ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္ႀကီး

ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းဘုရားအဝင္

အဝင္မုခ္ဦး

ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းဘုရားႀကီး

ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းဘုရားႀကီး

ဗုဒၶဝင္ပန္းခ်ီမ်ား

ေျခေတာ္ရာရွိစက္လကၡဏာမ်ား

ဘုရားဝင္းအတြင္းရွိ ေလာကပါလနတ္ရုပ္ထု

   
    The Shwe-thar-lyaung Image stands as a landmark of Bago, wonderfully executed to match the image of overwhelming proportions.It is said to be the largest Reclining Buddha Image in the world, measuring 180 feet in length and 52 ½  feet in height.

Legend of the Reclining Buddha

Tradition says that the Reclining Buddha Image was built in 994 A.D. by the King Mingadhipa(J.r).He was an animist. To get a wild game for animistic sacrifice, he ordered his son prince to go out for hunting.

While hunting in a forest,the prince met a Mon girl namely Dala Htaw near the edge of the forest.She was a devout Buddhist.The prince fell in love with her.He promised her that he would embrace Buddhism and married her and brought her to the palace.

Dalla Htaw became the chief consort of the crown prince, very much honoured and cherished. At the palace, Dala Htaw refused to worship the animistic idols.She kept a Buddha statue in her chamber and worshiped it daily.

This naturally caused jealously among the other wives, who looked for a way to bring about her downfall.It did not take them long to discover that she was a Buddhist and that she was performing her devotions in secret.

That Dalla, the crown prince’s chief consort did not follow the customs of worshipping the spirit images, nor take part in the rituals, was reported to the king.He was greatly offended.He had Dalla brought before him and in the presence of his courtiers, he commanded her to bow down to the images of the spirits.So, Dalla knelt, the pantheon of spirits images facing her and the king ordering her to bow down to them.Black-robed executioners armed with swords stood around her, ready to do their duty.

Dalla clasped her hands and with her mind firmly concentrated on the attributes of the Buddha and his teachings, she bowed down to the spirit images, as if unable to stand the pure thoughts permeating Dalla’s mind, fell down from their altars and broke into pieces.

The king, seeing the miracles, was filled with fear and remorse for having wronged a worshipper of the Buddha.He declared himself a Buddhist on the spot and proclaimed that all the sacrificial rituals must be stopped.Dalla was showered with honours.Later, the king, to commemorate his conversion, built the reclining Buddha image, not only of prodigious dimensions but also of sublime beauty, on the very spot where the spirit images fell down. 

Discovery after years of oblivion

The great image lay for many centuries in ruins until King Dhammaceti renovated it in the 15^th century.Later King Bayintnaung, the builder of Mahazedi Pagoda, carried on with the maintenance work.It fell into neglect again and lay completely in ruins buried underneath the jungle growth.

It was only in the last years of the 19^th century that it was discovered by accident.The recently established British government planned to extend the railroad to Pegu.The constructor responsible for supplies for the works found an immense mound of  bricks in the woodlands.The contractor decided to avail himself of the opportunity.

With the gradual clearing of the jungle shrubs, the original form of the image was revealed, to the great excitement of the Buddhist community.Filled with wonder and religious fervor, they at once took steps to stop the sacrilege.The next thing was to restore the great image to its former grandeur and glory.

A discovery of an ancient Buddhist monument always has a tremendous effect on the devotees.It is neither interest in antiquity nor intellectual motivation that moves people to gather round the scene in large numbers.It is sheer exultation over a miracle one is privileged to see.The discovery of the reclining Buddha image was, to the Buddhists, a grand opportunity to give their unstained service for its repair materials to the work site.

The overwhelming faith and enthusiasm of the people very soon turned the mound of ruined bricks into a thing of awe-inspiring beauty,the reclining Buddha image of today.In 1906, after the undergrowth had been cleared away, an ironta-zaung was erected over the Buddha.Although the ta-zaung detracts from the view of the statue inside, the pavilion does protect the Buddha from the elements.The statue was most recently renovated in 1948, when it was re-gilded and painted.

           ရွင္ပင္သာေလ်ာင္း (ခ) ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္ႀကီး

ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္သည္ အလ်ားေပ ၁၈၀၊တေတာင္ဆစ္မွ ဦးေခါင္းေတာ္အထိ ဥာဏ္ေတာ္ ၅၂ေပ၊မ်က္ႏွာေတာ္ ၂၂ေပ၊နားေတာ္ ၁၅ေပ ရိွသည္။၎သည္ ပဲခူးၿမိဳ႕ ကလ်ာဏီရပ္ကြက္တြင္ စံပယ္ေတာ္မူလ်က္ရိွၿပီး၊ မြန္အမ်ိဳးသမီး ဒလေထာ္က သကၠရာဇ္ ၃၅၆တြင္ တည္ထားကိုးကြယ္ခဲ့သည္။

ဟံသာ၀တီမင္း(၁၃)ဆက္ေျမာက္ျဖစ္ေသာ မိဂါဒိပၸမင္းငယ္သည္ မိစၧာအယူ၀ါဒကို လြဲမွားစြာကိုးကြယ္ခဲ့၏။တေန႔တြင္ မင္းႀကီးကသားေတာ္မင္းသားအား ယဇ္ပူေဇာ္ရန္ ေတာကစားထြက္ေစခဲ့သည္။မင္းသားသည္ ေတာကစားထြက္ရာလမ္းခရီး ေတာစပ္အနီး၌ ဗုဒၶဘာသာကိုးကြယ္ေသာ မြန္အမ်ိဳးသမီး ဒလေထာ္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ဆံုေမတၱာမွ်ခဲ့သည္။ထို႔ေနာက္ သားေတာ္မင္းသားက  ဒလေထာ္အား ဗုဒၶဘာသာကိုးကြယ္ပါမည္ဟု ကတိျပဳကာ၊သိမ္းပိုက္ေတာ္မူၿပီးေနာက္ နန္းေတာ္သို႔ ေခၚေဆာင္လာခဲ့သည္။နန္းေတာ္သို႔ေရာက္ၿပီးေနာက္ ဒလေထာ္သည္ မိစၧာရုပ္ကိုမကိုးကြယ္ဘဲ၊မိမိအေဆာင္တြင္ ဗုဒၶရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ကို ထားရိွကိုးကြယ္ခဲ့သည္။

ဒိ႒ိလႊမ္းမိုးေသာ မွဴးမတ္တို႔၏ ဂံုးေခ်ာမႈေႀကာင့္ ဘုရင္ႀကီးသည္ မင္းသား၊ဒလေထာ္ႏွင့္တကြ အေပါင္းပါတို႔အား ကြပ္မ်က္ယဇ္ပူေဇာ္ရန္ အမိန္႔ခ်မွတ္ခဲ့သည္။

ယဇ္ပူေဇာ္ပြဲႀကီး၌ ဒလေထာ္မင္းသမီးသည္ ဘုရား၊တရား၊သံဃာတည္းဟူေသာ ရတနာျမတ္သံုးပါးကို ဦးထိပ္ထားၿပီး သစၥာဆိုလိုက္ရာ နတ္ရုပ္ႀကီးသည္ အပိုင္းပိုင္းျပတ္က်သြားေလသည္။

ထိုအခါမွ မိဂါဒိပၸမင္းႀကီးသည္ အယူမွားသည့္ဒုကၡမွ ကင္းေ၀းပယ္ေပ်ာက္မႈေႀကာင့္ အျမင္မွန္ရရိွၿပီးသကာလ၊သားေတာ္ႏွင့္ေခၽြးမေတာ္တို႔အား ကြပ္မ်က္ျခင္းမွကင္းလြတ္ေစသည္။

ဒလေထာ္သည္ ယဇ္ပူေဇာ္ကိုးကြယ္လ်က္ရိွေသာ ေယာကၡမေတာ္ ဟံသာ၀တီမင္း မိဂါဒိပၸအား ဗုဒၶျမတ္စြာ၏ တရားစစ္ တရားမွန္မ်ားကို ေဟာႀကားေအာင္ျမင္သည့္ အထိမ္းအမွတ္အျဖစ္ ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္ႀကီးကို တည္ထားခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ဘုရင့္ေနာင္မင္းတရားလက္ထက္တြင္ ပ်က္စီးေနေသာရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ကိုဖ်က္၍ အေတာင္(၁၂၀)ရိွေသာ ရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္ႀကီးကို ျပန္လည္ျပဳျပင္ၿပီး ဓာတ္ေတာ္ႏွင့္တကြ ဘုရားဆင္းတုေတာ္မ်ားကို ႒ာပနာခဲ့ျပန္သည္။

ႏွစ္ကာလႀကာျမင့္သည္ႏွင့္အမွ် ေရႊသာေလ်ာင္းရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္ႀကီးသည္ ျခံဳႏြယ္တို႔ဖံုး၍ ေတာင္ကုန္းသဖြယ္ သီတင္းသံုးေနေတာ္မူခဲ႔ရသည္။သကၠရာဇ္(၁၂၄၂)ခုႏွစ္တြင္ ရန္ကုန္-ပဲခူးမီးရထားလမ္းေဖာက္ရန္ အုတ္ဖုတ္သည့္အခါ ရုပ္ပြားေတာ္ျမတ္ေပၚေတာ္မူခဲ့သျဖင့္ ဗုဒၶဘာသာ၀င္ ရဟန္းရွင္လူ ျပည္သူမ်ားက ေရွးမူမပ်က္ ျပန္လည္ မြမ္းမံတည္ထားခဲ့သျဖင့္ ယေန႔တိုင္ေအာင္ ႀကည္ညိဳဖြယ္ရာ ဖူးျမင္ေနႀကရပါသည္။