Far more beautiful than the Aracan Pagoda is the group known as the Four Hundred and Fifty. This remarkable group, which actually numbers 729, stands at the foot of Mandalay Hill and was built by an uncle of King Thebaw. In the center of the group is the usual pagoda, and around it in parallel, rectangular rows are small square pagodas, each terminating in a graceful tower and containing a slab inscribed on both sides. These slabs together contain all the writings of Buddha, and the smaller pagodas viewed from the center one, present an imposing spectacle. These pagodas are well kept, and all the buildings are snowy white. I emphasize the fact that these are in good repair, because so many of the Buddhist pagodas and monasteries are in a state of decay. Whether this is due to decrease in the zeal of the followers of Buddha or to the fact that the Burmese king, Thebaw, has for more than twenty years been a political prisoner on the west coast of India, I do not know. A writer for one of the Rangoon newspapers naively describes the annexation of Burma by the English as "necessary" and this "necessity" has deprived the Buddhist buildings of the governmental patronage which they formerly enjoyed.
About six miles above Mandalay, near the Irawaddy, stands the foundation of a pagoda which its builder intended should be the largest in the world. It was begun by King Bodopaya in 1790, after an unsuccessful campaign against Siam. In his disappointment his mind turned to religion, and he hoped to "acquire merit," as the Buddhists say, by the erection of this temple. The structure begins with four galleries; the first is five hundred feet square; and each succeeding one is a little higher by fifty feet less in diameter. Then the base of the pagoda proper, about two hundred and fifty feet square, rises to a height of one hundred and sixty feet. The entire building, as planned, would have reached to a height of five hundred feet, but the labor expended had become so great that the people complained and he was compelled to abandon the enterprise. He was warned by the experience of a former king whose extravagance gave rise to the proverb, "The pagoda is finished and the country is ruined." King Bodopaya is not the only "captain of industry" who has attempted to "acquire merit" by constructing monumental buildings with the labor of others, but he was not so successful as some of our trust magnates have been.
To match this great pagoda a bell was cast weighing ninety tons, said to be the largest sound bell in the world. The great bell of Moscow is larger, but is cracked. The Mingoon bell, as this one near Mandalay is called, is eighteen feet in diameter at the base, nine feet at the top and thirty-one feet in height to the top of the shackle. It was formerly supported on immense teak wood beams, but the foundation of one of these gave away and for years one side of the bell rested on the ground. Lord Curzon, while viceroy of India, caused the bell to be suspended from iron beams and put a roof over it.
BURMESE FAMILY.
The Buddhist priests seem to have made Mandalay their Mecca, for of the fifty-seven thousand in Burma, more than seven thousand reside there. The Buddhist priesthood is the greatest mendicant order in the world, the members of it being pledged to live by begging. Having occasion to ride out early one morning we saw a hundred or more bareheaded, barefooted, their only garb a yellow robe, carrying their rice bowls from door to door. They can not ask for food by word of mouth; they simply hold out the bowl and if food is denied, they move silently to another house. They are permitted to own no property except a robe, a bowl, a leather mat, a razor, a needle, a fan and a filter-cup. They must live under a tree unless someone furnishes them a house and must live on roots and herbs unless better food is given them. They have no parishes or congregations, but are expected to spend their lives in meditation, free from all worldly cares, except when engaged in expounding Buddhistic writing or in teaching the young. They live, as a rule, in monasteries, built for them by pious Buddhists, and from what we saw of these buildings no one would accuse them of being surrounded by luxury. These monasteries rest upon posts some distance above the ground, and each room has an outside door about large enough for one to enter upon his hands and knees.
I visited one of these monasteries at Rangoon in company with a native Christian whose father was half Chinese. To my surprise the first priest whom I met was an Englishman who turned Buddhist five years ago and donned the yellow robe. While I waited for the native priest to whom I had a letter, this Englishman gave me something of his history and a brief defense of his new faith. He came from London six years ago as a ship carpenter and a year after adopted Buddhism, which, he explained to me, does not require one to believe anything. While his parents were members of the Church of England, he had never connected himself with any church, and, being an agnostic, the doctrines of Buddha appealed to him. He described his adopted religion as one of works rather than faith, and declared that the slums of Christendom had no counterpart in Burma. The visitor, however, sees everywhere poverty and squalor which can only be paralleled in the most destitute portions of our great cities, and nowhere the comfort and refinement which are general in the United States.
Buddhism is reformed Hinduism and in its teachings presents a higher system of ethics than the religion from which it sprung. Gautama, called the Buddha or the Enlightened, was born between five and six hundred years before Christ, and was of the Brahmin caste. Not satisfied with the teachings of the Hindu philosopher concerning life, he went into seclusion at the age of twenty-nine and devoted himself to meditation. Six years later he announced his doctrine, destined to impress so profoundly the thought of the Orient. Accepting the Hindu theory that the soul passes from person to person, and even from the human being to the animal and back, he offered Nirvana as a final release from this tiresome and endless change. Nirvana, a state of unconsciousness which follows the absorption of the individual soul in the soul of the universe. This was the end to be sought, and no wonder it came as a relief to those whose philosophy taught the perpetual transition of the soul through man and beast and bird and reptile. The means of reaching Nirvana was through the renunciation of self. Life he conceived to be prolonged misery, infinitely drawn out, and love of self he declared to be the root of all evil. So long as one loves life, he argued, he can not escape from the bondage of existence. In the entire elimination of self by the relinquishment of a desire for a separate existence here or hereafter—in this alone could he find a path to Nirvana.
The next forty-five years of his life he spent in expounding and elaborating his doctrines, in formulating rules and in perfecting the details of his system. Many of his precepts are admirable. For instance, he divides progress toward the blissful state into three stages. In the first, he puts those who abstain from evil from fear of punishment; these he commends, though he considers the motive comparatively low. In the second stage are those who, passing from negative harmlessness to helpfulness, do good from hope of reward; these he praises as acting from a higher motive than the first. In the third state the seeker after Nirvana does good, not for hope of reward, but for the sake of love alone. The last gift love has to give, is to give up love of life itself and pass from further change to changeless changelessness.