Nat (spirit)

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A female nat in Mandalay

The nats (Burmese: ‌; MLCTS: nat) are spirits worshipped in Myanmar (formerly Burma) in conjunction with Buddhism. They are divided between the 37 Great Nats and all the rest (i.e., spirits of trees, water, etc). Almost all of the 37 Great Nats were human beings who met violent deaths (sein-thei, lit. "green death"). There are two types of nats. Lower nats are dewas of the lower six heavens., while higher nats are in the upper six realms. Much like sainthood, nats can be designated for a variety of reasons, including those only known in certain regions. Nat worship is less common in urban areas than in rural areas, and is predominantly practised among ethnic Bamar. Many houses contain a nat sin or nat ein, which essentially serve as altars to nats. Villages often have a patron nat. A coconut (ဥရူတုိင္‌) is often hung on a post in the house, wearing a gaungbaung and surrounded by perfume, and is an offering to Mahagiri.

Nats have human characteristics, wants, and needs. They are flawed, having desires considered derogatory and immoral in mainstream Buddhism. During a nat pwè, which is a festival during which nats are appeased, nat kadaw (nat mediums) dance and embody the nat's spirit in a trance. The roles of nat kadaws are often fulfilled by transvestite men. Music, often accompanied by pwè (orchestras), often adds to the mood of the nat pwè, and many claim to be entranced.

The most important nat pilgrimage site in Myanmar is Mount Popa, an extinct volcano with numerous temples and relic sites atop a mountain 1300 metres, located near Bagan.

List of official nats

A portrayal of the King of Nats, Thagyamin.

King Anawratha designated an official pantheon of 37 nats, after he was unable to sanction banning of nat worship. The official pantheon is made up of predominantly those in the royal houses of Burmese history, but also contains nats of Thai (Yun Bayin) and Shan (Maung Po Tu) descent. Listed in proper order, they are:

1. Thagyamin (သိက္ရား), considered King of the Nats, is idenfitied with identified with the Buddhist deva Śakra and the Hindu deity Indra.. He is often portrayed atop a three-headed white elephant, holding a conch shell on one hand, and yak-tail whisk on another.
2. Mahagiri (မဟာဂီရိး)
3. Hnamadawgyi (န္ဟမေတာ္‌က္ရီး)
4. Shwenabay (ရ္ဝ္ဟေနဘေ)
5. Thonbanhla (သုံးဘန္‌လ္ဟ)
6. Taungoo Mingaung (ေတာင္‌ငူမင္‌းခောင္‌)
7. Mintara (မင္‌းတရား)
8. Thandawgan (သံတော္‌ခံ)
9. Shwenawratha (ရ္ဝ္ဟေနော္‌ရထာ)
10. Aungzaw Magyi (ေအာင္‌စ္ဝာမက္ရီး)
11. Ngazishin (ငားစိးရ္ဟင္‌)
12. Aungbinle Hsinbyushin (ေအာင္‌ပင္‌လယ္‌ဆင္‌ဖ္ရုရ္ဟင္‌)
13. Taungmagyi (ေတာင္‌မက္ရီး)
14. Maung Minshin (ေမာင္‌မင္‌းရ္ဟင္‌)
15. Shindaw (ရ္ဟင္‌ေတာ္‌)
16. Nyaung Gyin (ေညာင္‌က္ယင္‌း)
17. Tabinshwehti (တဗင္‌ရ္ဝ္ဟေထီး)
18. Minye Aungdin (မင္‌းရဲအောင္‌တင္)
19. Shwe Sitpin (ရ္ဝ္ဟေစစ္‌ပင္‌)
20. Medaw Shwezaga (မယ္‌ေတာ္‌ရ္ဝ္ဟေစကား)
21. Maung Po Tu (ေမာင္‌ဘုိးတူ)
22. Yun Bayin (ယ္ဝန္‌းဘုရင္‌)
23. Maung Minbyu (ေမာင္‌မင္‌းပ္ရု)
24. Mandalay Bodaw (မန္တလေးဘုိးတော္‌)
25. Shwebyin Naungdaw (ရ္ဝ္ဟေဖ္ယင္‌းနောင္‌တော္‌)
26. Shwebyin Nyidaw (ရ္ဝ္ဟေဖ္ယင္‌းညီတော္‌)
27. Mintha Maungshin (မင္‌းသားမောင္‌ရ္ဟင္‌)
28. Htibyusaung (သိးဖ္ရုေဆာင္‌း)
29. Htibyusaung Medaw (သီးဖ္ရူဆောင္‌းမယ္‌တော္‌)
30. Bayinma Shin Mingaung (ဘုရင္‌မရ္ဟင္‌မင္‌ခောင္‌)
31. Min Sithu (မင္‌းစည္‌သူ)
32. Min Kyawzwa (မင္‌းက္ယော္‌စ္ဝာ)
33. Myaukpet Shinma (ေမ္ရာက္‌ဘက္‌ရ္ဟင္‌မ)
34. Anauk Mibaya (အေနာက္‌မိဘုရား)
35. Shingon (ရ္ဟင္‌ကုန္‌း)
36. Shingwa (ရ္ဟင္‌က္ဝ)
37. Shin Nemi (ရ္ဟင္‌နဲမိ)

References

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