သန္းေရႊရဲ႕ အႀကံ

သန္းေရြ ယုတ္မာပက္စက္ ေနျပန္ျပီ။

ေရြ တိဂံုဘရားမွာ သန္းေရြ ေက်ာက္စိမ္းဘုရား တဆူ ကို လ်ဴထားတယ္လို ့သိရတယ္။ ဘုရားပုံေတာ္ကိုသူမ်က္နာနဲ ့တူေအာင္ထုထားတယ္လို ့ဆိုတယ္။ ဘုရားကိုလူေတြကေတာ့သလို မ်ိဳး သူကိုလူေတြက ကေတာ့ေအာင္ မပုန္ကန္ရဲ ေအာင္လို ့ဆိုတယ္။ ဘုရားက ရုပ္ပြားေတာ္က ညဏ္ေတာ္ ၁ဒသမ ၅ မီတာျမင့္တယ္လို ့သိရတယ္။ ေရြတဂံုဘုရား ေတာင္ဖက္ မုဒ္ အျခမ္းမွာရိွတယ္။ သတင္းအျပည္ ့အစံု ကို ေအာက္မွာ အဂၤလိပ္ဘာသာျဖင့္ဖတ္ရူ နိင္ပါတယ္။ ဒီသတင္းကို အင္တာနက္မွတဆင့္ရရိွလို ့အမ်ား

ျပည္သူမ်ားသိရိွရန္ တင္ျပေပးလိုက္ျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Than Shwe first insulted the Buddha before he murdered the monks

Found at the Burma’s holiest shrine, Shwedagon Pagoda, Than Shwe-like Jade Buddha Image is clearly lacking in serenity and calmness of Buddha.

Like many of my fellow Burmese people still reeling from the brutal September crackdown, I recently paid a visit to the Shwedagon pagoda for much-needed spiritual comfort but only discovered another painful truth. Burmese Senior General, Than Shwe, has insulted the Buddha long before he killed the sons of Buddha.

After arriving at a rest-hall named Ponnya-Kusala-Bahukara, located between the southern corner and western corner of the pagoda, I was aware of a 1.5 m-high jade Buddha image whose face strikingly resembles that of Than Shwe. In great amazement, I repeatedly surveyed the face of the image and could ascertain that its facial proportion and appearance are nearly the same as Burmese junta-chief’s. The forehead of the Buddha image is set with precious gems. According to the brass plates that describe the history of this “Jade Buddha Image”, it weighs a total of 324 kg and is adorned with 91 rubies, 9 diamonds and 2500.28 gram of gold. Sculpted in 1999 when the Shwedagon Pagoda was renovated on a large scale under the supervision of former General Khin Nyunt, the image was housed in a glass-walled room— probably to make its abnormality easily unnoticeable to the pilgrims.

Observing the image more and more closely, I was overcome by feelings of discomfort and abhorrence one usually feels when seeing at Than Shwe’s face, burdened with mountains of grisly crimes he committed against his own people and thus as gloomy and dirty as Burmese currency notes. Obviously, this Buddha image can be one of many crazy things Than Shwe did for his continued rule on the advice of astrologers (probably including the move of ministry buildings from Yangon to a jungle redoubt in central Myanmar and naming the new capital Naypyidaw—meaning royal palace), wasting an enormous amount of country’s wealth while many of Burmese people are living in abject poverty. In fact, the peaceful atmosphere of Shwedagon Pagoda where the sacred relics of past three Buddhas were enshrined in is contaminated by this kind of bizarre astrological act aimed at self-exaltation.

Of Three Gems for all Buddhists--Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha Order, Than Shwe has already assaulted the first and the third to desperately maintain his grip on power and to build a personality cult around him. “And would he even continue to make amendments to the Buddha’s teachings, the Second Gem that categorically denounces the unjust rule?” I thought to myself because the most well-known Buddhist monk, Sayadaw Ashin Nyanissara and other Buddhist monk-preachers began launching thinly-veiled attacks against the recent crackdown in their latest discourses, using direct quotes from the Buddhist scriptures.

Of course, given his lack of qualms about even insulting the Buddha, it should be no wonder that Than Shwe decided to butcher the peacefully-protesting monks who have preserved the teachings of Buddha for 2550 years ago. And I wonder if the strongman who dares to insult the Buddha and kill the monks has a genuine will to help transform Burma to a democracy. I doubt it, but one sure thing is that Than Shwe’s faith in astrology could have become more passionate these days because he found himself killing the monks just two months after “ewhsnahtrellik-killerthanshwe” joke came out.