Mahāpaṇāmapāṭha

The Mahāpaṇāmapāṭha, the “Great Salutation” — homage to the Buddha carried through a succession of metres, the line lengthening as the stanzas go on, from a single syllable to the quarter-verse in the first (So, ko; Ne, saṃ) to six in the sixth. (The named metre labels — Tanumajjhāgāthā, Kumāralalitāgāthā, Lalitagāthā, Tanugāthā — belong to the Vāsamālinī later in the volume; the Mahāpaṇāma carries none.) It is an exercise in prosody as much as an act of devotion, and it is used as one: the Pali Platform manual takes its worked example of the six-syllable Tanumajjhā metre from this text's sixth stanza.

The volume holds three works, not one. The Mahāpaṇāma runs to its own colophon, Mahāpaṇāma niṭṭhitā (CST4 paragraphs 1–427); after it come the Tigumbacetiya-thomanā, a praise of the Shwedagon (428–478), and the Vāsamālinī (479–845). The Mahāpaṇāma names no author outright and gives no date. What its closing verses do say is what it is: a new salutation, abridged from the old great one — Mahāpaṇāmaporāṇaṃ, kiñci eva punappunaṃ … katoyaṃ paṇāmo navo.

The one date in the volume belongs to the Vāsamālinī. Its closing verses give the year twice, in the Buddhist era and the Burmese — chanavutādhike ca tivise sate kaliyuge, dvesatacuddasādhikasahassake, [2]396 and 1214 — as the year a war between brothers left the city in ashes: bhātikayuddhakena nagaraṃ tadā bhavati chārikā. The author then withdrew to a forest village and finished on the sixth day of Phagguṇa, Phagguṇamāse chadine raciya niṭṭhaṃva gato. Burmese year 1214 is 1852–53 CE, and its Tabaung, the month Phagguṇa, fell in February 1853 (Scott 1901, p. 125). The war is Mindon's rising against his half-brother Pagan Min, which began on 17 December 1852 and took Amarapura after seven weeks of fighting (Cocks 1910, p. 177). The Vāsamālinī was finished in February–March 1853 or shortly after; the Mahāpaṇāma bound with it has no date of its own.