Kyauk Ka Lat Pagoda
Interesting facts
- Behind the pagoda rises Mount Zwegabin, whose summit pagoda is said to enshrine a hair relic of the Buddha and draws thousands of pilgrims.
- According to Karen legend, a brother and sister mistreated by their stepfather were granted spiritual powers and became guardians of Mount Zwegabin.
- A wild ginger relative, Globba zwegabinensis, was named by botanists after the neighbouring mountain where it was first found.
- The pagoda's name begins with kyauk, the Burmese word for stone or rock, fitting a shrine perched on a limestone pinnacle.
- Thamanya Sayadaw, linked to this monastery in his youth, later made his own hill near Hpa-An a sanctuary where nonviolence and vegetarianism were the rule.
- By the late 1990s some 5,000 households had settled around Thamanya Sayadaw's hill, where he handed out land to followers free of charge.
Why it is worth it
Around Hpa-An in Myanmar's Kayin State, abrupt limestone towers rise straight out of the rice paddies, and Kyauk Ka Lat is the most improbable of them: a narrow, sheer pinnacle that thins towards its base, crowned with a small golden stupa and standing on a tiny island in the middle of an artificial lake. Shrines and monastery buildings crowd the rock around its foot, white egrets work the water, and the long ridge of Mount Zwegabin — at 722 metres the highest point in the region and a pilgrimage mountain in its own right — rises behind it, so that pagoda, lake and mountain read as a single composition.
The complex is a working Theravada monastery with a resident community of monks, reached across the water by a footbridge. It has a place in the region's modern history too. In the aftermath of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, the monastery's senior monk was involved in the resistance against British rule. In the 1920s the monk later known as Thamanya Sayadaw, who became one of the most revered teachers of loving-kindness meditation in Myanmar and a figure famous for refusing the patronage of the military government, taught here.
Hpa-An itself, also spelled Pa-an, is the capital and largest city of Kayin State, home to some 75,000 people, most of them Karen. Several other Buddhist sites lie close by in the surrounding karst country; local legend explains even the city's name through a tale of a frog king and a dragon king fighting over a magic ruby.
Getting there
Kyauk Ka Lat lies about 8 km from the centre of Hpa-An, the capital of Kayin State, which is linked to Yangon by express bus. The nearest airport in a straight line is Mae Sot (MAQ) in Thailand, about 97 km away across the border; the nearest airport within Myanmar is Yangon International Airport (RGN), about 161 km away.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Saddan Cave 12.0 km · cave
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Kyauk Ka Lat Pagoda is a Buddhist temple in the Kayin State, Myanmar. The temple complex is built onto a prominent limestone rock formation surrounded by an artificial lake, and houses an active community of monks.
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