Sacred Biography in the Buddhist Traditions of South and Southeast Asia

In the Presence of the Buddha: Ritual Veneration of the Burmese Mahāmuni Image

259 In the Presence of the Buddha: Ritual Veneration of the Burmese Maha −muni Image Juliane Schober In his discussions of cosmogony and the regeneration of time, Mircea Eliade1 has called attention to the pervasive tendency across religious traditions to define the present in terms of a pristine past. Eliade’s observation has been borne out in studies of Theravâda Buddhism, many of which have focused, in some measure, on the tendency in this tradition to interpret the present in terms of ideal constructs of a “pristine” past. For example, much attention—among scholars and within the tradition itself—has been paid to the continual purification of the teachings (dhamma) and monkhood (sangha), two of the Three Refuges or tiratana in the Buddhist confession of faith, in order to recreate them in their pristine forms. Contextualizing the present in the terms of an idealized past is a strategy also encountered in the sacred biographies of religious founders and saints whose lives become models for religious practice.2 This essay examines the ritual veneration of the first Refuge, the Buddha, as an alternative religious strategy for constructing or recreating a pristine past and field of merit for the Buddhist community. In particular, it analyzes the image of Mahâmuni in Burma as an icon and ritual expression of the Buddha’s continuing biography. The popular veneration of this image illuminates the ways in which sacred icons3 are used to create a presence of the Buddha in rituals and myths, linking his sacred biography to the local contexts of contemporary Burmese Buddhists. The Mahâmuni image has been among the most venerated images in Burma for centuries and, according to myth, was cast during the Buddha’s last life. It was enlivened—or consecrated—by the Buddha himself in order to create a “living twin” who would counsel kings and, in his absence, preach sermons to the community. In Burmese Buddhist ritual and belief, the Mahâmuni image functions, in Tambiah’s terms,4 as an indexical symbol that encompasses multiple religious modes, including rituals of veneration , myths of creation and lineage, and narrative analogies to miraculous episodes during the Buddha’s last life recounted in Theravâda texts. Symbolic and evocative references among these religious modes invoke multiple interpretations of the Buddha’s biography. The image extends the life of the Buddha to the local cosmologies of Burmese Buddhists who participate in the ritual construction of his continuing biography. The merit the community gains for its ritual observances manifests itself in diverse local contexts. The myth of Mahâmuni legitimizes both the creation and veneration of the image and perpetuates sacred biographies of both the Buddha and the image in local contexts. Its narrative places events purported to have occurred during the Buddha’s life into local geographic contexts and incorporates miraculous occurrences in the biography of the Buddha that are similarly recounted in the Dhammapada Commentary, a Theravâda text known throughout Burma and Southeast Asia. The rich and complex mythology associated with this image includes episodes that parallel other stories about the Buddha and evoke specific textual passages, such as the Twin Miracle,5 to authenticate its content. In the Dhammapada account, these episodes are used to universalize the Buddha’s presence throughout the cosmos. The rituals and myths of Mahâmuni thus accomplish two aims simultaneously: they place local contexts and actors within a universal Buddhist cosmology, and they locate a continuing biography of the Buddha in the Buddhist polities of Arakan and Upper Burma. Theravâda polities characteristically extended the biographical mode of recreating the Buddha’s presence and associated it with the power of kings and other patrons of this image. The veneration of this Buddha image is thus informed by local conceptions of religious patronage in sociopolitical domains. At various points in its legendary past in Arakan, the image was said to have been an object of competition among royal patrons in Southeast Asia. The Burmese king Anawratha (r. 1044–1077) is said to have failed in his attempt to move the image to his capital, Pagan. Centuries later, King Bodawpaya’s (r. 1782–1819) military envoy, however, succeeded in cap260  Juliane Schober turing it as a prized trophy of war and transported it to Upper Burma, where he enshrined it there in a religious complex now called the Mahamuni Pagoda and located on the outskirts of his capital, Amarapura. Today the...