A Yak.
These genii are said to be the spirits of an ancient Lawa king and queen, who at their deaths became the guardian spirits of the hills. Previous to the advent of Gaudama Buddha to the Lawa country, Poo-Sa and Ya-Sa were devourers of mankind, insisting upon receiving human sacrifices. On his arrival, Gaudama exhorted them to give up this evil practice; since then they are said to be content with buffaloes. The people, however, have doubts on this point, and at times fear that these powerful spirits, who can prevent the water from coursing down the hill-streams to irrigate their fields, have still a hankering after their old diet. The missionaries at Zimmé told me that the previous year the people had petitioned the King of Zimmé to hasten the execution of some malefactors in order to induce Poo-Sa to allow a larger supply of water to flow from the hills, as their fields were suffering from drought.
There is an annual sacrifice of animals to these genii, every house in the region being obliged to pay two annas, or twopence, towards the expenses. The money is kept in the court-house until June, when the sacrifices are made.[[1]]
LEGEND OF ME-LANG-TA.
Another legend of the local genii runs as follows: On the Shans’ first entering the Zimmé country, they found the city of La-Maing, which had recently been founded by Me-lang-ta, the king of the Lawas, deserted. At that time the whole of the country to the south of the Burmese Shan States belonged to the Lawas, who resided in the hills in the dry season and cultivated the plains in the rainy season. Overrunning the plains at a time when cultivation was not going on, the Shans occupied La-Maing, the ruins of which adjoin the present city of Zimmé, as well as Lapoon and other similarly deserted Lawa towns.
The Lawa king gathered a great army in the hills to drive the Shans out of his country, but finding them strongly intrenched and in great force, he offered to form an alliance with them if they would cement it by giving him in marriage Nang Sam-ma-tay-we, the beautiful and accomplished daughter of the Shan Prince of Lapoon.
The Shan chief haughtily rejected the offer of the Lawa king, and marched with a great host into the hills, attacked Me-lang-ta, scattered his army, and slew him. The place where he was killed is known as La-wat, “the Lawa destroyed”; and the king became the Pee Hluang, or tutelary deity of the region, and resides in a cave at Loi Kat Pyee, a hill to the north-east of Zimmé. Unlike Poo-Sa and Ya-Sa, he is not a reputed cannibal, but is satisfied with sacrifices of pigs every third year and fowls in the intervening period.
The Yaks of Indo-China are close kin to the giants in our nursery tales, and the Buddhist stories relating to them and other mythical beings would compare well with our own nursery tales. To show what fearful beings they are, I take the following story from ‘Nontuk Pakaranam,’ the translation of which appeared in the ‘Siam Repository’ for 1873:—
STORY OF A YAK.
