Kyansittha builds the Ananda temple at Pagan

Kyansittha, who according to the chronicles had twice been banished from the court, was chosen king in 1084 after the death of Sawlu, defeated the Mon rebels of Pegu and was crowned, probably in 1086, by Shin Arahan, the monk who had converted Anawrahta to Theravada Buddhism. He completed Anawrahta’s Shwezigon pagoda, repaired the Mahabodhi temple at Bodh Gaya, built a new palace about 1101–1102 and had many of his inscriptions carved in Mon, then the language of learning; in 1106 his envoys were received at the Song court with the honours due to a great sovereign.

The date of the Ananda is disputed. Charles Duroiselle, G. E. Harvey and George Coedès placed its completion or dedication in 1090, and the temple’s 900th anniversary was celebrated in 1990–1991. G. H. Luce considered this much too early — the Mon inscription on which the date rested records the building of the palace in 1102, not of the temple — and dated the Ananda to about 1105 or later, near the end of the reign. According to legend, eight monks from the Himalayas described to the king their cave temple of Nandamula on Mount Gandhamadana, and he resolved to build its likeness; scholars have looked for models in the temple of Udayagiri in Orissa — of which, G. Coedès suggested, the king may have heard from Indian monks — or in that of Paharpur in Bengal, and Duroiselle called the Ananda an Indian temple built in the Burmese capital.

The four faces of the central core each hold a standing Buddha about 9.5 metres tall, and the corridors around it contain some 80 stone reliefs of the life of the Buddha, while hundreds of glazed terracotta plaques illustrating the Jataka tales line the terraces; Kyansittha had his own statue placed in the temple in an attitude of prayer. Damaged by the earthquake of 1975, the temple was restored, and its spires were gilded for the 900th anniversary.