Pagoda Power

Looking for omens in a pile of rubble

IT was a sunny day, but a young laborer working on the renovation of the Danok Pagoda, near Rangoon, recalled:  “It suddenly grew very dark and we saw a bright red light rising from the northern end of the pagoda, and we heard a strange, haunting voice coming from that direction.”

Then the ancient pagoda collapsed, reportedly killing 20 of the laborer’s fellow workers and naval personnel who were helping out.

The authorities blamed faulty renovation work, which they said was being hurried along because of the approaching rainy season. Many local people, however, have a less mundane explanation for the collapse of the historic pagoda. Supernatural forces, not shoddy workmanship, brought it down, they say.

The 55 m (180-foot) Danok Pagoda has stood for an estimated 2,300 years on a site in present-day Danok Model Village, 20 km (13 miles) south of Rangoon.

It was long overdue for repair. But superstitious local people are asking why it tumbled down on such a significant day as May 30—the sixth anniversary of the Depayin massacre, when pro-regime thugs attacked a convoy carrying opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Moreover, the pagoda collapsed three weeks after junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe’s wife, Kyaing Kyaing, attended a ceremony at which the sacred golden umbrella, called a htidaw, was hoisted to the top of the structure.

According to local lore, still believed by many elderly residents, the Danok Pagoda shakes if it disapproves of any individual pilgrim. Did the pagoda shake at the approach of Kyaing Kyaing and her party of close relatives and military families? There are people in Danok Model Village who firmly believe that’s exactly what happened.

Others say former Prime Minister and Military Intelligence chief Gen Khin Nyunt, ousted in 2004, once had a dream warning that an accident would occur after the htidaw was placed atop the Danok Pagoda.

Astrologers in Rangoon studied the supernatural signs and found in them a bad omen for the generals. The collapse of the pagoda foretold the downfall of the regime, they declared.

Ironically, although government officials insisted on a rational explanation for the collapse of the pagoda, many of the generals and their families embrace superstitious beliefs. Junta leader Snr-Gen Than Shwe is known to seek the advice of astrologers when making major policy decisions, and his wife Kyaing Kyaing is reputedly even more superstitious.

One prominent astrologer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that when the country was preparing to vote in the constitutional referendum in May 2008, Kyaing Kyaing climbed to a plinth of Rangoon’s Shwedagon Pagoda, an area banned to women, and walked around the famous structure three times, shouting “Aung Pyi!” (victory).

The ritual, in which Kyaing Kyaing was “slavishly followed by attendants sheltering her with gold and white umbrellas,” was witnessed by officials who administer the pagoda site, the astrologer said.

Special metaphysical properties are attributed to the Shwedagon Pagoda. When a small earthquake shook the structure during renovation work in 1999, damaging the sacred umbrella, senior monks interpreted it as an ethereal sign of disapproval of the restoration plan.

A more severe earthquake in September 2003 damaged several pagodas, and many Burmese interpreted the event as a cosmic shudder of disgust at the Depayin massacre and arrest of Suu Kyi earlier that year.

Metaphysical interpretations of temporal events aren’t confined to religious structures, however. A Ferris wheel in a Pyinmana funfair collapsed during celebrations accompanying the inauguration earlier this year of a replica of the Shwedagon Pagoda, killing at least seven people and setting in motion a tide of speculation about the omens that might be attached to the accident.

Than Shwe’s program of building new pagodas and renovating old ones is seen by many as a cynical effort to win merit and compensate for his authorization of brute force to break up the monk-led September 2007 uprising.