက္ခြင့္မျပဳေတာ့ပါေခ်။

ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားသည္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးအနီးတြင္ မင္းကြန္းေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ႀကီးကို ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲလွဴဒါန္းခဲ့ရာ ကမၻာေပၚတြင္ အသံထြက္ႏိုင္ေသာ ေခါင္းေလာင္းမ်ားအနက္ အႀကီးဆုံးေခါင္းေလာင္းအျဖစ္ ျပည္တြင္းျပည္ပ၌အလြန္ထင္ရွားခဲ့သည္။ မင္းကြန္း ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ႀကီးအား နန္းေတာ္ကၽြန္းတြင္သြန္းလုပ္ခဲ့ၿပီး အေလးခ်ိန္ေၾကးပိႆာခ်ိန္ ၅၅၅၅၅ ခန္႕ ရွိသျဖင့္ ၅ ဂဏန္းကို ကိုယ္စားျပဳေသာ ၾကာသပေတးနံစာလုံးငါးလုံး ျဖင့္ “မင္းျဖဴမွန္မွန္ေျပာ ” ဟုမွတ္တမ္းျပဳခဲ့သည္။ေခတ္အတိုင္းအတာအရ မင္းကြန္း ေခါင္းေလာင္း၏ အေလးခ်ိန္သည္ ၉၀ ဒသမ၅၂ တန္ျဖစ္သည္။

အမရပူရ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး

            အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕၏ အေနာက္ေတာင္ဘက္တြင္တည္ရွိသည့္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏ဘြဲ႕အမည္သည္ မဟာ၀ိဇယရံသီျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း စည္းခုံေတာ္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးဟု ပိုမိုထင္ရွားသည္။ယခုအခါတြင္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသို႕ အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕တြင္းရွိ ဆုေတာင္းျပည့္လမ္းအတိုင္း သြားကာ ေရြကူႀကီးဘုရား၀င္းကို ျဖတ္သန္းၿပီး ဘုရား၀င္းအဆုံးတြင ္မီးရထားလမ္းကိုျဖတ္ေက်ာ္၍ အလြယ္တကူေရာက္ရွိႏိုင္သည္။

            ဘႀကီးေတာ္ စစ္ကိုင္းမင္းသည္ ဘိုးေတာ္ဘုရားဗဒုံမင္း၏ ထီးနန္းအရိုက္အရာကို ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၈၁၉ ခုႏွစ္ ဇြန္လ ၇ ရက္တြင္ ဆက္ခံခဲ့ၿပီး ကုသိုလ္ေကာင္းမႈမ်ားကို ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။ ခမည္းေတာ္ ဗဒုံမင္းသည္ အိမ္ေရွ႕မင္းသားဘ၀က ေဟမမာလာေစတီႏွင့္ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္မ်ားကို တည္ေဆာက္ ကုသိုလ္ျပဳခဲ့သည္။ ယင္းေစတီႏွင့္ေက်ာင္းေတာ္မ်ားသည္ မီးသင့္ခဲ့ရၿပီး ၾကြင္းက်န္ခဲ့သည့္ သရက္ ဥယ်ာဥ္ေတာ္၌ ေစတီေတာ္တစ္ဆူတည္ထားရန္ စစ္ကိုင္းမင္းက ႀကံရြယ္ခဲ့သည္။

            ဘႀကီးေတာ္ စစ္ကိုင္းမင္းသည္ အမရပူရေရႊနန္းေတာ္၏ အေနာက္ေတာင္ေထာင့္ ရွိ တာ ၇၀၀ ေျမမ်က္ႏွာျပင္၌ သီဟိုဠ္ မဟာ ေစတီကဲ့သို႕စည္းခုံေတာ္ေစတီကို ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၈၁ ခုႏွစ္ ေႏွာင္းတန္ခူးလျပည့္ေန႕(ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၈၂၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္မတ္လ ၂၈ရက္) အဂၤါေန႕တြင္ ကိုယ္ေတာ္တိုင္ အုတ္ျမစ္ခ်ခဲ့သည္။

            ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးေစတီေတာ္ ပထမပစၥယံ ပတ္လည္တြင္ ပုဂံေခတ္လက္ရာ စဥ့္ကြင္းမ်ား ထည့္သြင္း ခဲ့သည္။ဒုတိယ ပစၥယံ၌ ၅၅၀ ဇာတ္ေတာ္လာ ဗုဒၶျဖစ္ေတာ္စဥ္မ်ားကို ဇာတ္ေတာ္အမည္ႏွင့္ဇာတ္ကြက္မ်ားႏွင့္အတူ စက်င္ေက်ာက္ျဖဴကြက္မ်ားတြင္ လည္း ေကာင္း၊ တတိယပစၥယံတြင္ သမၺဳေဒၶ ဘုရားရုပ္ထုေတာ္မ်ားကိုလည္းေကာင္း ထုလုပ္ခဲ့သည္။ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏ မူလထီးေတာ္သည္

အ၀ ၁၂ ေတာင္၊ အျမင့္ ၁၈ ေတာင္ ဘုံကိုးဆင့္ ေရႊထီးေတာ္ျဖစ္သည္။

            အမရပူရပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးဌာပနာကို က်ဳံးႏွစ္တန္ရံလ်က္ ဌာပနာတိုက္ႀကီး ေလးတိုက္ႏွင့္တိုက္ငယ္ ၁၂ တိုက္ တည္ေဆာက္  ေဆာက္ခဲ့သည္ဟုဆိုသည္။ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ဖိနပ္ေတာ္အခ်င္း သံေတာင္ ၁၂၀ ႏွင့္ ဥာဏ္ေတာ္ သံေတာင္ ၁၂၀ ရွိသည္။

            အမရပူရ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏တည္ေနရာသည္ အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕တည္နန္းတည္ ခုနစ္ဌာနျဖစ္သည့္ ၿမိဳ႕ေတာ္၊က်ဳံးေတာ္၊ ေရႊနန္း ေတာ္၊ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္၊ကန္ေတာ္၊ဂူေတာ္ ၊ပိဋကတ္တိုက္ေတာ္ တို႕တြင္တစ္ခုအပါအ၀င္ျဖစ္သည့္ ေက်ာင္းေတာ္ေနရာဟု အဆိုရွိခဲ့ သည္။

ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ထီးေတာ္ႏွင့္ ငလ်င္ဒဏ္မ်ား

            ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၂၀၀ ျပည့္ႏွစ္ေႏွာင္းတန္ခူးလဆန္း ၈ရက္(ခရစ္ႏွစ္ ၁၈၃၉ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လ ၂၂ ရက္) ေသာႀကာေန႕တြင္

ျပင္းထန္ေသာ စစ္ကိုင္းငလ်င္ႀကီး လႈပ္ခတ္ခဲ့ရာ မဟာ၀ိဇယရံသီပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏ ထီးေတာ္သည္ ငလ်င္ဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္ေျမသို႕ ခခဲ့ သည္။ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ၃၄ ႏွစ္ႀကာ ထီးေတာ္မဲ့ေနခဲ့ၿပီး ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၂၃၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ မင္းတုန္းမင္းႀကီးက အျမင့္ ၁၃ေတာင္ တစ္ထြာ၊ အ၀ ကိုးေတာင္ ႏွစ္မိုက္ရွိသည့္ ထီးေတာ္အသစ္ကို ပုပၸား၀န္အား ႀကီးႀကပ္တင္လွဴေစခဲ့သည္ဟု ျမန္မာ့စြယ္စုံက်မ္းတြင္ ဖတ္ရႈရသည္။

            သမိုင္းပါေမာကၡ ေဒါက္တာသန္းထြန္း၏ စာစု ပုရပိုက္မူတြင္ သာယာ၀တီမင္းထီးေတာ္ျပဳျပင္တင္လွဴသည့္ ကုန္က်စာရင္း ကို ေတြ႕ရွိရေၾကာင္း ေတာင္သမန္ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ သမိုင္း၀င္ေနရာမ်ား စာအုပ္တြင္ ေရးသားထားသည္။ဘႀကီးေတာ္စစ္ကိုင္းမင္း၏ ညီေတာ္ သာယာ၀တီမင္းသည္ ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၂၉၇ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ေနာင္ေတာ္မင္းတရား၏ေကာင္းမႈကုသိုလ္ေတာ္ မဟာ၀ိဇယရံသီ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးကို  ထီးေတာ္အသစ္ျပဳျပင္တင္လွဴခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ယင္းစာအုပ္တြင္ မွတ္တမ္းျပဳထားေပသည္။

            မင္းတုန္းမင္းတင္လွဴခဲ့သည့္ ထီးေတာ္သည္လည္း ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၂၇၄ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ လႈပ္ခတ္ခဲ့သည့္ ငလ်င္ဒဏ္ေၾကာင့္ ေျမခခဲ့ရျပန္ကာ ခုနစ္နွစ္ၾကာ ထီးေတာ္မဲ့ေနခဲ့သည္။

            ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၂၈၁ ခုႏွစ္တြင္ အမရပူရၿမိဳ႕သူ ၿမိဳ႕သားမ်ား အသစ္တင္လွဴခဲ့သည့္ ထီးေတာ္သည္လည္း ၁၉၅၆ ခုႏွစ္ ဇူလိုင္လတြင္ လႈပ္ခဲ့သည့္ ငလ်င္ေၾကာင့္္ ပ်က္စီးခဲ့ကာ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးသည္ ခ်ရားသီးမွ ႀကာေမွာက္အထိ ၿပိဳက်ခဲ့သည္။ ပုထိုး ေတာ္ႀကီး ထီးေတာ္အသစ္ကို ဗမာ့ေခတ္ ဦးအုန္းခင္ႏွင့္ ဇနီး ေဒၚခင္ခင္ေလးတို႕က ၁၉၅၉ ခုႏွစ္တြင္တင္လွဴခဲ့သည္။

ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္

            မဟာ၀ိဇယရံသီ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး၏ အေရွ႕ေျမာက္ေထာင့္တြင္ တစ္ဖက္လွ်င္ ငါးေပက်ယ္၀န္းသည့္ ေလးေထာင့္ အုတ္တိုင္ ႀကီး ႏွစ္ခုတြင္ေခါင္းေလာင္းႀကီးတစ္လုံး ခ်ိတ္ဆြဲထားသည္ကို ျမင္ေတြ႕ႏိုင္ၾကသည္။ ယင္းေခါင္းေလာင္းႀကီးကို ဘႀကီးေတာ္ စစ္ကိုင္း မင္းက  ျမန္မာသကၠရာဇ္ ၁၁၈၉ ခုႏွစ္၊ တေပါင္းလဆုတ္ ၁၃ ရက္ (ခရစ္ႏွစ္၁၈၂၈ ခုႏွစ္ မတ္လ ၁၃ ရက္)ၾကာသပေတး ေန႕ တြင္ တင္လွဴခဲ့သည္။ ေခါင္းေလာင္းအေလးခ်ိန္သည္ ေၾကးစင္ ၁၅၀၀၀၀ က်ပ္(ပိႆာ ၁၅၀၀) ျဖစ္ၿပီး အခ်င္းသံေတာင္ ငါး ေတာင္၊အျမင့္ သံေတာင္ငါးေတာင္ႏွစ္မိုက္ရွိကာ ေခါင္းေလာင္းႀကီး၏ ပုဇြန္တုတ္ေကြးတြင္ ျခေသၤ့ ရုပ္မ်ားသြန္းလုပ္ထားၿပီး မဟာ ေမရု မကုဋဃ႑ ရာဇာ ဟု ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ဘြဲ႕အမည္ တပ္ခဲ့သည္။

            လက္ရွိအခ်ိန္တြင္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီး ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္အတိုင္းအတာသည္ အခ်င္း ရွစ္ေပရွစ္လက္မ၊ အတြင္းႏႈတ္ခမ္း အခ်င္း ခုနစ္ေပ ေလးလက္မရွိၿပီး ေခါင္းေလာင္းအတြင္းပိုင္း အျမင့္သည္ ေျခာက္ေပ တစ္လက္မ ျဖစ္သည္။ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ အထူ ရွစ္လက္မ ရွိကာ အထက္ေအာက္ ၂၉ လက္မ က်ယ္၀န္းသည့္ ေနရာတြင္ ေခါင္းေလာင္းစာမ်ားကို ပတ္လည္ ေရးထိုးထား သည္။ေခါင္းေလာင္းစာမ်ားကို ၀က္မစြပ္ၿမိဳ႕စား စာဆိုဒုတိယ န၀ေဒးဟုေက်ာ္ႀကားသည့္ ဦးႏုကေရးသားခဲ့သည္။

            စာမ်ား မေရးျခစ္ရဟု သတိေပး ဆိုင္းဘုတ္တင္ထားသည့္တိုင္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ေပၚတြင္ မွင္ဖ်က္ေဆးျဖဴ (Correction Pen) ျဖင့္ ေရးျခစ္ထားမႈမ်ားေၾကာင့္ ေခါင္းေလာင္းစာမ်ားကို ျပည့္ျပည့္စုံစုံမဖတ္ရႈႏိုင္ေတာ့သည္မွာႏွေမ်ာဘြယ္ေကာင္း လွေပသည္။ သမိုင္း၀င္ ေရွးေဟာင္းရုပ္၀တၳဳပစၥည္း၏ တန္ဘိုးကို သိနားလည္ၾကရန္ အထူးလိုအပ္လွေပသည္။

            ကုန္းေဘာင္ဆက္ ျမန္မာရွင္ဘုရင္ ႏွစ္ပါးျဖစ္သည့္ ခမည္းေတာ္ ဗဒုံမင္းႏွင့္ သားေတာ္ စစ္ကိုင္းမင္းတို႕သည္ ဧရာ၀တီျမစ္ ၏ တစ္ဘက္စီတြင္ ပုထိုးေတာ္ႀကီးတစ္ဆူႏွင့္ ေခါင္းေလာင္းေတာ္ႀကီးတစ္လုံးစီတို႕ကို လွဴဒါန္းခဲ့ၾကသျဖင့္ ကုန္းေဘာင္အေမြ အႏွစ္ မ်ားအျဖစ္ ထင္ရွားစြာ က်န္ရွိေနေပရာ သမိုင္းအေမြအႏွစ္မ်ား အရွည္တည္တံ႕ေရးအတြက္ အားလုံးက ၀ိုင္း၀န္း ထိန္းသိမ္းေစာင့္ ေရွာက္ ၾကရမည္သာ ျဖစ္ပါေပသည္။

ကိုးကား

ျမန္မာ့စြယ္စုံက်မ္း အတြဲ(၆)

ေတာင္သမန္ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ သမိုင္း၀င္ေနရာမ်ား (ကိုပညာ၊ အမရပူရ)

၀င္းေတြႏွင့္တည္ခဲ့သည့္မင္းေနျပည္(နတ္ေမာက္ထြန္းရွိန္)

             

Salay multicolored monastery and Myanmar Handiwork 

 

   By Maung Tha (Archaeology)

Among Myanmar wooden monasteries found in many areas, monasteries
decorated with woodcarving Buddhist plots of dramas were known as
multicolored monasteries. Among them, Mandalay multicolored monastery
at the foot of Mandalay Hill, Sagaing multicolored monastery under the
Sagaing mountain range, Sagu multicolored monastery near Minbu-Salin
road, Salin monastery at Wethe Lake, Salin town and Legaing
multicolored monastery and woodcarving multicolored monastery are most
famous.
Chauk and Salay
Salay town, situated on the east bank of the River Ayeyawady, is 56
km( 34 mile) south of Bagan town, 23km(15mile) veering towards south.
Salay town had been administered by Township Officer until 1930 and
Township Administrative Officer moved to Chauk town in 1930 where
there were many oilwells, leaving Salay town in the rank of mere
village in the Chauk town.
According to the Myanmar Encyclopaedia, the Salay town was a domestic
port and remained as a small town during flourishing Feudalism. Salay
town was famous for Salay King Kwe, Konbaung Era’s late poet Salay U
Ponnya and seedless jujube fruit. U Ponnya, jujube fruit and
multicolored monastery are outstanding symbols of Salay town. In
accordance with the statistics issued in 2013 by Archaeology and
National Museum Department, 19 ancient buildings including a
multicolored monastery have been maintained.
Multicolored Monastery
There are eight monasteries of Konbaung Era in Salay town; Salay
multicolored monastery built in Yadanabon Era was removed in 1992 and
opened in 1995 as a museum. Former U Ponnya monastery was gutted by
fire and the brick building was replaced by as a library, standing
tall up until today under the supervision of Archaeology and National
Department. Merchant U Po Kyi of North Salay built Salay multicolored
monastery in 1244 ME for Sayadaw U Guna to reside at the monastery so
that it took years to get it finished in 1254 ME. Donor U Po Kyi asked
for the permission for building a multicolored monastery from the King
who allowed the donor by a royal order to fell trees in the
state-owned forest without paying any taxes.
(n Konbaung Era, restrictions were imposed on sizes and decorations of
the monasteries in accordance with the reputation of a residing
Sayadaw and a donor. As U Guna was a residing Sayadaw and U Po Kyi was
a rich man, the monastery with four ladders was decorated  with carved
figurines and floral designs. In ancient times, the houses where the
princes once lived, were donated when they became kings. The houses
were called royal houses and imitated houses were known as royal
monasteries.
U Po Kyi, with the help of carpenters from Tanyaung village, built a
big monastery which was composed of 154 teak posts, each post with a
girth of average six feet. The size of the monastery was 152 feet long
and with a width of 76 feet. Irons with a measurement of 1 ½ to 13
inches for the monastery were made in the Blacksmith’s workshop in
Tanyaung village.
The structure of Salay multicolored monastery
The Salay multicolored monastery was built of many-tiered annexes,
Sanu annexe, Saunghla annexe, main hall, Khon and Bawga annexes. The
annexe in front of the monastery had seven tiers referring to the
Mount Meru. The monastery was attached with four ladders: elephant
figurehead at the southwest corner, horse figurehead at the northwest
corner, lion figurehead at the southeast corner and cow figurehead at
the northeast. By now these figureheads are not found distinctly. At
the same way, the mythical animal at the north ladder was installed
with a pointed crest and a mouth agape whereas the one at the south
ladder with a round crest and a mouth shut up. The two mythical
animals were believed to mean an ascent and a descent to the
monastery.
Annexes were paved with circular streets and attached with roofless
balconies. Posts along the streets were covered with sand and rocks to
prevent from the state of decay. The figurines of princes and
alchemists were beautifully sculpted in the covers of sand and rocks
which disappeared gradually to be replaced with bell-shaped covers. On
the north side of the monastery, the Yadanabon Era sculptural designs
were found on the railings and gates ranging from the east to the
west. The figures were sculpted by U Shan and Ko Shwepyi and other
woodcarvers. Sayadaw U Guna ordered these figures to be sculpted to
get the criminals ashamed from committing adultery and for repentence.
U Guna and multicolored monastery
King Mindon and Seinton Queen worshipped Sayadaw U Guna who was
revered by the Queen from the rank of lady-in-waiting. At the time of
becoming a queen, she addressed formally to the Sayadaw to build a
monastery in Nay Pyi Taw. Rejecting a royal offer, the Sayadaw decided
to reside at two Salay monasteries alternatively. Therefore, Seintone
Queen built a monastery in Sinmakyatkan village, somewhat like a
Zetawon monastery.
Sayadaw taught the Buddhist Scriptures to other monks at the
Dekhitnawon monastery for seven days and resided at a monastery
situated far from laypersons. Again in 1231 ME, boat owner U Pike and
wife Daw Ein Kywe built a monastery with nine annexes. Sayadaw
punished those who had destroyed a tranquil life in the country in
accordance with Buddhist Scriptures and so did for the depraved monks.
The construction of a woodcarving multicolored monastery, in which
Sayadaw U Guna would reside happened to coincide with dethroning King
Thibaw in 1247 ME, lasted for ten years. In 1254 ME, the husband and
the wife donated the monastery to U Guna. The monastery was handed
over to his disciple U Ponnya to reside in multicolored monastery. At
that time, Sayadaw was summoned to a British court for being allegedly
involved in a case. The court called U Guna in the boyhood name of
Maung Htaung and the Sayadaw disappeared from the monastery after the
end of lawsuit.
U Guna was believed to have passed away in around 1258 ME and to have
resided in Lamugyi village , Hinthada area. His disciples---monks and
U Po Kyi--- went to the village to collect his bones and brought back
to Salay town to enshrine his bones in Maha Abaya Pagoda.
Woodcarving in multicolored monastery
Woodcarving figures included many Buddha’s life stories which were
sculpted for the laypersons to get ashamed from doing misdeeds.
According to the history of Salay multicolored monastery , there are
45 figures totally including 36 figures from Jatakas. Among them, some
figures could not be described for their origins. Woodcarving figures
beautifully hand-crafted in Salay multicolored monastery are more
famous than those in other monasteries.
Translated by Arakan Sein
Ref: Myanmar Traditional Designs and Monasteries ( Maung Yin
Hlaingg,Pyinmamyaing)
       World-famous woodcarving figures from woodcarving multicolored
monastery( Maung Maung Latt)

Translated by Arakan Sein

Hla Maung (Arakan Sein)
122, 3rd Floor(4B), 93rd Street, Mingalar Taung Nyunt Township, Yangon.
Tel : 0930410245