Donation Ceremonies in Burma

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Buddhism is the main religion of the country and is very much alive and practised by monks and general population alike.  Every Buddhist child will spend at least a week or so in a monastery – as a monk or a nun – almost as a rite of passage.  On doing so, the family pay a donation to the monastery. On our second day of cycling, from Inle Lake to Kalaw we are privileged to be invited into a village home to join in the Donation Ceremony celebration for three young children – a girl and two boys, all under 7. 

 
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While musicians play and adults gather in various rooms around the house drinking green tea and eating the snacks provided, the children dressed in elaborate, brightly coloured and bejewelled costumes – possibly mimicking styles of the royal courtiers in times gone by – are formally photographed in a room upstairs.  Later they will process to the monastery, where their heads are shaved and they stay for a week or more, the boys wearing the maroon monk’s robes, the girls the pink nun’s dress. Our tour guide has spent two separate weeks in a monastery, the first aged 11, the second at 19. While a few will remain as monks for an extended period – or for life-long practice – the majority do not.  Monks who stay can also be released from their vows if they later wish to marry, and older men, who have had their families, can enter, or re-enter the monastery as monks.  A kind of social security, as the people donate to the monastery, the monastery cares for the monks, and also lays out basic food and tea for anyone entering the temple to pray, or otherwise visit.

Two days later, driving to Mandalay, we get caught up in a massive Donation Ceremony procession with hundreds of elaborately costumed adults and children on foot, on horse back, in decorated bullock carts and on the back of motor vehicles – possibly a rich family including many relatives in their celebration.  They are accompanied by a band and a dancing elephant, and we are overjoyed when the elephant – think pantomime horse – stops and performs for us!