gold leaf | G. S. Kenney Author

From the deck of the restaurant where we ate lunch, we could see the splendid temple we would tour shortly.

This pagoda houses five ancient and sacred Buddha images, which are believed to have been brought to Myanmar from the Malay peninsula sometime in the twelfth century. The images are small–only nine to eighteen inches high–and so much gold leaf has been applied to them in this century alone that you can no longer even guess they were once Buddhas. I don’t have a photo, but there is a good image here.

As you might guess, these small statues are uncommonly heavy.

Therefore, it may come as no surprise that when an unexpected storm came up while the Buddhas were being transported on their annual round of the Inle Lake villages and the ceremonial boat capsized, they sank to the bottom of the lake.

The lake is not deep, and four of the five statues were recovered. But search as they may, no one could find the fifth–and largest statue. You can imagine everyone’s surprise when they returned to the temple with the other four statues, and the fifth one was waiting for them there.

Clearly, this one statue didn’t want to travel any more. And so for the last fifty years, only four of the statues make the annual round of the villages.

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After lunch, we took the back way and walked to the pagoda. Dan and I being the kind of tourists that we are, we found the backyards as interesting as the waterfront.

A canal separated us from the temple. From its bank we watched some young women doing, um, something, involving tin cans and water. Then we crossed the narrow pedestrian bridge.

At the temple, groups of people talked or prayed, but we didn’t see anyone applying gold leaf right then.

Maha Muni Paya (Great Sage Temple) is a particularly holy site among Myanmar Buddhists and others. It contains an ancient Buddha statue (the Maha Muni Buddha), which was transported to Mandalay from Mrauk U in the kingdom of Rakhine (which borders modern Bangladesh), when that kingdom was defeated by the Burmese in 1784. But the statue is much, much older. Some believe that the statue was cast in 554BC, one of only five statues of the Buddha made during his lifetime; that it was breathed upon by him; and that it therefore became an exact likeness.

But the statue has been much altered . More about this later.

The temple itself, reconstructed in the late 1800s after the original temple burned, is ornate and filled with worshippers. Women are not allowed to approach the Buddha beyond a certain point. (This does not sit well with me, but there you have it.)

Now, here’s the weird part. Men, who are allowed to touch the Buddha image, constantly apply gold leaf to it. This is considered an act of virtue. (They also brush the Buddha’s teeth in the morning, an interesting deed considering that Buddha’s mouth is closed.)