Nat (spirit)

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Nat oun (coconut) hung on a post in a house.
Nat oun (coconut) hung on a post in a house.

The nats (Burmese: Image:Nat.png‌; MLCTS: nat; IPA: [naʔ]) are spirits worshipped in Myanmar (formerly Burma) in conjunction with Buddhism. They are divided between the 37 Great Nats and all the rest (i.e., spirits of trees, water, etc). Almost all of the 37 Great Nats were human beings who met violent deaths (a sein-thei, lit. "green death"). There are two types of nats. Lower nats are dewas of the lower six heavens, while higher nats are in the upper six realms. Much like sainthood, nats can be designated for a variety of reasons, including those only known in certain regions. Nat worship is less common in urban areas than in rural areas, and is predominantly practised among ethnic Bamar. Many houses contain a nat sin or nat ein, which essentially serve as altars to nats. Villages often have a patron nat. A coconut (nat oun) is often hung on the main post (ဥရူတုိင္‌) in the house, wearing a gaungbaung and surrounded by perfume, and is an offering to the Min Mahagiri (Lord of the Great Mountain) nat.

Nats have human characteristics, wants, and needs. They are flawed, having desires considered derogatory and immoral in mainstream Buddhism. During a nat pwè, which is a festival during which nats are appeased, nat kadaw (nat mistresses or mediums) dance and embody the nat's spirit in a trance. The roles of nat kadaws are often fulfilled by transvestite men. Music, often accompanied by a saing waing (orchestra), adds much to the mood of the nat pwè, and many claim to be entranced.

Worship of nats predates Buddhism in Myanmar. After Buddhism arrived, however, the nats were merged, syncretistically, with Buddhism, with the Buddha considered to be the greatest nat, and with nats presiding at the birth of the Buddha.

The most important nat pilgrimage site in Myanmar is Mount Popa, an extinct volcano with numerous temples and relic sites atop a mountain 1300 metres, located near Bagan.

Contents

[edit] List of official nats

A portrayal of the King of Nats, Thagyamin.
A portrayal of the King of Nats, Thagyamin.
Traditional offerings of bananas and coconut at a nat shrine
Traditional offerings of bananas and coconut at a nat shrine

King Anawrahta designated an official pantheon of 37 nats, after he was unable to sanction banning of nat worship. The official pantheon is made up of predominantly those in the royal houses of Burmese history, but also contains nats of Thai (Yun Bayin) and Shan (Maung Po Tu) descent. Listed in proper order, they are:

  1. Thagyamin (သိက္ရား), considered King of the Nats, is identified with the Buddhist deva Śakra and the Hindu deity Indra.[1]. He is often portrayed atop a three-headed white elephant, holding a conch shell in one hand, and a yak-tail whisk in the other.[1]
  2. Mahagiri (မဟာဂီရိး)
  3. Hnamadawgyi (န္ဟမေတာ္‌က္ရီး)
  4. Shwenabay (ရ္ဝ္ဟေနဘေ)
  5. Thonbanhla (သုံးဘန္‌လ္ဟ)
  6. Taungoo Mingaung (ေတာင္‌ငူမင္‌းခောင္‌)
  7. Mintara (မင္‌းတရား)
  8. Thandawgan (သံတော္‌ခံ)
  9. Shwenawrahta (ရ္ဝ္ဟေနော္‌ရထာ)
  10. Aungzaw Magyi (ေအာင္‌စ္ဝာမက္ရီး)
  11. Nga zishin (ငားစိးရ္ဟင္‌)
  12. Aungpinle Hsinbyushin (ေအာင္‌ပင္‌လယ္‌ဆင္‌ဖ္ရုရ္ဟင္‌)
  13. Taungmagyi (ေတာင္‌မက္ရီး)
  14. Maung Minshin (ေမာင္‌မင္‌းရ္ဟင္‌)
  15. Shindaw (ရ္ဟင္‌ေတာ္‌)
  16. Nyaung Gyin (ေညာင္‌က္ယင္‌း)
  17. Tabinshwehti (တဗင္‌ရ္ဝ္ဟေထီး)
  18. Minyè Aungdin (မင္‌းရဲအောင္‌တင္)
  19. Shwe Sitpin (ရ္ဝ္ဟေစစ္‌ပင္‌)
  20. Medaw Shwezaga (မယ္‌ေတာ္‌ရ္ဝ္ဟေစကား)
  21. Maung Po Tu (ေမာင္‌ဘုိးတူ)
  22. Yun Bayin (ယ္ဝန္‌းဘုရင္‌)
  23. Maung Minbyu (ေမာင္‌မင္‌းပ္ရု)
  24. Mandalay Bodaw (မန္တလေးဘုိးတော္‌)
  25. Shwehpyin Naungdaw (ရ္ဝ္ဟေဖ္ယင္‌းနောင္‌တော္‌)
  26. Shwehpyin Nyidaw (ရ္ဝ္ဟေဖ္ယင္‌းညီတော္‌)
  27. Mintha Maungshin (မင္‌းသားမောင္‌ရ္ဟင္‌)
  28. Htibyusaung (သိးဖ္ရုေဆာင္‌း)
  29. Htibyusaung Medaw (သီးဖ္ရူဆောင္‌းမယ္‌တော္‌)
  30. Bayinma Shin Mingaung (ဘုရင္‌မရ္ဟင္‌မင္‌ခောင္‌)
  31. Min Sithu (မင္‌းစည္‌သူ)
  32. Min Kyawzwa (မင္‌းက္ယော္‌စ္ဝာ)
  33. Myaukhpet Shinma (ေမ္ရာက္‌ဘက္‌ရ္ဟင္‌မ)
  34. Anauk Mibaya (အေနာက္‌မိဘုရား)
  35. Shingon (ရ္ဟင္‌ကုန္‌း)
  36. Shingwa (ရ္ဟင္‌က္ဝ)
  37. Shin Nemi (ရ္ဟင္‌နဲမိ)

[edit] References

This article or section uses Burmese characters which may be rendered incorrectly. A Burmese Unicode font is needed, and a modern browser supporting Graphite may also be required to properly view this article or section as intended.
  • Salek, Kira. "Myanmar's River of Spirits", National Geographic Magazine, 2006-05, pp. 136-157. Retrieved on July 3, 2006.
  • U Kyaw Tun et al. (2005-01-15). Nat in My Classroom!. Tun Institute of Learning. Retrieved on July 3, 2006.
  • Temple, R.C. (1906). The Thirty-seven Nats-A Phase of Spirit-Worship prevailing in Burma. 

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b Hla Tha Mein. Thirday-Seven Nats. Yangonow. Retrieved on July 3, 2006.

[edit] External links

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