Bagan East and West Hpet-leik, Myanmar

Address

Bagan East and West Hpet-leik, Myanmar

New Bagan,

Myanmar (Burma)

Moolavar

Buddha

Introduction

The East and West Hpetleik temples predate the reign of King Anawrahta (r. 1044-77) and the ‘canonical’ Bagan architecture that derived from his reign. They are a pair their barrel-shaped stupas and wide, flat roofed bases are distinctly different from the majority of the surviving structures at Bagan.

Both temples are located well to the south of the main monument zone near the west edge of New Bagan, about 150 meters from the present-day riverbank. Though probably built at the same time, each is slightly off axis, with the main entrances facing one another. This would have been even more apparent when they were originally built as both featured mandapa-like wooden porches facing the common ground between the two temples.

Puranic Significance

The temples represent an intermediary step in the transition from Pyu prototypes at Sri Ksetra to the dominant forms at Bagan which emerged in King Anawrahta’s reign and later. For instance, the essential form of the Hpet-leik monuments is a square-shaped solid core surrounded by an ambulatory, capped with a centrally-placed stupa. This design is consistent with the Leimyethna Paya at Sri Ksetra (Pyay) which was probably built in the 7th century, though the stupa atop the Leimyethna no longer survives. The Hpet-leik stupas, too, are indebted to Sri Ksetran prototypes such as the Bawbawgyi Paya Stupa which displays a similar barrel shaped form, with the circumference of the upper part of the stupa only slightly smaller than the base. The one major anomaly is the square-shaped harmika placed atop both the Hpet-leik stupas, though these were likely added after their initial construction, possibly during the reign of King Sithu II (r. 1174-1211) when travel to and from Ceylon, where the harmika was commonly used, grew more frequent. The overall layout—square shaped base with a perimeter ambulatory, topped by a stupa—served a functional purpose as it allowed worshipers to ritually circum-ambulate the stupa even if they could not directly view it from within the ambulatory.

The covered ambulatory made sense in the context of the Leimyethna as objects of worship were set in niches in each of the four cardinal directions. No such niches have been found at the East and West Hpetleik, but they may have been obliterated by later remodeling under King Anawrahta who converted the ambulatories into galleries for the display of terracotta tiles featuring the jataka tales. These tales were so numerous—more than 500 in all, representing the prior lives of the historical Buddha, Gautama—that it would have been well nigh impossible for artists to represent each tale in its entirety. Instead, each tale was represented by a single unglazed terracotta tile depicting a key scene from each tale, with an identifying caption in pali script. Some of the more prominent jataka tales merited more than one tile, especially those near the end leading up to Gautama’s final rebirth such as the popular Vessantara jataka which has several surviving tiles numbered ‘550’. As the monuments are located well south of the majority of sites at Bagan there appears to be no budget for a full-time guard to allow visitors to view the tiles under supervision, though the visitor can wander the exterior of the site at will. It is hoped that at some point in the future both monuments might be opened to the public under controlled conditions as the ambulatories within each temple would make an ideal ‘museum’ environment to view the jataka tiles in their original setting.