Pagan Kingdom

The plain around the old capital on the Irrawaddy carries the densest concentration of surviving Buddhist religious architecture anywhere. Some two thousand brick temples and stupas stand, out of a considerably larger number originally built, raised across roughly two and a half centuries. The scale is a direct consequence of the religious economy. Building a temple was an act of merit, the merit belonged to the donor, and the donation was recorded in inscription, so a society in which merit making was the principal religious activity of the wealthy produced monuments continuously and did not reuse the old ones. The turn to Theravada under Anawrahta in the eleventh century is the event the kingdom is remembered for, reinforced by contact with Sri Lanka and by the arrival of Pali texts and ordination lineages.

Tradition attributes it to the influence of a monk from the south and to the conquest that brought texts and relics to the capital. George Coedes placed the episode within the wider adoption of Indian religious forms across mainland Southeast Asia. The name is written Bagan in current Burmese romanisation, and it has no connection at all with the English word pagan, which is a coincidence of spelling in a European language.

The kingdom's adoption of Theravada set a pattern for Burmese Buddhism that has held ever since, but it did not produce a single uniform religion, and Melford Spiro's study of Burmese practice is the standard account of what actually resulted. Spiro describes a system in which canonical Theravada teaching about karma, merit and release operates alongside a well organised cult of the nats, powerful spirits with their own shrines, mediums and festivals, and alongside a body of protective and apotropaic practice.

Practitioners do not experience these as competing religions. They address different problems: the canonical teaching concerns the long term fate of a person across lives, while the nats are approached about illness, business, travel and the immediate future. Spiro's framework has been criticised and refined since, and the atlas records it as an influential analysis rather than as the last word. What is clear is that the plain of temples represents one part of the religious life of the kingdom, the part that was monumental, royal and textual, and that the evidence for the rest is very much thinner because it was not built in brick and did not attract inscriptions. Any account of Bagan that reads the monuments as the whole of the religion is reading the surviving evidence as if it were a complete sample.