I wrote the
following looking across the huge blue expanse of water. A cormorant is on a
post hoping a fish will swim by, as is a kingfisher with a long red bill. Gulls
are wheeling over boats taking local people to the pagoda. Around the Lake there
is Water Hyacinth, which is a scourge in many parts of the world as it is
invasive and prolific and clogs up waterways – but here it just occurs around
the edge of the Lake.
There is an unusual
story about this area. There are several versions, some more unusual than
others. Apparently in BC 184, which was the time of the dragons, there was no
Lake. There was a village of 10,000 houses and 1,000 monasteries. But the
villagers were not Shan or Kachin.
They were Ta Man
Ti or magic people. They carried a blanket with them and if they took it off,
it could be seen that they were half tiger and half human. They had no
religion, no Buddhism, no rules or laws. But then we learned that there was
just one Buddhist woman: widow Daw Aye Moan
One night, Daw
Aye Moan was visited by a good nat in
a dream. It is rare to hear of a good nat.
Nats are part of Myanmar’s spirit
world. They are the spirits of people who usually came to a sticky end and
therefore want to make trouble for people still living. There are 37 main nats in Myanmar. There is one for each
village or town, one for each profession or job. In some places there may be a nat for each house. The spirit world of nats is as alive to the Myanmar people
as the Buddha and his teaching and is much older.
The good nat told widow Daw Aye Moan that
everyone in the village must leave within a week otherwise they would die. Daw
Aye Moan spent every day giving this message to the villagers. But nobody
believed her. Eventually, she knew she
must leave so she did, taking her two children and her two buffaloes with her. She climbed a mountain to be safe
and when she looked next morning the huge lake, now known as Indawgyi, covered the
entire area. All houses in the village were submerged and all the people had
drowned.
Apparently, when
Daw Aye Moan escaped up the mountain called Low Mon only one of the two
buffaloes made it to the top with her. The smaller of the two drowned. We
visited the spot where one huge boulder contains the footprint of the buffalo
that drowned and next to it the footprint of Daw Aye Moan. All her life the
widow wanted to build a pagoda according to her faith, so the Sayadaw or Abbott
of the Lwei Monastery organized the building of a pagoda for her at Mohnyine.
We learned the
lake has three levels. The bottom is where the dragons lived (a long time ago) then
there is the submerged village level, and now the Lake, which has the pagoda Shwe
Min Zu in the centre. We walked to the Pagoda first by road and then for half a
kilometre on a causeway, which is under water in the rainy season as the water
level rises by seven or more feet and can only be reached by boat. Fortunately
in February it was only ankle deep and we walked admiring the view as we went.
The pagoda is interesting for
several reasons. First, it is owned by two villages, side-by-side, so neither can
say the whole pagoda belongs to them. In November and December every year, the
water on the left side of the pagoda remains blue, but the water on the right
side turns red. Further enquiries on my part revealed that it was a bad nat that does this. The red is a sort of
medicine and all the fish on the right side die. Apparently, the fishermen are
pleased because it is much easier to catch dead fish than ones that are still
alive!
