Burmese Sketches - Khamkoo

BVRM1S8E SKETCnES. itfj
of differentiating. To him the phenomena of life and death
are wondrous miracles, and, in his imagination, there exists
beyond the grave a world of spirits endowed with material
appetites and all other attributes of sentient beings.
According to the indigenous belief of the Burmese, man is
regarded as being constituted of two component parts, vi£^., his
material body, and his leikpya or butterfiy-spirit, which the
Karens call /a, and the Chins klo. Tylor in his •* Primitive
Culture '' (vol. I, p. 387) says :
*' The conception of a personal
soul or spirit among the lower races may be defined as follows.
It is a thin unsubstantial human image ; in its nature, a sort of
vapour, film, or shadow ; the cause of life and thought in the
individual it animates ; independently possessing the personal
consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or pre-
sent ; capable of leaving the body far behind to flash swiftly
from place to place ; mostly impalpable and invisible, yet also
manifesting physical power, and especially appearing to men,
waking or asleep, as a phantam separate from the body of
which it bears the likeness ; able to enter into, possess, and act
in the bodies of other men, of animals, and even of things."
The Burmese also believe that this soul or spirit is capable of
leaving its living tenement, either in sleep or illness, and stories
have been related of its experiences. It is said that the spirit
of an old Burmese lady, who was seriously ill, visited hell, and
the accounts we have, on her recovery, of her journey thither,
tallied with what she had been taught in childhood and youth.
On death, the souls go to Hades, which is below the earth.
There they are adjudged by their Rhadamanthos, the Nga
Thein of the Chins, but whose indigenous name the Burmans
have forgotten. This awful judge sits under a tree, and his
dog watches by him. The tree is called the " tree of forget-
fulness," because spirits passing under it forget their experience
on earth. Stories, however, have been related of persons
who, because of their exemption, through their extraordinary
merit, from passing under the tree, could relate about their
past life ;
and an instance is related where property was restored
to such are-incarnated child.
The virtuous go to a happy abode, and the wicked are
doomed to suffer in hell.
The world of the dead is separated from the world of the
living by a stream of water, over which souls are ferried across.
It is lor the payment of ferry-toll on this stream that some
silver or copper coin is always placed in the mouth of a dead
Burman, as in that of a dead German peasant, and provisions