Murdered monks at the Ananda Temple

Photos of the Ananada Temple in Bagan, Burma by David Lansing.

Sai plays me like a fiddle. He knows all he has to do is tell me a good story about some place and I’ll want to go. So today he tells me the story of the Ananda Temple in Bagan.

“A thousand years ago eight traveling Buddhist monks approached the king in Bagan to beg for alms. They told him about this amazing temple in the Himalayas where they had meditated and were so persuasive in describing its beauty that the king immediately asked the monks to design a similar temple. Which they gladly did. The temple was so amazing and so unique that the king immediately had all eight monks killed. So they wouldn’t build a similar structure anywhere else.”

Okay, so how could I possibly resist that story? So we had to go to Ananda. Just like Sai wanted.

Water pots for the monks at the Ananda Temple in Bagan, Burma. Photo by David Lansing.