THE GRAND ANANDA

A BRIEF BACKGROUND

Built by King Kyansittha in 1091 A.D., it is the finest and the most venerated temple at Bagan. Legend says that it was built according to the plan furnished by Indian Buddhist monks which purported to their cave-temple in the Nandamula mountain held to be in the Himalayas. This temple symbolizes the endless wisdom (Ananta Panna) of the Buddha just as the Thatbyinnyu symbolizes the omniscience of the Tathagata. Hence the name Ananta, which later transformed to Ananda, the name od Buddha’s cousin.

Of all edifices built by King Kyansittha, Ananda Phaya near Tharapa Gate excels in architecture and decorative artworks – 35-foot high teak doors with intricate wood carvings, marble statues, murals and glazed figures, the four facades with four standing Buddha images representing the four Buddhas that had already been in this world of Buddha.

STRUCTURE and LAYOUT

It is in plan a square of nearly 200 feet to the side and broken on each side by projection of large gabled vestibules, which convert the plan into a perfect Greek cross. The vestibules are somewhat lower than the main mass of the building, which elevates itself to a height of 35 feet in two tiers of windows. Above this rise successively diminishing terraces, the last of which just affording breadth for the spire which crowns and completes the edifice. The lower half of this spire is in the form of a mitre-like pyramid adapted from the temples of India; the upper half is the same molded taper pinnacle that terminates the common bell-shaped pagodas of Bagan. The gilded htee (umbrella) caps the whole at a height of 168 feet above the ground.

On western facade, inside the statue of Buddha, is a statue of Shin Arahan who had brought the Theravada Buddhist to Bagan and he statue of King Kyansittha. In the main Tazaung on that facade, an enlarged likeness of a pair of footprint of Buddha complete with 108 characters as written in Pali treaties.

That’s the lake inside Ananda compound. There’s a shadow of the temple in the lake. It was Ko J who showed me the shadow and I made this shot…

That’s very first time I learn to know about playing with SKY and CLOUDS mounting Wide Angle Lens on my Camera…

That was the result of FRAMING technique showed by Ko J… I learned a lot from him during my Bagan trip…

35-feet Buddha image on the Southern wing of The Grand Ananda…

The four facades with four standing Buddha images representing the four Buddhas that had already been in this world of Buddha…

This statue is revered at the Eastern wing of the temple…

A religious glance from Northern wing…

Treasure

Just want to say “GREAT”, #4 is very outstanding.
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Treasure >> Thanks a lot for the comment. For me, #3 touches me so much. A perfect FRAMING shot.
THAN ZAW MYO

I like 3rd photo!!!
http://www.myanmarlensman.com KMN

It’s all amazing bro! btw, LTNS! :-)
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ THAN ZAW MYO >> Thanks a lot, bro. #3 is top of this set for me…

@ KMN >> Thanks for your comment, sis. Yes, LTNS.
Yan Paing

One of amazing. You make it’s the best land of ancient city in Burma.
Thein S Soe

ပံုေတြအရမ္းေကာင္းပါတယ္…။ အသစ္တင္တိုင္း အၿမဲတမ္း အားေပးျဖစ္ပါတယ္…။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း ဓါတ္ပံုရိုက္တာ ၀ါသနာပါ ပါတယ္။ ေနာက္ၿပီး ကၽြန္ေတာ္လည္း ထား၀ယ္သားပါ…။
Naing Htun Lwin

Hi Bro…
All photo are amazing!!! I love to see all ur photos!!!
Rgds,
KoPyae
http://www.myokyawhtun.net Myo Kyaw Htun

All of shots are great… I like 3rd one most out of these photos. I’m sure you learned a lot from Ko J. Love the Lighting and natural tone processing in this post. Keep it up bro!!!
Ma Ma Lay

Perfect!
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man.
Francis Bacon (1625)
Nyein Chan Htwe

3rd one!!!
Frame within a Frame. I love it.
Keep going bro.
T.T

Like first photo…
Saw Yu

အားလံုးကို ေရေရလည္လည္ ႀကိဳက္တယ္… ႀကိဳက္လြန္းလို႔ ဘယ္ပံုအႀကိဳက္ဆံုး ဆိုတာ ေျပာရခက္ေနၿပီ…
မနက္ ေစာေစာစီးစီး ရင္ထဲေအးခ်မ္းသြားတာပဲ… It’s one of your best posts :)
David Ho

Upon looking at the first photo. I can’t help but say wow. It was picture perfect. The lighting, the composition. For me, this is one of your best post.
MyoMin

Bro…
The Amazing ANANDA n Great shots per bro. I like all photos.
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Yan Paing Oo >> Thanks, bro. I still have lots of temples from Bagan waiting to be uploaded… I hope you would love to see…

@ Thein S Soe >> ထား၀ယ္ သားဆိုေတာ႔ တနယ္တည္း သားေတြေပါ႔။ လာေရာက္ အားေပးတာ ေက်းဇူးပါဗ်ာ။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ အမ်ားႀကီး ႀကိဳးစားဖို႔ လိုပါေသးတယ္။ အခြင္႔အခါ သင္႔ရင္ ထား၀ယ္ကိုလဲ တစ္ေခါက္ သြား႐ိုက္ခ်င္ေသးတယ္။

@ Naing Htun Lwin >> Happy to see your visit and comment, bro…

@ Myo Kyaw Htun >> Yes, bro. Many shots here follow Ko.J’s instruction and guidelines. He is simply a GOD for me…

@ Ma Ma Lay >> Thanks for the praise!!!

@ Nyein Chan Htwe >> Yes, bro. I still have some more framing from NATT HLAUNG KYAUNG. Havent prepared for the post yet…

@ T.T >> Thanks a lot, Ko Thein Toe Gyi…

@ Saw Yu >> Yes, I confess. It’s one of the top posts here…

@ David Ho >> Thanks bro. I spent many hours for this post. Finally, I am happy to see you guys’ comments here.

@ Myo Min >> I love Bagan and want to go again and again…
http://BurmeseMTV.com Linn

Fascinating story and photos… Well done…
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Linn >> Thanks a lot, bro…
Htet Htet

woww, super special!!! love all the photos…
MTA

Ko Ye Yay… I know u r brilliant at taking scenery pictures… :) Keep it up!!!
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Htet Htet >> Thanks a lot for your visit and comment. It is, of course, one of the best posts I have ever published here…

@ MTA >> Nyi Ma Lay Yay… Thanks a lot for dropping in and comment.
ေမာင္ေမာင္

ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေတာ႔ အေပၚဆံုးပံုကို ပိုႀကိဳက္တယ္ ၊ တတိယပံုလည္း ေကာင္းတယ္။
http://khinoomay77.blogspot.com/ KOM

အားလံုးႀကိဳက္တယ္ ၊ အေပၚဆံုးပံု အႀကိဳက္ဆံုး။
Uncle Dr. Yu Sein

I like the picture THE SHADOW OF TEMPLE IN THE LAKE.
Your photos are more & more better. Keep onward…
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ ေမာင္ေမာင္ >> Thanks a lot, bro. I have tried my best for every single shot. :)

@ KOM >> Thanks for your visit and comment…

@ Uncle Dr. Yu Sein >> Thanks, uncle. I never stand still. I walk on…
http://www.nyinyimyanmar.co.cc/ ညီလင္းဝင္း

ပံုေတြ အားလုံးကို ႀကိဳက္တယ္ ရဲလြင္ဦး။
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ ညီလင္းဝင္း >> ေက်းဇူးဗ်ာ ကိုေက်ာ္…။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ ဒီထက္ ပိုၿပီး ႀကိဳးစားေနမွာပါ။
Moe Lwin

The Ananda is one of my favorite temples of Bagan. In 1989 January 5th, in the morning I had recited my prayers and asked to lived in the area, 9 years later my prayers came true and i ended up working in Kyuakpadaung for 5 years and 2 years in Yenanchaung. It became one of the fondest memories of my life. And I also discovered what being a Myanmar was all about too. But my message here is ; be careful of what you wish for – your wish might be granted!
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Moe Lwin >> Thanks for sharing ur true story, bro. I do hope my prayers come true in fast pace…
Ko Min

All r nice :) i envy u…
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Ko Min >> Thanks a lot and I will keep trying…
Pon Gyi

1st one & 3rd one r such masterpieces… luv the way the shadow appears in water in the 1st pic… that makes the pic unique… & also luv the way u captured the 3rd pic… it looks like a photo placed inside a photo frame… but i wonder why u didn’t take pics of smiles of the Buddha statues which r the most amazing fact of Ananda Pagoda… or may b u juz don’t upload here… anyway, nice job again bro!!!
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Pon Gyi >> Thanks a lot for your comment. I really appreciate your long and descriptive comments here. You always go into details for each and every shot and mention why you like particular shot. I have some Buddha images photos in my HDD but didn’t uploaded since I already had a lot here. Sometimes, I worry that my fans get bored seeing series of pictures. But then this one is one of my best…
MinThant2009

ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေတာ႔ တတိယပံုကို ပိုႀကိဳက္တယ္ ၊ အေပၚဆံုးပံုလည္း ေကာင္းတယ္။
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ MinThant2009 >> ေက်းဇူးဗ်ာ။ တတိယပံုက composition ေလး ေကာင္းသြားတာလဲ ပါတယ္ဗ်။
http://photography.zinonline.com Soe

First one is my favorite.
You are doing great, bro!
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Soe >> Thanks a lot, bro. I will keep it up!!!
http://yelwinoo.com/travel-spots/the-great-thatbyinnyu.html THE GREAT THATBYINNYU

[...] of the 12th century A.D. by King Alaungsithu, grandson and successor of the King who erected the Ananda Temple. Standing within the city walls, some 500 yards to the south-west of the Ananda, the Thatbyinnyu [...]
http://novaspacetime.wordpress.com SuperNova

I like #5. The rest are also outstanding. Great works!!!
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ SuperNova >> #5 has very few distortion, bro. You are right. I like it too…
http://novaspacetime.wordpress.com SuperNova

I love that distortion!
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ SuperNova >> Lolz… Me too…
http://yelwinoo.com/landmarks/the-dhammayangyi-temple.html THE DHAMMAYANGYI TEMPLE

[...] of all buildings and temples in Bagan. The Dhammayangyi shares a similar architectural layout to Ananda Temple. The Dhammayangyi Temple is one, among the four notable monuments of [...]
http://www.stanleykay.com Stanley Kay

Hi bro, I like your second photo of Ananda… The red trees stand out…
http://yelwinoo.com/ Ye Lwin Oo

@ Standley Kay >> Thanks a lot for your visit and comment, bro…
http://yelwinoo.com/portraits/to-the-memory.html To The Memories

[...] – I was busy shooting with him at Ananda Temple [...]

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