Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/95

Rh There are many houses in this country which the local people say are haunted without being able to give the story of any particular person who died there; yet no one would suggest that the ghost is the spirit of the house, or anything but the disembodied spirit of a dead man.

The spirits which represent the forces of nature, however, are naturally further removed from human origins than those which are assigned to local landmarks. Moreover there is a tendency with the Burmese to merge the identity of their own gods of this class with Indian gods imported with Buddhism.

Some light may be thrown on this question by the legend of the Môndaing Nat, whose image is in one of the Buddhist temples at Pagan, a former capital. Môndaing is one word for whirlwind, and one naturally thinks that the Môndaing Nat is the Storm Spirit,—one of the personified forces of nature dwelt on by Sir James Frazer. But the legend, contained in a Burmese manuscript sent to me some years ago by Mr. Duroiselle, now Government Archaeologist, says that Nga Môn Daing was a citizen of Păgan who on his death, for some reason not mentioned, became a nat, and interfered with the building of a pagoda which was then being erected. A natwin, or spirit-medium, on being consulted said the pagoda could be finished if a crocodile and an elephant were offered to the nat. This was done, and an image of the nat attended by an elephant placed in the temple. The component parts of môn-daing cannot be assigned any suitable meaning, and look more like a man's name than a word for whirlwind, the ordinary term for which is le-bwe (le, wind, and pwe, whirl). It seems quite possible that this word for storm owes its origin to the legend and the individual round whom it is woven, just as our words boycott and macintosh are derived from men's names.

No account of the Burmese gods could omit to mention the Thirty-seven Nats, and there has been a great deal