AT the foot of Mandalay Hill, more than 100 stone inscriptions are scattered, lying flat on the ground of the Kyauktawgyi Pagoda compound. On each stone tablet, the teachings of the Buddha are written in Pali. The inscriptions have been lying on the ground for more than eight decades – so long that tourists and locals walk past them without a thought.

However, the stones did attract the interest of one man though, who claims to have solved the mystery of their haphazard placement while on a research trip to Mon State.

“I discovered that they are the stone inscriptions intended for Shwesayan Pagoda in Thaton in Mon State,” said U Aung Thu, a freelance researcher of Buddhist inscriptions in Myanmar.

He said that Shwesayan Pagoda is missing more than 200 stone inscriptions.
“The number of stones is important because Buddha’s complete teachings are inscribed in them. A complete set is 729 but there are only 525 at the pagoda at Thaton.”

The story of the Shwesayan stones stretches back to 1912, when U Khandi, a well-known hermit who constructed several massive Buddhist structures in Myanmar, made more than 2400 stones inscriptions to preserve the Buddha’s teaching.

Together, the inscriptions created two books of the Buddha’s teachings. One now resides at the Sandamuni pagoda, near Kuthodaw pagoda at the foot of Mandalay hill, while part of the other is at Shwesayan in Thaton, Mon State. “But U Khandi could only send 525 stone inscriptions to Thaton – the rest are left in Kyauktawgyi pagoda where I found them,” said U Aung Thu.

U Khandi was following the lead of King Mindon, who in 1868 constructed the world’s largest book – 729 large marble tablets with the Tipitaka Pali canon of Theravada Buddhism inscribed on them in gold – at Kuthodaw Pagoda, also at the foot of Mandalay Hill.

Stone inscriptions are very important in Buddhism, said U Aung Thu, because one of the outcomes of the Fifth Buddhist Synod in 1871, held by King Mindon, was the ruling that nobody could amend the Buddha’s teaching.

According to U Aung Thu’s research, there are 9364 stone inscriptions in 23 sites in Myanmar. There are complete sets of the canon in three places – two in Mandalay and one in Yangon.

The researcher is now hoping to add Thaton’s Shwesayan pagoda to that list and is organising donations that will enable the transportation of the remaining stone inscriptions to Thaton.

“I hope all the required marble tablets will be sent in October and Shwesayan becomes one of the four places with the complete book in Myanmar,” he said.

He is being helped by U Nyi Than, a stone inscriber. “Now, I am organising to transport them to Mon state. We plan to send the stones by truck and it’s a very difficult job. I can only guess how U Khandi could have organised this difficult work in those days,” U Nyi Than said.