Note 18 — Chapter I

Pounhas are the Brahmins who, even in those days of remote antiquity, were considered as the wisest in their generation. They had already monopolised the lucrative trade of fortune-tellers, astrologers, &c., and it appears that they have contrived to retain it up to our own days. During my first stay in Burmah I became acquainted with a young Pounha, wearing the white dress, and getting his livelihood by telling the horoscopes of newly-born infants, and even grown-up people. I learned from him the mode of finding out by calculation the state of the heavens at any given hour whatever. This mode of calculation is entirely based on the Hindu system, and has evidently been borrowed from that people.

Though Brahmins in those days, as in our own, worked on popular ignorance and credulity in the manner abovementioned, we ought not to lose sight of the great fact, borne out by this legend in a most distinct and explicit way, that many among them devoted all their time, energies, and abilities to the acquirement of wisdom, and the observance of the most arduous practices. Their austere mode of life was to a great extent copied and imitated by the first religious of the Buddhist persuasion. Many ordinances and prescriptions of the Wini agree, in a remarkable degree, with those enforced by the Vedas. In the beginning, the resemblance must have been so great as to render the discrepancies scarcely perceptible, since we read in this very work of an injunction made to the early converts, to bestow alms on the Pounhas as well as on the Bickus or mendicant religious, placing them both on a footing of perfect equality.