By Fyllis Hockman
It was such a serendipitous meeting. While strolling through the gilded Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmar's most sacred Buddhist shrine, my husband and I stopped to talk to a monk. A very chatty fellow of 51, he was eager to show us the photos from his recent trip to Japan — yup, on his smartphone. Things got even more interesting when he actually invited us to lunch at his monastery two days hence. And that was only one of the many surprising and unexpected happenings on our Myths and Mountains' Myanmar Odyssey tour.
This is a mystical, magical land filled with pagodas, temples, shrines, stupas and monasteries — of which we saw more than our share — plus many other sites traversing lakes and mountains, city and country, caves and cooking classes. But it is the local markets, small villages and contacts with people leading their everyday lives, usually in the form of making something by hand, that so enriched both the trip and the country.
The stories of everyday life are everywhere. And everywhere people are making things by hand, often out of materials that are themselves handmade. We visited a shoemaker and his family — ironically one of few places we didn't have to remove ours, a de rigueur exercise at every pagoda — who is the only person in Myanmar to make shoes for people with disabilities, by hand of course.
We visited silversmiths and weavers and lacquer workshops, a parasol factory, a textile workshop, a bronze-casting arena, sellers of jade and teak furniture — and everywhere the labor-intensive levels of individual craftsmanship were awe-inspiring. It's like watching God individually mold the different segments of the moon over a month's time and then painting each night's lunar orb with different brushes tinged with hues of gold and yellow, red and white with painstaking precision. That's the level of Myanmar artistry.
Our local connections continued at a street-long Jade Market comprised of everything from huge slabs not yet chiseled to the tiniest of stones to a comparably sized market of marble with statues, not surprisingly mostly of Buddhas, in every stage of development from mammoth to miniscule. Workers carved, scraped, hammered, polished, painted and washed for several blocks populated by green and white images of various sizes.
Onto another workshop in a different medium — this time wood-carving. More hammering — also whirring, smoothing, tapping, pounding, appliqueing — and this time Buddha had company: many animals, women in prayer and other decorative items made of teak.
More everyday life is evident on Yangon's Circular Railway, which takes workers, students, vendors and shoppers to wherever they need to be for a mere 30 cents for a three-hour round trip. The fact that the train we were waiting for arrived on the other side of the platform fazed no one, so naturally, we just crossed the tracks. In the United States we'd be arrested - or worse, dead. The train was rundown and crowded but cheap and functional, not unlike the markets. We were told that all modes of transportation are being renovated under recently elected State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, known affectionately to the locals as "The Lady."
A young boy walked the aisles selling strawberries, limes, mangoes and oranges for 50 cents — a roving supermarket. This exposure to a slice of life in Myanmar brought with it multiple slices of fruit, as well.
And more fruit, as well as every other aspect of the Burmese diet, shows up at the local markets, which are teeming with people selling and cooking all kinds of foods and trinkets. The babble of unfamiliar background noises lends its own exotic flavor to the compendium of other more tangible flavors.
Clothing here is as colorful as the red, yellow, green and orange fruits. Every inch on both sides of the narrow street, as well as right down its center, is covered with all kinds of veggies, spices, meats and pasta, some familiar, some totally unidentifiable. Negotiating the throngs of people and produce presents its own challenge. Vendors sit on their haunches for hours in positions I suspect we would find difficult maintaining for more than a minute.
Our aforementioned lunch at the monastery, a veritable vegetarian feast, was set out upon the floor. In further conversation, I found out I reminded our monk of his 86-year-old mother — which occasioned more pictures, of course, this time on his tablet. This was not a fact I found particularly pleasing, but he seemed so delighted at the idea that I became so, as well.
Aung Pan Kyaung Tike imparted several Buddhist lessons in casual conversation: You can't bring anything with you to the next life, so you might as well give away everything you have. And so it is with the monks, who have no material accumulations of their own but survive on the contributions of others in the community. Because of them, his monastery supports a school in a small village that had none and is currently building a monastery there.
As to a day in the life of? Monks awake at 4 a.m., meditate and recite 108 Buddhist mantras before breakfast, head out into the community with their "begging bowls," and pretty much pray and chant throughout the rest of the day. Lunch is their last meal of the day.
But from monk to merchant, jade-cutter to parasol-maker, shoemaker to silversmith, the people of Myanmar add a rich diversity to a country known primarily for its many stunning edifices devoted to Buddha and his followers.
WHEN YOU GO
For more information: www.mythsandmountains.com
Fyllis Hockman is a freelance writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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