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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
(JULY, 1907.
NOTES ON THE CHINS OF BURMA.
BY THE BEV, G. WHITEHEAD. (Formerly Missionary to the Chins, 8. P. G.)
Religion. The religion of all the Turanian races has been Animism or Shamanism. The gefferal lines of the religion of all the hill-tribes of Barms may be given in brief in the words in which Prof. A. H. Sayce in the Encyclopædia Britannical describes the religion of the Sumerians of Babylonis of three thousand years B. C. “According to the Sumerian idea every object and force in nature had its zi or spirit,' which manifested itself in life and motion. The zi was sometimes beneficent, sometimes maligoant, but it could be controlled by the incantations and spells which were known to the sorcerer-priests."
The chief objects of worship among the Chins may be divided into three groups : - (i) the Great Parent of all; (ii) the spirits who live in earth and sky, who send rain or withhold it, who watch over the village, the rice-fields, the jungle, or some one tree or mountain, &c.; and (iii) the penates, i, e., deceased forefathers, whom they fear rather than love, for while they dread their anger they expect little in the way of blessing from them. The Chins do not worship any images ; nor do they make any carved representations of any of these objects of worship.
The Great Parent of all is regarded as a female, Mother 'Li, and they do not think that she has or had any male counterpart. Perhaps one may rather say that they believe that sex does not enter into Li's essence. Mother 'Li reigns" on her throne in the heavens," " never growing old and never dying." She created, of her spittle, the earth and the sea and the sky, and brought forth by her power all life, animal and vegetable. She created man and imparted to him all the material and mental and spiritual blessings that he enjoys. All mankind are her children, and she loves them all. She bas given to each nation its bounds and language and letters. She is wholly good.
Reasoning, as I imagine, from the analogy of daily life, the teachers or priests have told the Chins that Mother 'Li herself has not existed from all times, but bad, as parents and ancestors, Yin, Aw, 'Keu and 'Kyën, who are now dead, and, like other departed spirits, much more apt to trouble the living than to assist them; -80 much so that the names Yin-Aw are sometimes used to denote in brief all the spirits Mother 'Li alone excepted), and that in a very unfavourable sense. It was too much, however, for the Chin mind to go back one step further, and to ask whence Yin and Aw came. They bave never really faced the question of the First Cause.
The genesis of the human race in general, and of the Chins in particular, is thus told by the Ohin teachers. In the beginning, after Mother 'Li had made the world, she laid a hundred eggs, which she hatched in cotton wool, and from which sprang a hundred pairs of human beings, the progenitors of the different races of mankind. She laid yet another ogg, a little one, which was most beautiful to see, and which she specially cared for. In her affection she did not put this one in cotton-Fool, bat kept it in an earthen pot, and so it did not hatch. After a while, thinking that the egg was addled, she threw it on to the roof of the house. It fell from the roof into some rubbish under the eaves, and was not broken. Afterwards when the rains came, it was borne down by the water with the rabbish into a stream, and finally lodged in a yang-lai (or gyin-ye) bush. Here the ashun, or king-crow, spied the egg, and carrying it off, hatched it ; and from this egg came a boy and a girl, the progenitors of the Ohin race. It was only small hamlot of nine or ten houses where the Chin race was hatched; but as to the race of the people who lived in
Tonth Editiral. XXVI. p. 16.
