YANGON, Myanmar -- Somerset Maugham described the great golden spire of the Shwe Dagon Pagoda, towering over the city, as "a sudden hope in the dark night of the soul."
Few who have seen it could fault him for hyperbole.
Walt Disney might have tried to create something so exotic, so fantastically mystical and serene. He might have tried.
But Shwe Dagon exceeds even Disney's wildest dreams, dominating Yangon as it dominates the psyche of those in Myanmar, the most sacred shrine in what is widely regarded as the world's most devoutly Buddhist country.
And with Myanmar suffering, isolated and impoverished, at the hands of one of the world's most corrupt and repressive regimes, Buddhism today has become an even more dominant force in everyday life.
That is why the pagoda's famous spire, "glistening with its gold," as Maugham wrote in 1930, is now covered with bamboo scaffolding.
The Shwe Dagon Pagoda is being re-gilded, "robe" by tiny "robe" of gold leaf, donated by tens of thousands of ordinary citizens whose salaries are often less than $10 a month.
"For Buddhist people," a young Myanmar woman explained, "it is the heart, or the glory. We want our Shwe Dagon to shine."
Indeed, there seems to be a strong correlation between Myanmar's "misery index" and its Buddhist devotion.
"As the country appears to have become more impoverished, both pagodas and spirit shrines have become more resplendent," Sarah M. Bekker, a U.S. authority on Burmese Buddhism, wrote in an essay published three years ago. "It is as if these are the only worthwhile things in which to invest time and money."
Her observation seems even more trenchant today, now that the hated Burmese dictatorship has snuffed out the country's democracy movement.
Thousands of demonstrators have been gunned down in the streets. Elections were voided in 1990, after the junta's overwhelming defeat. Hundreds of political opponents have been imprisoned, including 1991 Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.
And everywhere, in a country where the roads crumble and the water isn't fit to drink, the pagodas are being feverishly improved.
In the endless Buddhist cycle of existence, where fate is a matter of karma, the sum of good and bad deeds from previous lives, nothing builds merit faster than donating gold to the local pagoda.
