Cambodia – Angkor Thom, the Bayon temple

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Remember the Churning of the Ocean of Milk? The story reappears at Angkor Thom, where the gods on one side and the giants on the other, each pulling at their half of the great serpent, form railings leading to the main entrance of the Bayon temple.

  

You can’t see them well in this picture, but there are huge faces in the stone above the entryway.

In fact, there are huge faces all over the place at Angkor Thom’s Bayon temple. I was going to say the place was crawling with them…but that’s too weird an image. These faces are quite still. They haven’t moved in over nine hundred years. Not much, anyway.

      

 

Views near Golden Grove

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Yesterday afternoon the rain clouds rolled in. The wind picked up; the air smelled like the ocean. Thunder growled a warning. And then the rain broke loose. I closed the windows and kept working. After a while, the sky grew lighter, and when I looked up the sun was shining again, long, late afternoon golden light slanting through the pouring rain.

Wait a minute.

Late afternoon sunlight…in the pouring rain…

There must be a rainbow! A perfect end to this beautiful (Jewish) New Year’s day.

As if the rainbow weren’t enough, the sun put on a show too.

 

 

Cambodia – Angkor Wat, the battles, the heavens, the hells

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Angkor Wat contains more bas-reliefs than just the Churning of the Sea of Milk, all epic in scale and astonishing in detail. Considering that they are almost one thousand years old, they are amazingly well preserved. There are lots of glorious battles scenes with armies marching on foot, on horseback, on elephants. Battles are so crowded and chaotic you can almost hear the shouts of the advancing soldiers and the screams of the wounded.

Larger-than-life kings and even many-armed gods preside over all. The dying fall to hells that have more tortures than Dante’s Inferno or rise to heavens full of earthly glories.

            

Cambodia – Angkor Wat, the churning of the ocean of milk

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Once upon a time–and maybe still today–there were gods and there were demons. Although they were half-siblings, they hated each other and fought terrible battles. But generally the gods had the upper hand.

One day, Indra, king of the gods accidentally insulted a great and powerful sage, who then cursed Indra and all the gods with him, causing them to lose their good fortune. Shortly afterwards, the demons defeated the gods in a great battle, and the demons gained control of the universe.

The gods appealed to Vishnu, who is the creator of everything, gods and demons alike. You can imagine how they moaned and cried, but Vishnu told them they were adults and had to fend for themselves. He advised diplomacy. You can just hear him telling them in his best parenting voice that they could catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

So the gods went to the demons and proposed a project of joint cooperation: Together they would churn the Ocean of Milk (which we call today the Milky Way) for the nectar of immortality, which they would share when they got it. The demons agreed.

It took all of the joint strength of the gods and the demons to churn the Ocean of Milk. They used Mt. Mandaranchal as a fulcrum. Vasuki, the five-headed king of the serpents, agreed to serve as the churning rope.

The demons, with their armies behind them, held Vasuki’s head.

    

The gods held his tail.

 

They took turns pulling, rotating the mountain this way and that, churning and churning. Sea creatures were stirred up in the ocean.

 

The gods and demons churned so hard that Mt. Mandaranchan began to sink into the ocean. To hold it up, Vishnu appeared in his incarnation as a turtle (Here we see both Vishnu and the turtle below him). Indra, king of the gods, flew above Vishnu to steady the mountain.

The gods and demons churned up a lot of good stuff (and a little bad): the moon, a seven-headed horse, a divine cow, Indra’s elephant, the most valuable jewel in the world, a powerful poison (fortunately swallowed by the god Shiva to prevent it from killing off everything, and the source of Shiva’s blue throat), a divine tree, the goddess of alcohol, the goddess of good fortune and wealth, the heavenly dancing nymphs (apsaras, which you can see flying above gods and demons alike), and finally, yes, the elixir of immortality.

A great battle ensued for possession of the elixir, and–tragedy!–the demons won. But Vishnu appeared disguised as an enticing maiden, who distracted the demons and then stole the elixir back for the gods. A second great battle ensued, this time with a decisive victory for the gods.

And so, that’s why we worhip gods and not demons to this very day.

 

Views near Golden Grove

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My friend Jennie is visiting me on Block Island today. It’s a work day. We’re both trying to get past some form of writers’ block on our novels. But that’s no reason not to take a walk on a beautiful day. Here is what it looked like from our beach this afternoon.

 

 

Cambodia – Angkor Wat, the buildings

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We’re in for three postings about Angkor Wat over the next few days. Today, let’s look at the buildings and site. The next two posts will cover the wonderful friezes.

Most temples traditionally face east, the direction of the sunrise and hope. But Angkor Wat faces west, the direction of death. Some scholars have conjectured that the Wat was intended as a mausoleum, but no remains have ever been found. So… maybe not.

Construction was begun early in the reign of King Suryavarman II, who reigned from 1113 to 1150 AD, and the temple was mostly completed in the first half of his reign. Considering that this may be the world’s largest religious building, this is no small feat.

With an outer wall 2.2 miles long, the Wat encloses an area of over two hundred acres. It has more stone than the Great Pyramid. Sacked by the enemy Chams in 1177, Angkor Wat was never completely abandoned, even after a new Khmer king built the Bayon Temple at Angkor Thom in the following century.

We approached Angkor Wat from the east and then ascended the stairs to the galleries of carved stone friezes (more on these later).

   

 

After viewing the friezes, we crossed some inner galleries, to see some Buddhas still actively worshipped today. (I should note here that although the temple was originally consecrated to Vishnu, it became Buddhist when the Khmer people did.)

     

 

The friezes near the entrances and exits are apsaras, heavenly dancing girls who await the righteous, er, men. Cute, aren’t they? So welcoming! I wonder what they do for the righteous women.

Afterwards, we made our way out the western entrance, across a long stone causeway, past numerous ancillary structures and the remains of a great moat.

       

Looking back even just from the midway point, the temple was far away. And awesome.

 

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Dan and I have been here on Block Island since Thursday, and just as the United States Weather Service forecasted, it’s been cloudy and occasionally foggy and rainy. It’s been beautiful, and I’m not complaining. It’s always beautiful here on the island. But the last thing we expected was any kind of color at sunset. So, imagine our surprise when…

This is a gift. This is why we’re here on the island.

This is why we human beings are here on this Earth. The planet is beautiful, and we are here for only a short time. Appreciate it. Take care of it.

 

Cambodia – Ta Prohm

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You recognize the picture, right? Or something like it?

The jungle creeps across the ruins, engulfing them in serpentine tree roots. There is a sense of slow-motion menace here, of inevitable decay.

It’s beautiful.

Even the entrance to the temple compound promises decay and grandeur on a romantic scale.

 

 

Construction of Ta Prohm, originally named Raja Vihara, was begun in 1186 AD and lasted for forty years. After the fall of the Khmer Empire in the fifteenth century, the temple was abandoned and fell into jungle-engulfed ruins.

But the romance of Ta Prohm is now somewhat disappearing. The place is being fixed up and made safer for its two or three million annual tourist visitors. It is a monument worth protecting, both from the trees and from the tourists, but I do hope that the moody atmosphere is not destroyed in the process.

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the army of trees continues its quiet, merciless invasion.

         

 

Cambodia – Rural life in Angkor

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Except for the town of Siem Reap, the Angkor region is generally rural, especially in the archaeological park near the wats. The geography is nearly flat, not far from the Siem Reap River (perhaps even in its floodplain), a good place for farming. Rice farming in particular.

 

But not just rice. There are also, for example, cashew trees.

We were not here during the tourist season, and although there were a lot more tourists than in Myanmar, the roads through the archaelogical park were not busy.

 

A few small shops offered their wares.

 

Home from school, children offered friendly greetings.

  

Houses were basically rectangular and built on stilts to keep them dry during the rainy season. This season had just begun when we were there, and so people were still able to use the “extra” room beneath the house, keeping cool in its shade.

  

There were also a few tourist-oriented shops along the road. Given the region’s increasing economic reliance on tourism (and the fact that vendors are not allowed inside the archaeological sites), I was surprised not to see more. And the few there were had a certain homey attractiveness.