Ten years in Burma

by Julius Smith

There was a company of about twenty men, eight of whom were devotees, while the others urged them on their terrible way. Around each devotee’s neck was an iron ring supporting twenty-four small chains about two feet in length. On the end of each chain was a large hook made of wire, and these two dozen hooks were buried deep in the chest, sides, and back of each poor man. The flesh was raised in great welts over the buried hooks! But to add to the horrors of this torture, each man had an iron rod about the size of a slate-pencil thrust through both cheeks, passing through the mouth, of course. Another rod of equal size pierced the tongue, which was drawn out of the mouth as far as could be done without plucking it from its roots, the rod holding it in that drawn condition, as it was held against the face by the strained muscles. These hooks and iron rods piercing the flesh of body and face must have produced all the agony that the human frame could endure. Yet the cruelties of the heathen could add to even this. Most of the poorer natives of India go barefooted. But these devotees wore wooden sandals, not to protect the feet, but to torture them. Through these sandals from below nails were driven and sharpened above, so that every step each poor man took the weight of his body pressed upon the upturned nails, and must have produced a refinement of agony. To the natural weight of the body was added a wooden arch often used among this class of Hindus in Rangoon as a symbol, this arch being carried on the shoulder and adding possibly twenty pounds to press down his tortured body upon those upturned nails! These poor deluded sons of our unhappy race, these devotees of a Christless faith, were agonizing along this highway under a pitiless tropical sun, making their way to a Hindu shrine eight miles away! Their condition was indescribable. Their attendants were urging them forward with shouts, and were dashing water on their protruding tongues, seemingly untouched with pity at their agony.

The very sight of this torture made the heart sick. I doubt if any Christian man could have endured the sight for any length of time. An indescribable faintness began to sweep over me; and the bishop, who has a heart of great tenderness, could hardly speak; but as he turned to me I noted an expression of anguish on his face, as he said in broken tones: “That is the worst sight I have witnessed in thirty-five years in India; but that is the ripened fruit of idolatry.”

Let the reader again recall that this occurred in the closing years of the nineteenth century of our gospel era. Let him also be informed that among all these thousands of Hindu immigrants to India there is not one missionary giving his time to preaching Christ. The only reason there is not such a missionary is because there is no money in any mission treasury to send him. There is plenty of money in Christian hands. If the Christian men and women of those lands that are the heirs of all temporal blessings, and of the Christian joys of the gospel centuries, could realize the blackness of the night that has settled down on the Christless nations, who are heirs of thousands of years of increasing idolatry, they would hasten the messengers of life and light to these poor people.

If we turn to Buddhism and ask for correspondingly desperate conditions, we are at once assured that they are not found. Its friends would assure us of its elevated character as a religion. But I am sure we find a sad enough condition among some of the most faithful Buddhists, and a refinement of cruelty in all classes of the adherents of the teachings of Gautama. The building of a pagoda is regarded as the most meritorious deed, and even its repair or partial regilding gives a man honor and merit. But the serving of a pagoda renders a man an outcast. The only real outcast ever recognized in Burmese Buddhism, which is free from the Indian caste system, is the “pagoda slave.” Perhaps we ought to speak of this in the past tense, as the English rule has made it possible for these slaves to find their freedom, which was impossible under Burmese rule, though even this legal liberty is not recognized by the Buddhists.

Under Buddhist, or Burmese, order, whole families were set apart for the pagoda service. Once in that service they were despised by their self-respecting co-religionists, and their children after them forever suffered their disabilities. Sometimes a certain number of families in a village were arbitrarily picked up and set down at the pagoda for this purpose, henceforth to be banished from the circle of respectability. Never could any man get out of this degraded service. The heaviest penalties were laid upon any who tried to aid him or his family to escape to any other calling.

Why this strange degradation of men and women who serve the pagoda, when the building of a pagoda exalts its builder here and hereafter, does not seem to be explained. Personally, I think it one of the stony-hearted cruelties natural to this faith. The priests were fed daily out of the household’s store; but the pagoda caretaker had to fight with the ownerless dogs, with which Burma abounds, for some of the food offered to the images of Gautama! When the slave died he could not have respectable burial. Sometimes his body was thrown out with the refuse for the dogs to eat. This settled policy of Buddhism may be truly said to be one of its perfected fruits, not mentioned by the friends of the faith from Western lands.

Under British rule these people were allowed to become sellers of supplies for the pagoda service, or to go away where, unknown and carefully disguising their former life, they might work into some respectable occupation, but never with the consent of Buddhist priests or self-respecting laymen, who had always despised the servant of the temple. But the sight which always met the observers when visiting the great Sway Dagon Pagoda in Rangoon until recent years, was the line of lepers always piteously begging along its ascending steps. They were classed with the pagoda slave, and were despised. It can not be said that they were really pitied, even though some corn or rice and an occasional copper coin were thrown them by the Buddhist climbing the stair to Gautama’s shrine. These lepers were born on these steps, diseased, rotted, and died there! A more pitiable sight was never witnessed than these poor, suffering creatures, practically expelled outside the bounds of Buddhist sympathy for no fault of character or conduct. Of course, the Buddhist would say that the leper’s foul disease was the demerit of some past existence, and therefore he suffers justly in his loathsome condition, and his ostracism from human sympathy! But this is only another heartless invention of a much overrated religion.

The reader will have made the contrast. Centuries of labor and millions in gifts to raise and perfect the great pagoda and to gild it and to bejewel its tinkling bells, all in honor of eight human hairs; while its own faithful adherents suffer and die without so much as a shed being built to shelter them! Millions for gilding brick and mortar, and not the least coin to build a hospital for suffering and despairing men! This is Buddhism’s fruitage of the centuries. Let him praise the tender sympathies of this faith who will. To me it is one of the most heartless systems taught among men. The leper was an outcast here, and taught to believe millions of years of existence in hell were awaiting him hereafter. This was his portion in Buddhism.

Turn now and witness what Christianity has done for him. Within the decade of my writing, the Christian missions of Burma became strong enough to put their sympathies underneath the long suffering lepers. A Scotch leper mission is aiding the Wesleyans at Mandalay. Later the Baptists in Moulmein, and the Catholics on their own account in Rangoon, built leper asylums, the Government aiding also in their support; and the lepers in every municipality in Burma have been gathered into these Christian institutions, their sores bound up, medicines to alleviate their sufferings given, abundant food and suitable clothing provided, the first time to most of them during their agonized lives. Best of all, the gospel, with its help, love, and hope, is preached to them who had been bound to suffering for ages to come by their own religious system! If to the question, “Do missions to the Burmese Buddhists pay?” there could be offered only these three leper asylums, they would warrant the answer, “Yes.”

One very hot afternoon I went with an assistant of the Wesleyan Leper Asylum, and took twenty-five of those lepers off the steps of the Sway Dagon Pagoda, and securing their passage money from the Rangoon municipality, I sent them off to Mandalay. Later I visited that city and the asylum, and there beheld one hundred and forty of the lepers gathered from many places in Burma. They were so well cared for as to seem almost content in spite of their physical suffering. They were fed, clothed, and had the gospel preached to them in the true Christian spirit. Some of them were filled with peace and joy by conscious communion with Him who is so mightily preached by this institution of mercy. There was one leper, with hands and feet fallen off, an eye gone, and the tongue nearly eaten away; still on the piece of a face that remained there shone a light seen only on the face of the man who communes with God. In this glad vision I had my reward in having aided in a small way to send so many afflicted ones to this Christian haven. A thousand times since I have been made glad with the memory of what seemed that hot afternoon a very commonplace piece of work. But as it retreats into the past, and I know every poor sufferer will have had Christian care all his days, it came to be recognized as one of my greatest privileges as a missionary to have had some part in this work.