THE folk-tales included in this collection were current in Upper Burma and, to a less extent in Lower Burma also, until two or three decades ago. Most of them had their origin in Upper Burma, for until the des¬truction of the Mon Empire of Pegu by Alaungpaya in 1752, the home of the Burmese people was Upper Burma. In the last decade or two with the advent of the fiction magazine, the novel, and the cinema, these village folk-tales have come to be half-forgotten.
Tales told in a Burmese. village could be divided into three categories, (i) folk-tales, (ii) folk-legends,. and (iii) Yatakas or Buddhist Birth stories. But the village story-teller considered a tale as a tale and no more, and he would not distinguish or classify the stories that he told. For the folk-tale collector then, there are many pitfalls : a tale which appears at first to be a perfect folk-tale may prove to be a Jataka on careful scrutiny as, for example, the account of the enmity between the Owl and the 'Crow (given below as Appendix I); and a tale which appears to be a folk-legend may prove to be a folk-tale after all as, for example, the account of the prediction of the astrologer of Pagan.
Folk-legends are of two classes, (i) those relating to persons who are either heroes or magicians mentioned in the chronicles, and (ii) those relating to places. In this second class are (a) place-name stories as, for example, the legend of the Wild Boar of Tagaung, dealing with places on the eastern bank of the Tzra¬waddy, the names of which begin with Wet, the
Burmese Folk-Tales
Burmese word for 'boar' (given below as Appendix
II); (b) stories about places as, for example, the Legend of the Indaw Lake (given below as Appendix
III); and (c) stories relating to buried treasure.
Most folk-legends are historical, and they attempt to
amplify certain episodes mentioned in the chronicles.
However, some of the folk-legends relating to persons
and events before A.D. 1044 may originally have
been folk-tales which were later incorporated in the
chronicles. Although some writing was known at least
in palace circles in the Kingdom of Prome that
flourished before Pagan, and the Mons had their
writing before Pagan, it was only after 1044 that the
Burmese alphabet came into being as a result of the
conquest of the Mon Kingdom of Thaton by Anaw-
rahta (King of Pagan 1044-1077). In consequence the
history of Burma before 1044 is legendary in the sense
that it is not based on contemporary records. As the
chronicles came to be written only after 1044, for the
events before 1044 the chroniclers had to rely on the
tradition of the palace and legends of the people. In
these circumstances, doubtless a few folk-tales crept
into the chronicles as legends. The account of King
Outsider (given below as Appendix IV), for example,
seems to be in reality a folk-tale although it is to be
found in the chronicles. That a monarch by the name
of King Outsider once ruled over the Kingdom of
Prome there is no reason to doubt, for the list of kings
of Prome as given in the chronicles is on the whole
authentic, for the chroniclers relied on palace tradition
'for that, and as the names of the previous kings of
Introduction xi
Burma were always carefully handed down from generation to generation of palace officials, palace tradition was unlikely to err in its list of kings. But what does the name 'King Outsider' signify? It mere¬ly signifies that a person who did not belong to the royal line became king. Therefore, it is not im¬possible that the folk-tale relating to a person who became a king just because he ate the head of a cock, was accepted as a traditional account of the real King Outsider of Prome. The theme of the story of King Outsider is not how a poor lad became king, but that the flesh of the cock had certain magical qualities which would accrue to its eater. Viewed in this light, the story of King Outsider is of the same category as the folk-tale of the Gold Cock. Perhaps a belief that the flesh of a cock had certain magical qualities was prevalent in Burma and the neighboilring regions in primitive times. The less civilized peoples of Burma, especially the Karens and the Chins, use the legs of a cock for purposes of divination. In the folk-tale of the Astrologer of Pagan there is an attempt to explain why the legs of a cock should be able to divine. There is also a jatakal in which the magical qualities of the flesh of a cock serve as the main theme. As a peasant was sleeping under a tree, he heard two cocks cwarrel¬ling; the first cock boasted that anyone eating his flesh would become the possessor of much gold and jewel¬lery, and the second cock boasted that anyone eating his flesh would become king; the villager killed the second cock, and cooked it; but as he was not to be king an accident intervened and, in the end, the king's prime minister ate the flesh of the cock and became king afterwards. It is perhaps interesting to remember that Burma with its numerous streamlets and wooded valleys was one of the earliest homes, if not the original home, of the fowl.
In 1056 Buddhism became the state religion of the Kingdom of Pagan, which now included the whole of Burma in its dominions. Pagan became a great centre of Buddhism, and there was a widespread study of the Buddhist scriptures by monks and scholars. The scriptures were in Pali, and had yet to be translated, but the villagers gradually became familiar with the jatakas through the village monk, who would include one or two Jatakas in his sermon on the sabbath day. Many of the jatakas are animal fables, and every ,Jataka contains some moral. The coming of the jatakas to the village perhaps resulted in the dis¬appearance of the folk-fable or moral tale. Among the folk-tales in this collection only one could be termed a fable, namely 'The Rabbit has a Cold', but even there, the stress is laid on the wisdom of the Rabbit, the hero of the Burmese animal tales, rather than on any moral. The acceptance of Buddhism also meant the acceptance of Buddhist and semi-Buddhist mythology and as a result the native myths disappear¬ed, except for a few which became degraded into folk-tales. In this collection, 'The Eclipse of the Moon', `The Old Man in the Moon' and 'The Three Dragon .Eggs' are obviously myths degraded into folk-tales, and perhaps 'Master Thumb' is also a degraded myth.
