north, and you must not go southwards; from September to November the west is barred to you, and from then on till March it is dangerous to go north.

The difficulty an Englishman occasionally finds in getting boatmen to go in a particular direction, or porters to carry his baggage across country, is therefore easily accounted for, without any necessity for stigmatising the Burmese as hopelessly lazy and averse to steady labour. The fact that men are always to be got eventually is no argument against the general belief in the theory, for the English persuade people to all manner of iniquity. Staunch members of the Order of the Yellow Robe will tell you that the brandy-drinkers and the opium-eaters (whom the English Tha-thana-baing, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other good people believe to be so very numerous in Burma) are very frequently proselytes, and, at any rate, have been much influenced by the white foreigners. And I think that every officer in the commission who has at length got together a band of men to journey towards the nagah's jaws, will bear me out when I say they must have been a bad lot, and drank raw spirits and chewed opium enough to gladden the heart of an anti-opium society man in search of a frightful example.

It may be asserted that the unlucky days were invented as an excuse for laziness; but the prevalence of the system with regard to other matters disproves this. For example, the blind god is supposed to laugh at barriers of rank and time and space; but most Burmans have a profound belief in the yan-pet linga-the rhyme of hostile pairs, referred to in the chapter on marriage. Again, in forming a partnership for purposes of trade, or the like, a due regard must be paid to birthdays. Lucky combinations are follows:-Sunday and Friday,

as

Tuesday and Thursday, Saturday and Wednesday, Monday and Yahoo.

When you get a Burman on his lucky day, he will display an amount of "spasmodic energy which has surprised many travellers into calling him hard-working. The boatmen on the Irrawaddy and the Sittang often row six, eight, and even ten hours at a stretch, on no more solid food than cold boiled rice, with a fragment or two of salt fish or curried vegetables. But that is when it is their "kingly day." Try them on a pyat-thah-da nay, and they will not even drift with the stream.

VOL. II.

H

CHAPTER XI.

THE BUTTERFLY SPIRIT.

This

IT is a matter of common knowledge that Buddhists deny the existence of a soul or spiritual principle in man. Each new being, spiritual nature as well as bodily substance, is the product of what has gone before, and differs entirely from the previous being. That faculty which performs all the actions referred by other religions to the soul is by the Buddhist system placed in a sixth sense called manaw, the heart, or faculty of knowing. sense is as material in its action as any of the others which are denominated seeing, hearing, tasting, and so on. The manaw is, it is true, the most important of all the senses. The eyes, the ears, all the others, are merely channels to communicate impressions to the purely intellectual faculty of knowing; but it is not a separate something, distinct in composition and existence from the material body. The quality and keenness of perception of the manaw is a matter of serious importance to its owner; for it is only by meditation that a man can attain to the higher heavens, and the act of meditating can only be conducted by the sixth sense. The observance of the precepts and the performance of good actions meet with abundant reward in happy births on earth or in the six

heavens of the nat-dewahs; but the inward good deeds of the soul are incomparably more meritorious, and therefore the pondering on the lawkee seht, the ideas of creatures yet under the influence of the passions, and on the lawkohtara seht, which are the ideas of those happy beings who have entered into the current of perfection and move about in the regions of pure spiritualism-the consideration of these and of the sehtathit, or results immediately connected with ideas, throughout all the five stages of meditation up to oopekka, lead to rewards in the twenty superior heavens, where the contemplative gradually frees himself from the thanya, or false persuasions, and acquires a contempt for matter.

All this action has its place in the manaw, or the seat of knowledge, and is duly explained to the Burman when he is in the monastery school, and afterwards, perhaps, in discourses of the Yahans in the rest-houses on feast-days, or other suitable occasions. Unfortunately, however, the matter is, to say the least, a little obscure, and not by any means easily to be grasped. Accordingly, the superstitious Burman having got a confused lot of big words into his head, after letting them simmer there for a while, evolved from his internal consciousness the notion of the leyp-bya, or butterfly spirit.

This personation of the soul in a fairy-like form had natural elements of attractiveness in it; and the consequence is that the error of the unphilosophical Burman long ago has grown into a present national belief, and it is universally accepted that the life of man resides in the leyp-bya and dies when it disappears. The man at the point of death opens his mouth and the butterfly escapes from the body, but only to die at the same time. Many strange things are explained by this doctrine. For example, the leyp-bya is the cause of dreams. It is not absolutely

necessary that the butterfly should remain constantly in the body; death will not necessarily ensue from the separation. When the man is asleep, therefore, it leaves the body and roams about far and wide. But in these wanderings it can only go to such places as the person to whom it belongs has previously been in. A straying from known paths would cause extreme danger to the sleeping body, for it might happen that the butterfly would lose its way and never return, and then both would die-the body because the animating principle was gone, the leypbya because it had no earthly tenement to live in. The butterfly is enabled to perform these journeys through its existence as thway seht, or soul of the blood; and it is the state of this blood which makes the leyp-bya more or less inclined to roam, and which directs its movements. If the blood is feverish or excited in any way, the butterfly necessarily becomes restless, and wanders about more or less rapidly and into more or less strange places, according to the degree of perturbation. Therefore it happens that the soul thus existing in itself, and straying or flying at random, sees extremely strange and fantastic visions on these voyages. An elaboration of this notion divides dreams into three special varieties; those which occur at the beginning of sleep, those about midnight, and those in the early morning; or the false, the mixed, and the true. Baydin-sayahs and wise women are for this reason always very particular in their inquiries as to the precise time at which the dream occurred. If they foretell wrongly it is, of course, because the questionist made a mistake as to the time when his vision appeared to him.

These night wanderings of the butterfly spirit are not without their dangers. In addition to other hobgoblins and spectres, Burma is especially plagued by evil spirits called beeloos-creatures in human guise who devour men.