Friday, April 29, 2005

khmer country (part 2)

24 Apr

it's the first leg of my tour of angkor (sorry, am watching the amazing race as i write this) and we headed off to angkor thom and visited the magnificent south gate. gods and demons guarded the "big city" (angkor=city, thom=big) and its gates had carvings of four faces, each representing compassion, wisdom...err...and something and something. heh. i forgot. i kept snapping away and am almost out of film. =\ but how could i resist? the history! the carvings! the ruin...

how do i describe it all?

we went to the bayon temple, the last temple built by the kings of the ancient civillisation. i guess i took the most pictures there. then we headed off to ta prohm, a temple totally destroyed by vegetation. i guess ta prohm represented the power of nature. for 300-400 years it was untouched by man, leaving it at the mercy of the plants, which turned out to absolutely merciless.

tree roots broke walls down as the plants themselves reached for the sky, damaging the temple and all its former glory. however, not all was destroyed by nature. it was sickening to see the buddha carvings hacked by hindus. man lent a hand in defacing the temple that was built meticulously with sandstone, carved by skilled hands, lovingly smoothed...and is now gone.

at bayon, i took my time, exploring every nook and cranny, photographing everything that caught my eye. i stared right into the blank eyes of one of the 216 faces of stone and silently asked it...how does it feel to no longer be revered as a god? to be seen and awed, but treated as merely a source of income or a reason for bragging rights?

these temples were once built for narcissistic purposes, a step towards the status of devaraja - the king god. the kings led kingdoms that stretched so far that they believed themselves the center of the universe, and the kings thought themselves gods. a temple was necessary to ensure their status as deities. grand monasteries dedicated to ancestors, parents, generals, wives.

yet now they lie in ruins. what can the faces tell me? what have they seen? the hundreds of pairs of eyes lay waiting for centuries, forgotten by the people who worshipped them, people who then went on to worship war and guns instead of the deities that guaranteed them rain and a good crop. what did they see? what do they see?

perhaps it's a new sense of reverence now. admiration rather than respect. wonder and intrigue where there was once worship. their legacy lives with every click of the shutter...the gods, the kings, the hands that cut, carved, polished and prayed.

i have captured yet another piece of the souls of those who lived so many hundred years ago in my mind, my writing and my photographs.

anyway, am going to angkor wat later.

lishun at 9:45 AM

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