Project MUSE
Michael A. Aung-Thwin
/favicon.ico
15

1

The Historical Framework

Throughout Mainland and Island Southeast Asia, and in parts of southern China, there appears to have existed a broad culture more or less equivalent to the traditional archaeological typology of Neolithic and Chalcolithic. Because the culture is so widespread throughout Southeast Asia and because Southeast Asian scholars needed a term that would not have to succumb to the chronological or other theoretical parameters of stone and metal cultures found elsewhere, in recent years this culture has come to be known as the Hoabinhian, named after the locality in Vietnam, Hoa Binh, where significant evidence of it was apparently first unearthed. In certain areas, it is datable to approximately 10,000 b.c. or even earlier.1 Since the 1930s, archaeological excavations in Burma, though infre­quent and spotty, have yielded enough information to suggest the presence of what is called an Early Hoabinhian culture—roughly equivalent to the Paleolithic—that lasted until approximately 4000 b.c. This early stage was followed by what is known as the Late Hoabinhian and contemporaneous metal manufacturing age be­tween 4000 and 2000 b.c., after which a fully metal manufacturing period appeared, between 2000 and 1000 b.c. Between 1000 and 200 b.c. is a blank, followed by some of the first urban sites to be found in Burma. The origins of urbanization in Burma have become somewhat clearer only in the last decade or two. In this endeavor, epigraphy and archaeology have led the search, but a better under­standing of later Burmese narrative accounts (even if concerned largely with legitimation) and painstaking analysis of Chinese and Arabic sources have also been significant.2 The picture is clearer from 200 b.c. onward, enabling us to divide Burmese history proper into five major periods.

b.c. to approximately the early ninth century a.d. is the Pyu period, named after the Tibeto-Burman speaking Pyu people, thought to have been the dominant culture in Burma at the time. It is what I have called the formative period in Burmese history. This is followed by the classical age of Burma’s history, the Pagan period, the efflorescence of the previous age, lasting politically at least until the end of the thirteenth century a.d. and the focus of this study. A period of political disorder seems to have characterized the next two centuries, known as the Ava period, which, however, was a time of intellectual ferment as well. A unified age once more emerged under the strong Toungoo dynasty, which lasted until the first half of the eighteenth century and was replaced by the Konbaung dynasty of the mid-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in turn terminated by the British in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The Hoabinhian Culture in Burma

The Early Hoabinhian culture can be found in Burma in sites scat­tered on or near the banks of the Irrawaddy River throughout the central plains of Burma known as the dry zone. Some sites are also found farther to the east in the Shan Hills, where in fact the evidence for it has been most dramatic. Although the study of Burma’s Early Hoabinhian culture is in its infancy, it nevertheless offers evidence of broader Southeast Asian features of this time: cord-marked, kiln-fired, and wheel-turned pottery; polished and rough stone adzes, axes, choppers, and scrapers; and in the Padhalin Caves in the Shan States, wall paintings of the sun, a fish, cattle giving birth, ele­phants, deer, wild boar, and palm prints.

Subsequently, a bronze culture appeared, largely upon the re­mains of, as well as coterminously with, the Early Hoabinhian. Many of the bronze implements uncovered, for example, appear to have been copies of their stone counterparts. It is, again, another period of Burmese prehistory with very little data available but enough to suggest the presence of an indigenous bronze casting “industry” with an affinity to other Hoabinhian sites in Southeast Asia. Between the end of the Bronze Age in Burma (say, 1000 b.c.) and the earliest urbanized site so far discovered (approximately 200 b.c.) is a data gap, undoubtedly reflective of work still to be done.17

The Urbanized Polities and the Pyus

From 200 b.c. until the first nine centuries a.d. is the Pyu period, though one might prefer to call it (as I do) the period of early urbanized polities. Who exactly the Pyu people were is still an open question, but it was a period and culture that we can identify dis­tinctly. Because of the priority given by the Archaeological Survey of Burma to two better known cities of this period, Śrī Kṣetra and Beik­thano, it was at first thought that civilization moved south to north, for these two cities are found south of the dry zone, considered the “cultural core” of Burma. Subsequently in the late 1960s, the Archaeological Survey began to find other urbanized sites belonging to this same culture in the dry zone itself, particularly Hanlaṅ (Halin), north of Pagan. But then in the 1970s, Winka, far in the south, located near Thaton (Sadhum) in coastal Burma, was discov­ered. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several more “Pyu” sites, notably Binnaka and Mongmai, were unearthed, once more, in the heart of the dry zone and close to some of Burma’s earliest irrigation works, near Kyaukse, the economic mainstay of all (except one) sub­sequent Burmese dynasties (see Map 1).

The archaeological remains of this pre-Pagan urbanized culture show that it is uniform to a significant degree. Mongmai, Hanlaṅ, Binnaka, in the central dry zone, and Śrī Kṣetra, Beikthano, and Winka, south of it, were related in several ways. They apparently used the same Tibeto-Burman language (Pyu) and wrote in Devana­gari, Kadamba, and the Pallava script of Andhra. They created vir­tually identical artifacts, making (and buying) clay water vessels with rouletted patterns and long spouts, used carnelian and onyx beads, and imported (?) Red Polished Ware (thought by some to be Roman and by others to be Indian). Their belief system included Sarvāstivādin Buddhism (an early branch of the Hīnayāna whose doctrines were similar to those of the later Theravāda and who wrote their texts in Sanskrit), elements of Hinduism, and a rather wide­spread Southeast Asian practice of urn burial. 18

19More important, some of their material and ideological culture show continuity with the Pagan period. Their ideology of salvation, for example, was closely related to the doctrine of the future Buddha (Metteyya) and the Four Buddhas of this kappa (the present cosmic age), as it was to the Burmans at Pagan, while their religious edifices set a standard for the smaller temples of Pagan. Certain features of their secular buildings and the ideology that went with them also became standard. Their fortified cities were arranged according to patterns that persisted into the nineteenth century: the number of gates (twelve); the central location of their palaces; and the high-walled cities constructed of relatively uniform bricks with their tem­ples forming a protective ring around them. The predominant liveli­hood of these people appears to have been largely but not exclusively agrarian (numismatists point to a Pyu coinage system with a uni­form set of symbols struck on both sides, specimens of which are found as far east as present-day Saigon).3 The juxtapositioning of several hinterland cities with several coastal or near coastal cities also suggests a dual economic and political relationship among cer­tain pairs of them, not unlike several ancient civilizations (such as Harappā and Mohenjo-Daro) where the inland city controlled the agricultural resources and the coastal one the commercial ones—a pattern to be followed by subsequent Burmese kingdoms. The Pyu political culture, lastly, seemed to have been structured around a dynasty composed of several royal families, whom the chronicles mention, in part confirmed by a short list of names in a Pyu inscrip­tion found at Śrī Kṣetra.

The picture of this pre-Pagan, urbanized culture, though cer­tainly incomplete, has nevertheless become clearer since the mid-1960s and has several implications for Burmese history and prehis­tory. First, urbanized culture in Burma did not “move” in any particularly significant direction prior to the founding of Pagan but had been present in the core area for a millennium, from which later political, economic, and social institutions apparently developed. Preliminary dating of some of the remains show, in central Burma at least, a first millennium (200 b.c.?) occupation with a probable Hoabinhian or early Neolithic base. Therefore, previous conclu­sions about Beikthano’s status as the earliest Pyu city (first century b.c.–second century a.d.) may have to be revised. Not only would the revised chronology be significant, but the location of these sites may place, for the first time, the origins of urbanization in Burma in the dry zone itself—the nucleus of subsequent centers of Burmese culture and for long an important part of Burmese origin myths. In fact, most of these urbanized sites remained as cultural and often 20political centers to give a total picture of dry-zone political para­mountcy during the next millennium. Second, it is now clear that this Pyu culture was far more extensive than heretofore imagined (from dry-zone Hanlaṅ to coastal Winka), thereby linking central Burma not only to the Isthmus of Kra but to the international com­mercial network that stretched from the Mediterranean world to China. Third, because the choice of digging at these sites was dic­tated not by archaeological surveys but first by a search in the chron­icles for records of ancient cities (written well before archaeology became an academic discipline), the case for the antiquity of some of the chronicles’ data as well as the cumulative tradition of Burmese historical writing deserves serious reconsideration. Lastly, the new evidence suggests that the development of Pagan in the central plains of Burma from a small fortified city to a sophisticated and bustling metropolis to become, in fact, the political and cultural cap­ital of eleventh-, twelfth-, and thirteenth-century Burma, was not at all sudden or dramatic—as we had thought—but rather a gradual growth from the socioeconomic and cultural foundations established by these urbanized sites of the first nine centuries a.d.

The Rise of Pagan

By a.d. 638 at the latest, the Pyus had become the dominant power in the Irrawaddy River basin, with their capital at Śrī Kṣetra. By the early eighth century, that city had apparently been destroyed and another Pyu city, Hanlaṅ, had replaced it. For the next century, the center of political gravity remained there. Then in a.d. 832 and 835, the powerful kingdom of Nanchao that dominated western Yunnan for at least two centuries—peopled by Tibeto-Burman speakers (Lolo) said to be akin to Burmese—raided and sacked Hanlaṅ, the last major center of the Pyus in central Burma, as well as Mi-ch’ên, a Mon center in Lower Burma. And it was probably this political and demographic vacuum that the Burmans exploited. Where the Burmans came from and to what extent they might have migrated from Yunnan with the Nanchao troops (as some scholars suggest), is an issue still to be resolved. It is true that the Burmese chronicles attribute the founding of Pagan to Pyuminhti (Pyusawhti) and the names of his descendants follow the typical Nanchao nomenclature—that is, parts (usually the last) of the father’s name were used as 21the first (or middle) part of his son’s. Moreover, the date given for the founding of Pagan by the chronicles, a.d. 849, is reasonably close to the destruction of the last Pyu city in 832. It is uncertain what happened to the Pyus thereafter—some were taken as pris­oners by Nanchao according to the Man-Shu, a Chinese account of Yunnan around the eighth and ninth centuries—but it is also clear that some of the Pyu sites such as Binnaka were not abandoned, showing continuous occupation, with Pagan, Ava, and even Kon­baung artifacts uncovered there.4 Pyu inscriptions have also been found after this date (one in the thirteenth century).

In any case, in or about 849, a fortified city located at a strategic point on the Irrawaddy was built on what may have been remains of an earlier Pyu village, and certainly according to earlier Pyu designs. It was to become known later as Pagan (or Pukam, Pukaṁ, Pokām, Pukām), whose meaning is still unclear, and in Pali as Ari-madḍanapūra, “the city [that is a] crusher of enemies.” The earliest mention of Pagan occurs in Cham and Mon inscriptions in a.d. 1050 and 1093, respectively, while a Chinese source, the Chu-fan-chih of Chao Ju-kua, reported that envoys from the “P’u-kan kingdom” visited the Sung capital in a.d. 1004.5 With the founding and subse­quent growth of this new city and its dynasty, a millennium of cul­tural and political development centered in the plains of the dry zone began once more.

The next two centuries saw expansion by the Burmans of Pagan in several directions as central Burma reasserted its hegemony. It was a period of development, a period concerned with unification and centralization of resources, both material and intellectual. Labor was imported from adjacent territories, while certain ideolo­gies dealing with legitimation of authority and society were evolving based on foundations already established by the Pyus as well as on prevailing thought in the Asian world.

Each of the Pagan kings in this period insured the perpetuation of the civilization in his own way, according to the needs of his own generation. The earliest king about whom we have inscriptional information but know little else is the tenth-century monarch Caw Rahan (Sawyahan), grandfather of the well-known Aniruddha, who probably attained the throne around a.d. 956—not by legitimate succession it seems but by some form of usurpation. He was fol­lowed by Kloṅ Phlū Maṅ (Kyaunghpyu Min) about 1001. Again, the legitimating legends that surrounded this king suggest that he 22too was not in line for the throne but was a person with obvious abil­ity who worked his way up at court and attained the kingship through military talent and the consolidation of his fief in the nearby district and town of Nyaung-U. He had three sons who battled for the throne, which was won by Aniruddha, one of the great unifiers of Burma. With the accession of the latter in 1044, more contempo­rary sources become available, placing Pagan’s history on firmer ground.

Aniruddha consolidated his position at court and improved his administration by building up his defenses north of the capital, as well as by repairing and creating new irrigation works in the rich, perennially watered plain of Kyaukse. He then exploited the fertile plains of Maṅbū (Minbu), southwest of Pagan. To maintain this sys­tem effectively and efficiently, he needed laborers. And to make Pagan more than a military kingdom, he found it necessary to incor­porate the manifestations of culture into the state he was building: translated into human terms, that meant importing artisans, priests, scribes, and scholars.

In 1057, Aniruddha moved downriver and gained hegemony over the Mon capital of Thaton, from where he brought back much of Pagan’s skilled artisan and scholarly population who were so impor­tant to the growing kingdom. This was one of the primary means by which state development was enhanced in early Southeast Asia—the importation of scarce labor into the capital to insure the productivity 23of the abundant and fertile land, to build the monuments so neces­sary for legitimacy, and as well to augment the supply of manpower for the armed forces. Although for most Pagan kings labor scarcity was a constant problem in the struggle for survival, Aniruddha with this expedition at least temporarily solved it, and along with it the need for “culture.” Leaving most of the Irrawaddy River Valley and the Lower Burma port cities relatively secure with garrisons and appointed governors, he returned to Pagan where, in the next year, he built one of his many pagodas to commemorate the victory, whose inscription survives.6

Another critical development in this early period was Aniruddha’s relationship with the saṅgha, the Buddhist church. Without fully realizing the implications of his actions, he increased patronage to the saṅgha, which by now had become the standard beneficiary of conquered wealth. The flow of wealth to the church initially en­hanced the economic and cultural development of the kingdom, but it also created a situation that would become a problem for his suc­cessors.

The challenges of the subsequent generation were the demands for form, order, and some sort of accommodation to the “chaos” created by the diverse cultural influences introduced into Pagan by Aniruddha’s conquests. Since no single cultural influence was as yet completely dominant, there had to be an amalgam. King Kalancac­sā (Kyanzittha, 1084–1111) rose to meet these needs. One word best describes the demands of his age as well as the age itself—syn­cretism. It was an age characterized by Burman military rule, Pyu traditions, Mon culture, and Theravādin spirit. To say that Pagan was, at this time, an ethnic Burman civilization is to speak only of the ruling class; to call it Mon ignores the political and military reali­ties; to call it Pyu overestimates the longevity of that tradition; to call it Theravādin oversimplifies the religious milieu. All these elements made up eleventh-and early twelfth-century Pagan.

Kalancacsā was the person around whom this amalgam could unite. He cemented the fissures of decentralization by appeasing all cultures and groups. He patronized Mon scholars and artisans; their language became the lingua franca of the court and, in effect, the Mons emerged as the intellectual elite. He satisfied the Burmans by maintaining their rule. He provided a sense of continuity to the older traditions of the society by linking his genealogy to the real and mythical ancestors of Śrī Kṣetra, the symbol of the Pyu golden past. 24Lastly, he supported and favored Theravāda Buddhism while toler­ating other religious groups. Art and architecture, religion, lan­guage and literature, ethnic plurality—in effect the whole society during Kalancacsā’s reign—reflected assimilation and syncretism. By the end of the eleventh century the same cultural influences imbibed by the Pyus—Brahmanism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and local beliefs concerned with the supernatural—had been synthe­sized, a process that was continued into the twelfth century.

This age of syncretism, however, eventually yielded to a new one, itself a response to syncretism. Because the culture under Kalancac­sā was invariably a mixture there was a need after his reign for some sort of permanent, definable, and distinct tradition—not temporary assimilation, cosmopolitanism, or amalgamation. Syncretism by its very nature had created intellectual and structural uncertainty. King Aloṅcañsū (Alaungsithu, 1113–1169/70) filled precisely that vac­uum, by beginning the process that institutionalized what was to become the Burmese Theravāda Buddhist tradition.

What Aniruddha and Kalancacsā had struggled for—unification of human and intellectual forces—Aloṅcañsū took for granted. Theravāda Buddhism, the constant, no longer required royal ma­nipulation of folk and other beliefs to be supreme. As a result, in Aloṅcañsū’s reign few if any conscious innovations in the field of political ideology are to be found, at least those that had to accom­modate Buddhism with the various folk beliefs prevalent in the cul­ture. Kalancacsā had already accomplished that. It was not Aloṅ­cañsū’s task to seek the components that might comprise a tradition; his was to establish cultural permanency by standardizing more tan­gible elements such as the administrative and economic systems.

Once this tradition was defined, culture was standardized, and, in general, the society was stabilized, new conditions emerged that dic­tated the needs of the following generation. Wealth and prosperity, efficiency of administration, stability of political, social, and eco­nomic conditions had put pressure on the fixed relationship between productive land and population. Although population had probably increased among the artisans, a result of prosperous conditions in the construction sector and general stability, because of the relation­ship between hereditary status and occupation the need for labor in crown services, particularly in the agricultural and military sectors, could not be met fully by the growth of the artisan and other non-crown classes. In the generation that followed Aloṅcañsū, therefore, 25expansion and conquest became a solution to some of these prob­lems.

King Narapati Cañsū (Narapatisithu, 1173–1210), known for his expansion and conquest, proceeded to increase the agricultural base of the kingdom with new and, as a result, uncommitted labor from conquered areas, securing the needed wealth for a growing royalty and officialdom. Indeed, of the four centuries that the Pagan dynasty ruled, the height of its political and administrative develop­ment was the hundred years between the end of the twelfth century and first half of the thirteenth, especially during the reigns of kings Narapatisithu and Nātoṅmyā (Nadaungmya, 1210–1234). It was a period in which the kingdom expanded physically to an extent never to be surpassed during its life; when military organization and suc­cess reached their zenith; when monumental architecture achieved a qualitative (and quantitative) standard that subsequent dynasties attempted to emulate but did not succeed in doing; when the gov­ernment defined and established its ideologies of legitimacy and the society its criteria for being; and it was a time when the court finally developed the complex organization that was to be a model for later dynasties. It was also a period during which the agricultural econ­omy reached its Upper Burma potential; when the saṅgha enjoyed one of its most wealthy periods; and one in which customary (civil) and criminal law were codified to become the basis of jurisprudence for subsequent ages.

More specifically, the Irrawaddy River Valley from Bhamo on the China border to the Tenassarim Peninsula had been unified, ruled by a king of an established hereditary royal family, and supported by an officialdom whose power was based mainly on “the royal com­passion.” The state was (1) founded upon an economy of redistribu­tion embedded in institutions not necessarily economic in nature; (2) administered by a semibureaucratic structure, with a relatively centralized taxation system and an imperial army; (3) dependent upon a populace legally placed into crown, non-crown, and exempt categories; (4) whose people were educated and “pacified” by a large, ubiquitous, and at least horizontally united Buddhist church the head of which was appointed by the king with its members the paramount beneficiaries of the dominant belief system, kammatic Buddhism; and (5) stabilized by a uniform judicial system based on codified law written in the vernacular, Burmese.

By the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries then, because 26Pagan had leaders with vision as well as necessary human and eco­nomic resources, it could and did establish a sound administrative, political, and economic system—in effect a permanent tradition the essence of which was to persist to the nineteenth century. It is this Pagan, built by Narapatisithu and some of his predecessors and inherited by Nātoṅmyā and his successors, that is the primary focus of study.

The imperial milieu of Narapatisithu’s reign, however, in turn created new conditions for the following generations, which became accustomed to power, affluence, and an elegant culture. Narapatisi­thu’s successors—Nātoṅmyā (1210–1234) and Klacwā (Kyazwa, 1235–1249), as well as those who followed them—simply reaped the benefits of his efforts without strenuous effort or much sacrifice on their part at state building. And largely because of the stable and bountiful conditions that were passed down, kings like Narathiha­pade, who lived in the last half of the thirteenth century (1254–1287), faced more acutely a problem that had become an invariable part of the society, one that most Pagan monarchs since Aniruddha had to contend with, though on a smaller scale: namely, the devolu­tion of wealth in the form of taxable land and corvéeable labor to the religious sector. It was a problem that plagued Burmese society for the next millennium.

Briefly stated, the process (discussed more thoroughly in the Con­clusion) occurred in the following manner. The merit-path to salva­tion—the spending of one’s material resources on religious things to insure a better rebirth—dominated religious belief. The ultimate material result of this belief was the construction on a tremendous scale of temples and monasteries, permanently endowed with pro­ductive but tax-exempt land and labor. Because most workers were paid in cash, in kind, or in rights to good land, perpetually scarce labor was attracted to the capital, invariably increasing the amount of cultivated land or its productivity (hence, state revenues), while enlarging the pool of people liable to per capita taxation not only at that particular point in time but for subsequent generations, for tax liability was normally hereditary.

Cultivable land in Pagan at first was plentiful, and productive acreage increased during the first three centuries in proportion to the state’s demographic growth. And since the state held or took the best (irrigated) lands and had revenue rights to virtually all others, except for those given in perpetuity to the saṅgha, it was easier and 27more profitable for newcomers to cultivate partially or fully devel­oped state-owned land for a share of the produce than to clear and settle on virgin land by themselves.

As more temples were built and more revenues generated, the state grew in strength and grandeur, attracting more people from external sources while general prosperity stimulated natural popula­tion growth domestically. Moreover, the expansion of state coffers increased the size of its administrative, political, and especially mili­tary apparatus. With it, as in the mid-eleventh century, neighboring centers of population were conquered and large numbers of people were brought back to be resettled around the capital. Again, such increases in population, especially of military specialists, skilled arti­sans, and monk/scholars, greatly enhanced the growth of the politi­cal, material, and intellectual/religious institutions of the state, bestowing upon the state even greater legitimation than conquest by itself could have done. Because Buddhism and its structure had become institutionalized as essential to political, social, economic—indeed total—legitimation of the state, royal patronage and support of the religion and saṅgha in moral as well as material ways could continue indefinitely. The more one donated to the religion—the bigger the temple built, the larger the land and labor endowments one made—the more legitimate the king and his state became. The scale increased as others in the society followed the royal example. Initially then, there was a direct (and circular) relationship between spending on religion, increased agricultural production, propor­tional demographic expansion, and state development.

But after two hundred years of spending on what were in effect perpetually tax-free endowments, the state began to feel the strain of the cumulative effects of wealth flowing to the religious sector, with­out being able to retrieve significant portions of it. By then also, Pagan had probably reached a population commensurate with its natural productive capacity, which meant that cultivable land and labor to work it, were in equilibrium. Moreover, with the growth and development by then of other regional polities, the competition for labor outside the nucleus grew more intense; labor was no longer as easily obtainable as it once had been. There thus came a time when the expenditures of each new reign were at the outset too heav­ily committed to the church.

To regain some of this wealth in a socially acceptable and legal manner, Buddhist kings used what scripture called sāsana reform or 28purification of the Order. In effect, this reform enabled the govern­ment (more precisely the king), to regain its influence over the saṅgha in matters of the latter’s behavior vis-à-vis temporal matters such as wealth and power. Cultivable land and corvéeable labor belonging to the saṅgha could be legally confiscated, and per capita tax on heretofore exempt categories could once again be imposed. The process also restored the king’s image and position as defender of the faith. The success of purification, a sign of effective leader­ship, could determine the longevity of the dynasty, while unsuccess­ful purification perpetuated the uncontrolled growth of the saṅgha.

In the late thirteenth century, as the Buddhist church grew rich and its temples and monasteries were gorged with wealth, no strong leaders emerged to successfully purify it. At the same time the state could not simply take back this wealth illegally without compromis­ing the belief system on which its own survival rested, nor would it simply destroy the saṅgha militarily. With the revenues on which royal power rested seriously drained, the invariable factionalism at court eventually led to civil war, finally destroying the unity and cen­tralizing capabilities of the state, while it became a tempting object of plunder for enemy as well as tributary states.7 The Kingdom of Pagan declined because the factors that had nurtured it in the first place became, in time, forces that contradicted and destroyed it. To put it differently, because Pagan society was unable (and unwilling) to change once constructive forces when they became destructive ones—creating an “inexorable dialectic”—the political power of the dynasty collapsed. Ultimately the Kingdom of Pagan declined not as a result of Mongol invasions or the egalitarian ideologies of Thera­vāda Buddhism (as it is conventionally argued) but because internal­ly generated forces first rendered the state incapable of resisting the Mongols and other centrifugal forces, which in essence merely pro­vided the coup de grace to an institutional fait accompli. Yet this pat­tern of development and decay did not end with the Pagan dynasty; it recurred at least three more times in Burmese history, until the last dynasty, weakened for fundamentally the same institutional reasons, was conquered by another waiting neighbor: the British.8

With one exception—the circumstances of which were anomalous—the centers of Burmese politics and culture from at least the ninth century have lain in the dry, central plains of Burma, dependent upon surrounding oases of intensively irrigated tracts of land. 29Inland and agrarian, with trade playing a minor role in the acquisi­tion of wealth, rainfall barely wetting the soil, and with the swamps of Lower Burma not yet drained and filled to be a factor in the econ­omy, the wealth (hence power) of the first Burmese state relied on essentially two ingredients: cultivable land and labor. It was here in this demanding and limiting material environment that Burma had its origins as a state, and it was here that it ended its monarchical career. The room to deviate from this physical environment was meager, and the inclination to do so—once the Kingdom of Pagan had been fully formed by the middle of the thirteenth century—was not there; had it been there, a major transformation of thought con­cerning the nature and purpose of man and his role in the universe would have been evident in the sources. Nevertheless, the most was made out of this environment, and it is with the results of these efforts of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries—the institu­tions that evolved, the beliefs and thoughts that shaped and formed Burmese society, and their relationship to the events of the time—that we are primarily concerned.