ရခုိင္ရုိးရာ သၾကၤန္ပြဲေတာ္

(၁) သၾကၤန္၏ အဓိပၸါယ္

သၾကၤန္=ကူးေျပာင္းျခင္း ၊ မာဂဓဘာသာ သကၤႏၱ နွင့္ သကၠဋဘာသာ သႀကၤန္တ မွ ဆင္းသက္သည္။ရခိုင္/ျမန္မာ ျပကၡဒိန္နွစ္၏ ပထမဆုံးလျဖစ္ေသာတန္းခူးလတြင္ နွစ္ေဟာင္းကုန္၍နွစ္သစ္ကူးသည့္ သႀကၤန္ရက္ကိုက်င္းပေလ႔ ရွိသည္။ ရခိုင္တို႔က အတာသႀကၤန္ကူးေသာလ ျဖစ္၍ တန္ခူးလကို တာကူးလ ဟုေခၚဆိုသည္။

(၂) သႀကၤန္ျဖစ္ေပၚလာပုံသမုိင္းေၾကာင္း

ဘီစီ(၅၆၈)တြင္ ရခိုင္ဓည၀တီျပည္ရွင္ စႏၵာသူရိယမင္းၾကီးသည္ ျမတ္စြာဘုရားသွ်င္နွင့္ အတိတ္ဘ၀ကသူငယ္ ခ်င္းေဟာင္းျဖစ္ဖူးသည့္ အားေလွ်ာ္စြာ မေနာအဓိဌာန္ျဖင့္ ပင့္ဖိတ္ခ်က္အရ ဗုဒၶျမတ္စြာဘုရားသွ်င္သည္ ေနာက္ပါ သံဃာေတာ္အပါး(၅၀၀)ျဖင့္ ေကာင္းကင္းခရီးမွ ၾကြခ်ီလာကာ ေမာရပဗၺတေသလာဂီရိေက်ာက္ေတာ္ေပၚ၌ သက္ ဆင္း ေတာ္မူခဲ့သည္။ ယင္းအခ်ိန္၌ပင္ ဘုရင္းနွင့္ တိုင္းသူျပည္သားမ်ား ကိုးကြယ္နိုင္ရန္ ပုံစံတူ ကိုယ္ပါြ းေတာ္

မဟာျမတ္မုနိဆင္းတုေတာ္ကို သြန္းလုပ္ေစသည္။ ရခိုင္ျပည္သူျပည္သားတို႔သည္ ဆင္းတုေတာ္ၾကီးအား အေမႊး နံ႔သာရည္မ်ားျဖင့္ ေရသပၸါယ္ပူေဇာ္ၾကေလသည္။

ေနာင္နွစ္စဥ္တြင္လည္း ရခိုင္ျပည္သူျပည္သားတို႔သည္ ဗုဒၶဆင္းတုေတာ္မ်ားအား အေမႊးန႔ံ သာရည္မ်ားျဖင့္

ေရသပၸါယ္ပူေဇာ္ေသာ ဓေလ့ျဖစ္ထြန္းလာခဲ့ပါသည္။ ဘုရားဆင္းတုေတာ္မ်ားအား ေရသပၸါယ္ရာမွ က်န္ေသာ

အေမႊးနံ႔သာရည္မ်ားကို အခ်င္းခ်င္းပက္ေလာင္းၾကရာမွ ေရေလာင္းကစားေသာဓေလ့ျဖစ္ထြန္းလာသည္ဟု

အဆိုရွိၾကပါသည္။ရခိုင္သၾကၤန္ကို နံ႔သာသီြးပြဲ / ဘုရားရီခ်ဳိပြဲ နွင့္ သၾကၤန္ ရီေလာင္းပြဲဟူ၍ အဆင့္(၃)ဆင့္ျဖင့္ က်င္းပၾကပါသည္။

ဗုဒၶသာသာကို အေျခခံေသာပြဲျဖစ္သျဖင့္ သၾကၤန္ အၾကိဳေန႔မတိုင္မီတစ္ရက္အလိုတင္ ရပ္ကြက္အလိုက္ ကိုးကြယ္ ေသာ ဘုန္းၾကီးေက်ာင္း သိမ္အေဆာက္ဦးမ်ားကို ေရျဖင့္ ဦးစြာ ေဆးေၾကာသန္႔စင္ၾကပါသည္။ သၾကၤန္အၾကိဳေန႔ ညေန႔ပိုင္းတြင္ ရပ္ကြက္ ဓမၼာရုံ သို႔မဟုတ္ ယာယီမ႑ပ္၌ မိန္းမပ်ဳိေလးမ်ား က နံ႔သာျဖဴ နံ႔သာနီ ကရမက္ စသည့္ အေမႊးနံ႔သာတုံးမ်ားကို ယူေဆာင္လာၾကကာ ေက်ာက္ပ်ဥ္ကိုယ္စီျဖင့္ စုေပါင္း နံ႔သာေသြးၾကေလသည္။ မိန္းမပ်ဳိမ်ား နံ႔သာေသြးေနၾကစဥ္ ေယာက်ၤားပ်ဳိမ်ားက မ႑ပ္အျပင္ဘက္မွ တူရိယာမ်ား တီးမွဳတ္သီဆုိကခုန္၍ အားေပးၾက ပါသည္။ေသြးျပီးေသာ န႔႔ံသာရည္မ်ားကိုအိုးၾကီးမ်ားတြင္ စုေပါင္းထည့္၍ သိမ္းဆည္းရသည္။

ယင္းကို နံ႔သာသီြးပြဲ(နံ႔သာေသြးပြဲ)ဟု ေခၚဆိုျခင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ သၾကၤန္အက်ေန႔တြင္ လူၾကီးလူလတ္မ်ား ဦးေဆာင္၍ အပ်ဳိ လူပ်ဳိအားလုံးစုရုံးကာ အတီးအမွဳတ္မ်ားျဖင့္ လွဴဘြယ္၀တၳဳမ်ား အေမႊးန႔ံသာ ရည္အိုး မ်ားကိုင္ေဆာင္လ်က္စီတန္းလွည့္လည္၍ ဘုန္းေတာ္ၾကီးေက်ာင္းမ်ားသို႔ သြားေရာက္ၾကပါသည္။ ထိုေနာက္ လွဴဘြယ္၀တၳဳမ်ားဆက္ ကပ္၍ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားထံမွ ငါးပါးသီလခံယူေဆာက္တည္ျပီးမွ လည္းေကာင္းေက်ာင္းရွိ ဗုဒၶဆင္းတုေတာ္မ်ား ကိုဦးစြာေရျဖင့္ သပၸါယ္သန္႔စင္ျခင္းကို ေယာက်ၤားပ်ဳိးမ်ားကေဆာင္ရြက္ ၾကသည္။ထိုေနာက္ မိန္းမပ်ဳိမ်ား ယူ ေဆာင္လာေသာ အေမႊးနံ႔သာရည္မ်ားျဖင့္ေရသပၸါယ္ျပီး ဆင္းတုေတာ္မ်ားကို ပက္ဖ်န္းပူေဇာ္ကာ သၾကၤန္ကို ၾကိဳဆိုေလ့ရွိၾကပါသည္။

ရခိုင္ရုိးရာ သၾကၤန္ပြဲေတာ္ ရုပ္သံဖုိင္ၾကည္လုိသူမ်ားေအာက္တြင္ ကလိစ္ႏွပ္ပါ

                           ( ရခုိင္ရုိးရာ သၾကၤန္ပြဲေတာ္ ရုပ္သံဖုိင္)

1. The Meaning of “Thungran”

• Thungran = Transition (derives from Pali as well as Sanskrit)

• Thungran days are celebrated at the transitional time from old year to New Year on the month of

Tankhu (April), the first month of Rakhine or Myanmar Calendar year.

• The Rakhine calls that month as “Tar ku la” that means the transitional month.

2. Brief History of “Thungran”

• In BC 528, during the reign of King Canda Suriya of Dannyavadi, the Lord Buddha together with

500 disciples visited Selagiri Kyauktaw Hill according to the telepathic request and invitation by the

King who was much closed friend of the Buddha in the past lives. In the moment, a replica of the

Lord Buddha namely “Mahamuni” was casted to be worshiped by the King and Rakhine people.

Then the sacred Buddha Image was poured and offered with the sweet smelling creamy water (Nan

tha re = Sandalwood).

• Since then, the tradition is appeared for Rakhine people cleansing and offering of the Nan tha re

to Buddha Statues.

• With the remaining Nan tha re, Rakhine people pour on each other and the tradition of “Thungran

Water Festival” emanated from that time till the date.

Traditionally 3. Celebrating Rakhine Thungran Traditionally

• Rakhine Thungran is usually celebrated in three categories, namely (1) Nantha Grinding

Ceremony, (2) Nantha Pouring to the Buddha Statues, and (3) Water Festival.

• As of Buddhism-related festival, Rakhine people cleans the monasteries and its ordination building

(Thein = Sima) with water in every wards and village on the eve of Thungran.

• At that evening, Rakhine girls assemble at the pagoda platform or a hall bringing sandalwoods of

white and red (Nantha Phyu and Nantha Ni). They grind the Nantha pieces or blocks on the face of

Kyauk-pyin (round flat rock) to obtain the creamy sweet smelling Nantha. At the same time, the

young Rakhine men cheer and sing songs with the musical instruments to make the Nantha

Grinding event into a competition. The Nantha creams are well preserved in pots or containers.

• The next morning (Thungran Ah Kya Day), the people go to the pagodas and monasteries and do

the cleaning and offering of the Nantha to Buddha statues. Then the Five Concepts of Sila are

received from monks to whom offering are delivered. Thereafter, young girls pour Nantha creams

to those statues. Indeed, that is the gesture of welcoming to Thungran.

• The opportunity of watering each other in the pandals during the days from Akya to Attat is the

affectionate and efficacious tryst for boys and girls.

• Each pandal built of wood and bamboo, decorated with palm leafs and padauk flowers, is placed

with a long boat filled with water therein. Wooden barricades with decorations are built firmly in

front of it. Pandals are used to be named in lively titles and well decorated name board is set up at

the forefront thereof. Generally, water throwing period prolongs from 10 am to 4 pm daily.

4. Splashing Water in the Pandals

• The pandal girls have to sit facing the boat with the backs to the open side of pandal.

• Boys either in group or individually roaming around and reveling songs and rhymes, come into the

pandal to play watering with pandal girls. On request to the pandal supervisor ladies, they will

choose the girl with whom they would like to play watering with. They chosen girl then offers a

bucket of water to the boy and he will start to play water, then the girl response watering with her

own bowl. Others while waiting their turn outside the pandal will play music, songs or rhymes.

Necessary measures are pre-arranged to avoid discontent with regard to priority to enter the

pandal.

• Such traditional water throwing of Rakhine national is unique among other nationals of Myanmar.

(Collected and typed by Ashon Nyanuttara)