The Water Sprinkling Festival

The Dai calendar begins on 13 April, the day the sun enters Aries, a traditional New Year for many peoples in Asia, from the Khmers to the Punjabis, all of whom mark the occasion with celebrations and special activities. The Dai observance is shaped by three factors religion, the weather, the cultural heritage. As the Dai are Buddhist, religious rites are part of the events. As it is the hottest, driest, most humid time of the year the idea of dousing each other with water seems like a good way to celebrate anything. And because of the general ethnic renaissance in the province the Dai are more conscious of their cultural roots. They have arranged for the festival to include highlights from other festivals, once held at other times of the year, for other reasons, but long since fallen into desuetude. Money from the government has encouraged this last aspect and so nowadays the Water-Sprinkling festival is not just a big Dai festival, it is a celebration of Dai culture.

In anticipation of the festival Dai women begin dressing in their best traditional clothes and ornaments several days prior. And impatient children begin splashing each other some days in advance of the official opening. On the first morning the Dai go to the rivers and streams to fetch fresh water to bathe the Buddha images. Women carry buckets balanced on a carrying pole. Others fill small embossed silver bowls and use sprays of leaves to sprinkle the water.

A Dai elder removes the image from the temple to a specially constructed outdoor shrine. The girls with buckets of water empty them into the "dragon trough," which channels the water to a device that activates an umbrella over the Buddha. As the umbrella turns the water sprinkles the image beneath, while the crowd vies to catch drops of it. Then they begin sprinkling each other, at first using the sprays of leaves, but soon emptying bowls and buckets over one another's bodies. After that, no one in the open is exempt from getting wet.

The bathing of Lord Buddha is a reenactment of the myth that at the Buddha's birth dragons came to bathe him by spraying him with perfumed water. The act also recalls the fact that only after Gautama Siddartha, taking a break from his ascetic practices, bathed in the river did he feel refreshed and spiritually cleansed enough to be ready for Enlightenment. Yet this Buddhist aspect has been grafted on to an older festival that predates Dai conversion. In fact, the Water-Sprinkling Festival is observed by all branches of Yunnan's Dai, both Buddhist and animist, with its origin in an ancient, wholly secular myth.

Accordingly, once upon an ancient time the Dai were oppressed by an avaricious, seemingly invincible demon lord, who seized the seven most beautiful women and forced them to be his wives. One night, drunk with pride and boasting of his power he let out his secret  that his neck was his vulnerable part. It could be severed by a strand of his own hair. With that fatal revelation he fell asleep. The seven wives plucked a hair from his head,wrapped it around his neck and decapitated the demon.

But the head didn't die. Instead it burst into flames and rolled around, scorching all in its path. One of the wives grabbed it and quelled the flames. But when they buried it the land became barren. When they threw it in the river a flood ensued. So each took turns holding it in her lap for one year and after seven years the head died. At the end of each round the succeeding girl splashed water on the one who'd been holding the head in her lap, in order to wash off the filth and contamination accrued in her year's turn. A variation of the myth has the head continuing to burn and the seven Dai women sprinkling water on it for 999 days, when at last the flames were quenched. The water-sprinkling at the festival (water-throwing is a more accurate description) commemorates the seven heroines of the myth.

The festival's commencement is also inaugurated by the launching of rockets from tall bamboo platforms in the fields. In the Dai communities of neighbouring countries rocket-launching is a separate festival, also held in the hot dry season, as a signal to Heaven not to forget the rains. Included in the festival activities are the dragon-boat races, which in northern Thailand and northern Laos are staged at the end of the monsoon. Teams wearing different coloured head scarves compete on the Lancangjiang in long, narrow boats with dragon-headed prows. Another event associated with different Dai festivals elsewhere is the launching of hot-air balloons at night. In northern Thailand this is done for Loi Krathong, at the November full moon. Called Kongming lanterns after their supposed inventor Kongming, another name for Zhuge Liang, these float by the dozens over the land and water; big, fiery, orange spheres against the black night sky.

Dances and parades are part of the action, with all the minorities participating in separate contingents, all in ethnic costume. On the third day a fair is staged and on the adjacent open grounds young men and women line up in opposing ranks about thirty metres apart for the youth's favourite courtship game. Having made bulky little string-purses, the girls toss them to the boys opposite, who toss them hack. Whoever fails to catch it has to present flowers to the other as an apology. At first the girls throw them at random, but soon, for this is the purpose of the game, they choose one particular boy they like and always throw the purse to him-a clear signal of romantic interest.

TOP