Myanmar Culture & Art

Is dominated by Buddhism.

All cultural activities beside of some modern music, paintings and abstract art in Myanmar have Buddha related components included. This domination is since at least over thousand years, before there were the nats, local ghosts, which draw most spiritual attention. They are even today a very lively part of the live almost everywhere it won't matter if it's rural or in the big cities.

Myanmar Nats

Nat Pwe to inaugurate the house

Travel picture from Sagar in

Shan State near Inle Lake

Myanmar figurative art shows the Buddha as a golden or other colored icon, as a blandly attractive person, unmarked by his asceticism or suffering; the image is meant to show his spiritual not his physical nature. Images, which can be miniature or colossal, are generalized. It is part of their function to display absence of 'personality' and individualism, and they are thus monotonous.

It has been described that all art, if they are to have any effective virtue or magical power, must be careful copies of the earliest images. They show a conservative Theravada country and are therefore made according to a systematic proportional scheme which the craftsmen have handed down for centuries. At the same time it is believed that to make, or to pay for the making of a new image is a virtuous act, helping the donor on the way to enlightenment by creating merit for him this is deep anchored in culture. Thus there has always been an incentive, as in Thailand for people to multiply identical art in all sorts of materials, not because they were needed, but because it was a good thing to do for its own sake.

People go to temples

At its lowest, this belief has led people to go to temples and spend an hour or two stamping out clay with a metal stamp and temples often have rooms containing thousands of this kind of Buddha.

Buddha appears in Myanmar culture

There are only three principal iconic positions in which the Buddha appears in Myanmar culture. The first is in the 'earth-touching' attitude. Where he sits cross-legged, his body upright, his left hand is laid palm up in his lap, his right hand stretched forward over his right knee so that the tips of the fingers touch the ground. This refers to the moment of the enlightenment, when he called the earth itself to witness that he was entitled, by the virtue he had accumulated over the ages, to the supreme insight. 

Buddhist art at Mandalay Hill

Reclining statue at Shwethalyaung

The second shows him standing with his right hand raised in the gesture of protection, his left held down, palm out, giving blessings. The third principal icon represents him lying on his right side, his cheek resting on his right hand, in the act of dying into Nirvana.

The rest of the representational cultural iconography is based mainly on stories dealing with his lives in earlier incarnations. Characteristically, these stories are all represented as relief's or paintings in an abbreviated form, containing only the principal figures, and without any expressive or dramatic interest at all. They serve only as schematic reminders of stories that everyone knows, and do not have to tell the story. Sometimes the representations contain figures of the celestials, who are often mentioned in Buddhist texts as listening to the sermons, or attending him. Art and culture always represents them as delicate, elegant creatures, garlanded with scarves. Certainly these Indian celestials were conceived in the image of their Nats.

Figurative sculpture as represented in the colossal sculptures enshrined in the temples, has never been a highly successful art form. The oldest images at Bagan were often built of brick and finished in stucco. Many huge modern artwork are made in the same way. The technique is not a flexible one, and they had no particular incentive to develop expression in the figures. They remain faithful and monotonous centerpieces for the devotions of the faithful. They were heavily and repeatedly gilded, since paying for the application of gilding was always held to be a meritorious act. This sort of pious gilding always obscured the aesthetic qualities of anything. 

Along the borders of the robe an inlay of precious or semi-precious stones was often set, again as a testimony to the piety of a donor. Just as it is impossible to study the evolution of the architecture of living temples, so it is not possible to compose a stylistic sequence for large images which have been continuously reworked.

In the case of smaller sculptures, of bronze, stone or wood dating is also difficult; there is no means as yet of distinguishing the work of different localities and of different times, and no inscriptions with dates are available. The most that can be done is to offer a tentative identification of certain images with an older, up-country provenance. 

It is possible that they contain vestiges of Pyu style, and certainly some overtones of Chinese form. They tend to be mounted on high lotus plinths, and to wear modeled crowns whose panels are very tall and pointed, as are the tall flame-like protuberances of the skull. From the shoulders there often rise high flanges, fretted and flamboyant. The modeling of the body and face is restrained, but it has more of the old sense of Indian volume to the limbs than the orthodox type of Buddha sculptures.

There are traces of Khmer-Thai style in many images because after the Mongols broke the power in 1287, these neighbors took over much erstwhile territory, and maintained continuous contact with the sources of Theravada Buddhism in Ceylon. The orthodox  image is thus characterized by a bland horizontal emphasis in the features of the mask; but the forms of the body are suppressed into indeterminate volumes beneath the tent-like forms of the robe. The robe's pleats follow a simple, fan-like pattern; and end-folds appear sometimes developed into a fishtail pattern. Extremely undemonstrative reticence, and no attempt at the expression of qualities, mark the hundreds of orthodox figurines in bronze, wood and white marble.

In a few of the temples of Bagan there survive relief sculptures in painted terracotta and frescoes or murals that give some idea of the original splendor of the buildings. The style is markedly eastern Indian, very close indeed to Pala art in Biher and Bengal. Relief from the Ananda temple confine themselves to a few clearly silhouetted figures and objects disposed on the ground, scarcely developed sculpturally beyond their mere outlines. The most interesting work, however, is the brilliantly colored fresco-painting in, for example, the Abeyadana an id the Wet-kyi-in, Ky-byauk-kyi. 

Frescoes in the Abeyadana represent a whole Tantric series of divine principles ranged above each other on arcades. There are flying celestials in the fine slim-bodied sinuous style which provided the unvarying; basis for the whole later art. And here and there individual figures testify to a quality of invention that is no whit inferior to the Indian prototypes. Indeed it is possible that Indian Buddhist painters, at first willing immigrants, but later those expelled from their own country by the Moslem holocaust, actually painted some of the walls at Bagan.
The course followed by the later evolution of styles of relief and painting was always governed by a tendency towards schematic simplification. There is in Theravada Buddhism a strong streak of puritanism towards the arts. Artistic expression is regarded as an indulgence flattering to the senses. It can only be tolerated if it is purged of all reference to actuality and converted into a kind of mnemonic diagram. Bright simple colors ' red, yellow, green and gold ' and generalized floral decoration are admitted only because they attract the simple mind, and give it an impetus towards the truth contained in the legend. The idea of developing a visual language for expressing Buddhist ideas, and exploring its resources as was done in Mahayana countries was absolutely excluded in Burma.

The later sculptures of auxiliary figures from Buddhist mythology occasionally, makes a more substantial attempt at aesthetic expression. For example, there are figures representing saints who are supposed to be listening to the sermons of the Buddha, sometimes placed in a reverent attitude before the main image in a shrine or hall. 

Most commonly they are of wood, gilded, and with stone or glass inlaid ornament along the borders of their robes. Their figures, features and shaven heads are far more typical of the people than the stereotyped Buddha images, and there is some correspondence with visual actuality. Their expression is bland, elegant and sweet, with all emotion exiled. But the forms of which they are composed are usually hesitant, undifferentiated, and made without any conceptual firmness or certainty.

The teakwood figures of the Nats, mentioned earlier, belong to the same order of art as the temple furniture. They are carved in the same manner and technique. Many of the wooden halls contain brackets or panels carved with elegant figures representing the inhabitants of the heavens. Their attitudes and ornaments are based on those of the palace dancers. They wear the usual insignia of immortals ' upward-pointed epaulettes, and tall, pagoda-like pointed hats, often adorned with flamboyant cartouches. The Nats are carved more or less in the full-round, without the tension of form that is produced by the more demanding sculptural modes evolved in other countries of Southeast Asia. Some ride on their canonical animal vehicles, elephants or horses, and they hold weapons or make characteristic gestures by means of which they can be identified.

One of the most important types of local temple and monastery furniture, examples of which are found in some Western museums, are large, gilded sutra-chests, ornamented with relief in gesso. Such chests were used to store the manuscripts of the sacred Buddhist texts possessed by every monastery. Since these texts contained, as it were, the essence of Buddhism, the spiritual life-blood of the monastery, the chests in which they were kept had to be worthy receptacles, and they shared something of the reverence accorded the texts. The gilt and ornament are the visible evidence of this reverence. The chests stood backed against the walls in the library halls, and were subsidiary of the decorative scheme.

Their ornament is in very flat relief - true two-plane relief and for this very reason - the strictness of the limitations of the medium - much of this relief ornament is the most aesthetically satisfying work produced by the sculptor. The top of the chest is usually plain gilt, and the back, which is not normally seen, is the same. The chest may be supported on a gilt molded stand, perhaps with feet.

Old Tripitaka Chest at a Monastery in Sale near Bagan

Old chests were often given new stands, as it seems that their old stands often decayed, or suffered damage. The front face of the chest bears stylized representations of scenes from the life of the Buddha. Large areas of mirror may be set into the gesso to represent a lake, or the body of an ornamental chariot. The figures are few in number, laid out schematically over the surface; they tend to follow the horizontal and vertical directions, thus giving an air of repose and calm to the design. The side faces usually show figures of celestials bearing their 'insignia', in ornamental frames.

Temple furniture and lacquer ware

Another kind of temple furniture in which they excelled was lacquer ware. Today domestic rice bowls, either for use at home, or, more elaborate, for sale abroad, are made by stiffening a basis of fiber - often hair - with clay and lacquer-juice. They may have gilt figures or ornament on a ground of black lacquer. But the more elaborate temple 'lacquers' may be very large indeed, often compounded of as many as twenty separately formed pieces. Usually they are of red lacquer, and most have black figures and somewhat stereotyped 'rococo scroll-like ornament. The chief items are ceremonial 'alms bowls', meant initially to receive offerings of food from the faithful for the support of the monks. But later on, of course, the kind of alms deposited in these ornate bowls and thus sanctified was no longer in the form of food, but substantial wealth. Generally speaking, the forms of the bowls and related boxes are simple, with plain cylindrical or basin-shaped bodies. At the foot and lip, however, there is usually raised ornament in the form of molded flanges. Often a highly ornate base-stand and lid are added, both with elaborate tiers of molded flanges. Both these may be assembled out of separate pieces which fit into one another. The lid usually towers up into an elaborate conical finial resembling the pinnacle of a pagoda, once more recalling the Buddhist purpose inspiring the gift of the alms - ultimate Nirvana through the merit accumulated