The Uses of Human Malleability: Images of Hellish and Heavenly Sojourns in Pre-Modern Burma

Lilian Handlin

doi:10.3390/rel11050230

Abstract

For more than a millennium, Burmese donors sponsored elaborately decorated structures to publicize their allegiance to the Buddha’s Dhamma in its Pali version, illuminating their understanding of the human predicament. The structures always featured décor informed by revered texts, the Buddha’s words or Buddhavacana and its elaborators, that in the context of the biography of Gotama Buddha writ large, recalled numerous sub-chapters en route to Awakening. Throughout that immensely long timeframe, conceptions of retribution, recalling sojourns in various hells or heavenly mansions, remained constant. Their interpretation, however, moved with the times, reflecting the ever-shifting components of the Gotama saga designed to meet changing circumstances. The article explains why and how these two subjects sustained their influence, how their meanings changed, and how their visual interpretation reflected contemporaries’ grasp of the future. The core argument asserts that behind the images was a socializing conditioning mechanism revealing this setting’s ideational substructure. That substructure’s lineaments exploited psychological and physiological assumptions regarding how humans functioned, harnessing emotions evoked by stories and images and utilizing fear as a form of societal control. The aim was to create what throughout Burmese history were called “the good people”—ideal subjects for a dhamma-governed society.

Highlights

The Dhammapada, a collection of verses, with its commentary that told stories connected with the verses, was one of the Pali texts featured in décor visible on the interiors and exteriors of structures sponsored by Burmese donors over the course of a millennium
When the end was nigh, Cunda was literally roasted for seven days before being swallowed by Avıci hell, whose temperature the commentator described by quoting the monk Nagasena’s description of the hellfire’s intensity to King Milinda in the widely circulated Milindapañho, Questions of King Milinda
No Burmese equivalent from this period survives, but the reaction to hell images experienced by the great 12th century Japanese monk-poet Saigyo, at around the same time, indicates how, in a setting where similar ideational constructs prevailed, people reacted to what they saw and how they interpreted the experience

Summary

Introduction

The Dhammapada, a collection of verses, with its commentary that told stories connected with the verses, was one of the Pali texts featured in décor visible on the interiors and exteriors of structures sponsored by Burmese donors over the course of a millennium. In the Burmese context, the use of Western paradigms meant the explanation that the visual presentations of the Buddha’s teachings were meant to be “educational”, and the employment of terms like Buddhism, religion, prayers, temples, faith and Theravada, for which, during Pagan times, and centuries beyond, there were no Pali, Burmese, or Mon equivalents. No Burmese equivalent from this period survives, but the reaction to hell images experienced by the great 12th century Japanese monk-poet Saigyo, at around the same time, indicates how, in a setting where similar ideational constructs prevailed, people reacted to what they saw and how they interpreted the experience. The Burmese vernacular for the Pali niraya were the sticks, and vimānas the carrots, fear and hope in tandem.

The Uses of Fear

Interiorities

The Dhamma as a Societal Ideology

The Reconstitution of the Conditioning Mechanism in the Late Premodern Period