Ridiculous Mon Paradigm Quotation #4

"By...linking Lower Burma with the sacred geography, sacred genealogy, and sacred chronology of Asoka's Buddhist India, King Dhammazedi, in one stroke gave Ramannadesa an antiquity, orthodoxy, and legitimacy that it never had" (Mists of Ramanna, p. 1)

Dhammazedi was not unique in making such a linking or mapping to sacred geography, genealogy, and chronology. The writers of Burmese history did the same. Since kings before Dhammazedi had done this long before him, he was not the first, and you cannot say that this occurred in "one stroke". The accretion of myth to history takes place over a long period of time as a study of Livy's received history of Rome shows.

The parts of the Burmese chronicle that incorporate the Indian mythology of Ashoka (Burmese: Thawka) is translated into English (by me) in the Indian Kings I and Indian Kings II sections of the Burmese Historical Chronicle.

Ridiculous Mon Paradigm Quotation #3

"In 1479, when King Dhammazedi of the kingdom of Pegu declared on his Kalyani inscriptions that the legendary Suvannabhumi of Buddhist tradition was the Mon kingdom of Ramannadesa in Lower Burma, he inadvertently created a twentieth historiographic issue that I have called 'the legend that was Lower Burma,' still with us today" (Mists of Ramanna, p. 1)

No, professor Aung-Thwin, you are the one who quite intentionally created a historiographic issue. What King Dhammazedi did, create a regime legitizing myth, was quite normal for people who hold power.

Ridiculous Mon Paradigm Quotation #2

If only Aung-thwin had devoted his career to publishing pre-colonial sources. Instead he consumed the texts of colonial intellectual intermediaries, and cannot escape from this. Take the ridiculous historical bias in the following:

"The Mon Paradigm as we have seen, was not created by any single individual. It began with King Dhammazedi attempting to legitimate his reign and programs, continued with U Kala for reasons not entirely clear..." (p. 283, Mists of Ramanna).

1.Indigenous sources becoming gradually more and more factual and less mythological is the normal pattern of development in historical texts, Mon, Burmese, Roman,... Why pretend that only Mon sources exhibit this characteristic?

2. Modifying historical texts to legimitate rule is the norm, not the exception, in both the Mon and Burmese historical traditions.

3. Every Burmese king as well as Mon king king tried his hardest "to legitimate his reign and programs," not only the Mon King Dhammazedi. Contemporary politics even does this.

4. U Kala took Mon history from Dhammazedi? Obvious implication from above. Ridiculous.

5. The formula that guides your analysis is ridiculous and obviously opaque to you. Conspiracy theory for Dhammazedi, but for U Kala, the Burmese historian, it's not clear why he committed the Mon Paradigm. The history of Dhammazedi and the Kalyani inscriptions need to be published in the form of:

a. The original documents, so that people can examine the evidence for themselves without you holding their hands and leading them down ridiculous pathes of reasoning.

b. A comparison with other historical traditions, e.g. Tai, Burmese, to show that how Dhammazedi utilized the Kalyani inscriptions to legitmate his power was the norm, not an exception. Get the basic facts straight before you start weaving conspiracy theories.

Ridiculous Mon Paradigm Quotation #1

Regarding Pagan's conquest of Thaton in the Burmese chronicle, Aung-thwin asks:

"...since there is no epigraphic evidence for either the event or the place, when, how, and why did the story become part of Burma's chronicle tradition?"

1. All history enters the chronicle via inscriptions? This is ridiculous.

2. Inscriptional history is a history of only certain kinds of events. Most inscriptions record religious donations. Most chronicle narratives are records of warfare.

3. Almost all early modern Burmese history is chronicle history that has no reference in an inscription.

4. Aung-thwin is working here with worn out colonial era assumptions that the only history worth writing is inscriptional history.