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Shwesayan Pagoda
Religion
Affiliation	Theravada Buddhism
Location
Location	Patheingyi Township, Mandalay Region
Country	Myanmar
Shown within Myanmar
Geographic coordinates	21°50′24″N 96°12′50″E / 21.83987°N 96.21402°E / 21.83987; 96.21402
Architecture
Founder	Saw Mon Hla
Groundbreaking	11th century

Shwesayan Pagoda (Burmese: ရွှေစာရံ ဘုရား) is a Buddhist temple located in Patheingyi Township, 14 miles from Mandalay, Myanmar. Situated near the Dokhtawaddy River, it was built by Saw Mon Hla, one of the principal queens of King Anawrahta of Pagan.

Legend

According to Burmese chronicles, Saw Mon Hla was driven out by her rival queens, who were jealous of her status as Anawrahta's favorite. Her rivals accused her of witchcraft, forcing Saw Mon Hla to leave Anawrahta and return to her homeland, Maw.

On her return to Sae Lant village, her birthplace in northern Maw Shan State, one of her earrings, which contained a relic of the Buddha, dropped into a stream. As it fell, dozens of golden sparrows appeared, circling the spot where the earring landed. The stream was later named "Na Daung Kya", meaning "the earring fell into". Saw Mon Hla built a pagoda near the riverbank (located in present-day Patheingyi Township, Mandalay), enshrining her earrings and the Buddha relic. The pagoda's façade faced east, toward her birthplace in Shan State. When King Anawrahta learned of this, he ordered his soldiers to kill her if the pagoda faced east, and to spare her life if it faced west, where Pagan was located.

Upon hearing the news, Saw Mon Hla made a solemn wish and used her emerald shawl to turn the pagoda so that it faced directly between east and west, in an attempt to save herself. According to legend, the soldiers set her free when they saw that the pagoda was not facing Shan State. The pagoda was named Shwesayan, meaning "surrounded by golden sparrows". Saw Mon Hla and her brother died at their home near Hsipaw and are believed to have become nats (spirits) who protect the Shwesayan Pagoda to this day. A small memorial palace near the pagoda features a statue of Saw Mon Hla and her brother. King Anawrahta, deeply regretful after banishing his queen and hearing of her death, donated the surrounding land to the pagoda near the end of his reign.

King Alaungsithu continued to donate fifty households, along with the village of Shwesayan, to care for the pagoda and perform both major and minor religious duties.

Festival

The Shwesayan Pagoda Festival is held annually from the full moon day of Tabaung to the 10th waning moon (from 5 March to 14). The Shwesayan Pagoda Festival gained widespread recognition in Myanmar, thanks to Sein Tin Han, who composed the festival's traditional song called "Htanywet Pahtee" (ထန်းရွက်ပုတီး, 'Palm Leaf Beads'), which was performed by Nyo Nyo San, an eminent Burmese classical singer. During the festival, records indicate that giant catfish and other large fish come to honor the pagoda. Visitors to the pagoda feed these fish as they swim in the nearby river and commonly decorate their heads with gold leaf.

References

1. "Shwesayan Pagoda Festival". Myanmar Net Media. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
2. "ရွှေစာရံစေတီ (၅) ကြိမ်မြောက် ရောင်တော်ဖွင့်ပူဇော်ပွဲနှင့် မြို့လုံးကျွတ် မဟာနိဗ္ဗာန်ဈေးပြုလုပ်". DVB.
3. "သမိုင်းဝင် သစ္စာအဓိဋ္ဌာန် ရွှေစာရံ စေတီတော် မြတ်ကြီး၏ ဘုရားပွဲတော်ကျင်းပ". Eleven Media Group Co., Ltd (in Burmese). Retrieved 2024-09-09.
4. "MDY readies for 76th Buddha Pujaniya Festival of Shwesayan Pagoda". Global New Light of Myanmar. 2024-03-16. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
5. "King Anawrahta". Hmannan Yazawin (in Burmese). Vol. 1 (2003 ed.). Yangon: Ministry of Information, Myanmar. 1829. pp. 254–256.
6. ^ "စောမွန်လှ တည်ခဲ့သော သစ္စာအဓိဌာန် ရွှေစာရံဘုရား". Popular Journal. 2017-06-28. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
7. "ပုဂံ၊ ရွှေစာရံနှင့် မိုင်းမောဝ် ဧကရီ". MDN - Myanmar DigitalNews (in Burmese). Retrieved 2024-09-09.
8. "လည်ပတ်သူ နည်းပါးသွားတဲ့ ရွှေစာရံဘုရားပွဲ". RFA.
9. "ရွှေစာရံဘုရားပွဲတော်သို့ ပွဲတော်မတိုင်မီကပင် လာရောက်လည်ပတ်သောသူများ စည်ကားလျက်ရှိ". MDN - Myanmar DigitalNews (in Burmese). Retrieved 2024-09-09.
10. "အတိတ်နဲ့ ပစ္စုပ္ပန် ရွှေစာရံ". Voice of Myanmar. 2022-03-17. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
11. "ရွှေစာရံကို အရောက်သွားစို့ကွယ်". The Irrawaddy. 25 March 2016.
12. "Historic Shwe Sayan Pagoda festival commences in Mandalay". Eleven Media Group Co., Ltd. Retrieved 2024-09-09.

• Buildings and structures in Mandalay Region
• Buddhist temples in Myanmar
• 11th-century Buddhist temples
• Buddhist pilgrimage sites in Myanmar