There is little sectarianism in Burma proper, but the Sawtis, an anti-clerical sect, are found in some numbers in the Shan States and similar communities called Man are still met with in Pegu and Tenasserim, though said to be disappearing.  Both refuse to recognize the Sangha, monasteries or temples and perform their devotions in the open fields.  Otherwise their mode of thought is Buddhist, for they hold that every man can work out his own salvation by conquering Mara,[184] as the Buddha did, and they use the ordinary formulae of worship, except that they omit all expressions of reverence to the Sangha.  The orthodox Sangha is divided into two schools known as Mahagandi and Sulagandi.  The former are the moderate easy-going majority who maintain a decent discipline but undeniably deviate somewhat from the letter of the Vinaya.  The latter are a strict and somewhat militant Puritan minority who protest against such concessions to the flesh.  They insist for instance that a monk should eat out of his begging bowl exactly as it is at the end of the morning round and they forbid the use of silk robes, sunshades and sandals.  The Sulagandi also believe in free will and attach more value to the intention than the action in estimating the value of good deeds, whereas the Mahagandi accept good actions without enquiring into the motive and believe that all deeds are the result of karma.

5

In Burma all the higher branches of architecture are almost exclusively dedicated to religion.  Except the Palace at Mandalay there is hardly a native building of note which is not connected with a shrine or monastery.  Burmese architectural forms show most analogy to those of Nepal and perhaps[185] both preserve what was once the common style for wooden buildings in ancient India.  In recent centuries the Burmese have shown little inclination to build anything that can be called a temple, that is a chamber containing images and the paraphernalia of worship.  The commonest form of religious edifice is the dagoba or zedi:[186] images are placed in niches or shrines, which shelter them, but only rarely, as on the platform of the Shwe Dagon at Rangoon, assume the proportions of rooms.  This does not apply to the great temples of Pagan, built from about 1050 to 1200, but that style was not continued and except the Arakan Pagoda at Mandalay has perhaps no modern representative.  Details of these buildings may be found in the works of Forchhammer, Fergusson, de Beylie and various archaeological reports.  Their construction is remarkably solid.  They do not, like most large buildings in India or Europe, contain halls of some size but are rather pyramids traversed by passages.  But this curious disinclination to build temples of the usual kind is not due to any dislike of images.  In no Buddhist country are they more common and their numbers are more noticeable because there is here no pantheon as in China and Tibet, but images of Gotama are multiplied, merely