Chinthe

Also Known As: Burmese ခြင်္သေ့; the Burmese leogryph or temple lion
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Buddhist Mythology, Southeast Asian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A stylised lion whose power is protective rather than active, working by its presence at a threshold instead of by any deed.
Role in Mythos: It guards the entrances of Burmese pagodas and monasteries in pairs, and stands as an emblem of royal and national authority on thrones, bells, weights, coins and the state seal.
Relation to Humans: Worshippers pass between a pair of chinthe every time they climb to a shrine, and the lions are understood to keep out whatever should not follow them up. It has never been an enemy to be fought or a spirit to be appeased, only a sentry that is always already on duty.

Barefoot on the stone before six in the morning, and the stairway is already warm. Sellers are laying out jasmine and rolled gold leaf under the covered steps. Somewhere above, a bell is struck and the sound comes down the tunnel of the stairs in a long metallic wash. At the bottom, on either side of the opening, two lions sit up on their haunches, whitewashed to the colour of bone, taller than the houses across the road. They have been there since before anyone climbing today was born. Nothing has ever got past them, which is exactly the point.

The Burmese call them chinthe, and the word is worth pausing on, because it is not the name of a monster. It is the ordinary Burmese word for lion. The animal at the foot of the stairs is not a griffin or a chimera or a dragon, whatever visitors decide it looks like. It is a lion, drawn by people who lived a long way east of the last wild lions on earth and had therefore never seen one. Nobody in Bagan was working from life. They were working from Indian iconography, from Pali scripture, from other people’s carvings, and every generation of copying pushed the beast further from anything with a pulse.

What emerged is unmistakable and entirely unnatural. The mane is not hair, it is a fan of stiff curls stacked like flame or scale armour. The eyes bulge. The fangs are bared in what is not quite a snarl. The forelegs are ramrod straight and set wide, the chest pushed out, the hindquarters folded down, and the whole animal leans very slightly forward as though it has just registered you and is deciding. Many wear a crest or a small crown between the ears. Some are cast in bronze the size of a fist. Some are built of brick and lime plaster and stand at the four covered stairways of the Shwedagon in Yangon at a scale that dwarfs the crowd going up, and they are repainted so often that their features have gone soft and chalky, like a face under too much powder.

They come in pairs. This is not decoration, it is grammar. A chinthe alone is an ornament; a chinthe with its partner across the gap is a gate, and the gap between them is the thing being defended. What they are said to keep out is evil, which in practice means everything the pagoda is not: malice, ill luck, the unclean, whatever follows people around at the level of the ankles.

The reason they are there at all is a story the Burmese borrowed from Sri Lanka, and it is a grim one. The Mahavamsa, the Pali chronicle of Lanka, opens its sixth chapter with a princess of the Vangas whom the soothsayers had promised to the king of beasts. Ashamed of her and unable to hold her, her parents let her go, and she joined a caravan bound for Magadha. In the forest of Lala a lion attacked it. Everyone else ran away. She ran towards him, and stroked his limbs without fear, and he carried her to his cave and sealed the mouth of it with a rock. She bore him twins: a boy with a lion’s hands and feet, whom she called Sihabahu, and a girl. At sixteen the boy lifted the rock away, put his mother on one shoulder and his sister on the other, and walked out.

The lion came home to an empty cave. He would not eat. He went looking for his children through the border villages, and the villages emptied ahead of him, and the king put a bounty on his head. Sihabahu took the money, and he knew whose head it was. At the cave mouth the lion came out to meet his son with love in him, and the arrow struck him in the forehead and rebounded and fell in the grass at the young man’s feet. It happened three times. Then the patience of the king of beasts ran out, and the next arrow went through him. Sihabahu carried the maned head back to the city and was given a kingdom for it.

The chronicle stops there. It says nothing about a statue. The ending everyone repeats, in which the son is so sickened by what he has done that he sets a pair of stone lions at a temple door in his father’s honour, is the coda that the Burmese telling supplies, and it is why a Sinhalese origin legend is now the standard explanation of a Burmese sculpture. The graft has held for centuries, and it does real work. It gives the animal at the gate a grief to be carrying.

Away from the pagoda, the lion runs through Burmese material life in the same role, standing for authority and for the protection that comes with it. It sits at the arms of the palin, the royal throne. It crouches on the crown of the great bell at Mingun. It runs in rows along the roofline of the Ananda temple at Bagan. Cast in brass and small enough to hold, it served as a standard weight in the bazaar long before coins were common, so that a fistful of lion was what a measure of rice was balanced against. In the Burmese reckoning of the week the lion belongs to Tuesday, and Tuesday’s people take their sign from it. When a king born on a Tuesday minted gold, the coins came out with a lion on them: Shway Yoe recorded that the Tuesday lions of Mindon Min were the currency of the Upper Burma bazaars, and that coins from earlier reigns, bearing the wrong animal, were rigidly kept out of the sight of Burmese officials. The lion is on the state seal now, and on most of the banknotes.

Its powers are the powers of a threshold. It does not hunt, does not speak, has no myth of its own and takes no part in any adventure. It confers strength and vigilance on whatever it is set in front of, and it turns back what should not enter, and it does this without moving, which is the whole of its technique and also its limit. Uproot a chinthe from its gate and stand it in a garden and it stops working. Take away its partner and it is half a door. Its authority is positional, and every scrap of that authority is borrowed from the sacred thing standing behind it.

The last thing it was asked to protect was a column of exhausted men. In 1943 Brigadier Orde Wingate, told about the lion at the pagoda gate by Captain Aung Thin of the Burma Rifles, named his long-range penetration force after it, and then mangled the word in front of the press. The name that stuck was Chindit. Thousands of men walked a thousand miles behind Japanese lines under a corrupted Burmese word for lion, and the memorial to them on the Victoria Embankment in London is a chinthe, sitting up on its plinth with its forelegs braced, facing outward, doing the only job it has ever had.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a chinthe?

The chinthe is the guardian lion of Burmese Buddhism, a highly stylised leogryph set in pairs at the entrances of pagodas and monasteries throughout Myanmar. The word chinthe is simply the Burmese word for lion. Despite its strange flame-maned appearance, it is not a hybrid or a dragon but a lion, rendered in a long tradition of stylisation by artists who had never seen the animal.

Why are chinthe placed in pairs at temple entrances?

They work as a gate. A pair of chinthe flanking a stairway or doorway marks the boundary of sacred ground and is understood to turn back evil, misfortune and anything unclean that might otherwise follow worshippers up to the shrine. A single chinthe on its own is an ornament rather than a guardian.

What is the legend behind the chinthe?

The story usually told comes from the Mahavamsa, the Pali chronicle of Sri Lanka, in which the princess Suppadevi bears a son, Sihabahu, to a lion. The son escapes the lion’s cave with his mother and sister, and when the grieving lion terrorises the countryside he takes a royal bounty and kills it, only to find he has killed his own father. The Burmese telling adds an ending that the chronicle itself does not contain, in which Sihabahu sets a pair of stone lions at a temple entrance in atonement.

Where can you see chinthe in Myanmar?

Huge brick-and-plaster chinthe guard the four covered stairways of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon, and a whitewashed pair sits at the foot of Mandalay Hill. Smaller ones line the roof of the Ananda Temple at Bagan and crown the Mingun Bell, and the lion also appears on the royal throne, on brass bazaar weights, and on the state seal and banknotes of Myanmar.

What is the connection between the chinthe and the Chindits?

The Chindits, the British and Commonwealth long-range penetration force that operated behind Japanese lines in Burma during the Second World War, took their name from the chinthe. Brigadier Orde Wingate adopted the name at the suggestion of Captain Aung Thin of the Burma Rifles, then mispronounced it to the press, and the corrupted form stuck. The Chindit memorial in London is topped by a statue of the lion.