Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/108

96 to the boy, who acquired the art of calling wild elephants from the forest, and afterwards became king of his father's dominions. Udeinna is clearly the Sanskrit Udayana. The Indian story, as told by Wilson in his Essays on Sanskrit Literature, tells how King Udayana's mother was carried off from Kosambi by a garuda bird, but says nothing about a banyan-tree or wild elephants, and of course does not mention Burma. Possibly the spirit of the tree was that of a local celebrity, famous for his power over wild elephants, who was somehow identified with the Indian king. If so we have one more example of the interweaving of local with Indian legend.

Phallic worship.—In the north-west corner of Burma, among villages where the religion is Buddhism and the prevailing language Shan, there are often to be seen posts with a head of the conventional lotus-bud shape, painted in vermilion and gold and surrounded by a fence. These are placed over the bones of Buddhist monks who have been cremated. No one, however, who has seen the phallic emblem in the compound of the principal monastery at Bangkok can doubt that they are a survival of phallic worship, the very existence of which has long since been forgotten. The frequent obscene carvings on the outside of Buddhist monasteries, which seem so singularly out of place in view of the asceticism of their occupants, have no doubt a similar origin.

The Taungbyôn Brothers, already mentioned, are said to have been of an amorous disposition, and it is suggested in the Upper Burma Gazetteer (I. ii. 24 and II. ii. 106) that the method of their execution, a peculiarly painful form of a castration, is a hint at phallic worship. However this may be, there can be no question about the fertility-rite performed at Pyindaung fishery and described by me in Man for July 1919.