Cambodia Temple Quotes

When Angkorian society began, Paris and London were not much more than elaborate villages. Europe was crawling with barbarians, and here were the Khmer engineering sophisticated irrigation systems and constructing the biggest temple in the world.

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I

over five thousand years ago, in ancient China, mercury was used to induce abortions (although it most likely also killed the women). The Ebers Papyrus from 1500 B.C. mentioned abortions. He showed a slide of a bas relief from the year 1150 decorating the temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, where a woman in the underworld was getting an abortion at the hands of a demon.

...mist lifted its curtain off the lower galleries, uncovering the hazy robed figures of monks walking where dancing girls and warriors once served a king. Shadows shifted from gray to gold. Out of sight, sunlight scaled the temple's back walls, curving up from the east. Light traced the massive bud-shaped towers. Simone had been right, this was Irene's arrival in Cambodia, her entire being narrowed to a single pinpoint of expectation as the pinnacles atop the towers sparked and burst into flame. She leaned forward,watching a city rise fro the depths of the planet. In an instant the fire was extinguished and the sun owned the sky. Angkor Wat exposed its colossal sandstone expanse, revealing itself for what it was - the largest temple in the world.

When I was still a teenager, building my personality from the films and the books and the songs I later tried to give to Graham, the chief monk of one of Cambodia’s largest wats announced that he could not rule out that the victims of the Khmer Rouge were not the final link in a chain of karmic cause and effect. If they had behaved with integrity in past lives, perhaps they would not have had to lie in mass graves at the end of this. My mother never went back to our temple after that. She kept flowers and fruit on the shrine at home, but it became a place she put her thoughts to dry out. All her honoring she gave to her new country, which told her she was welcome as long as she worked. In terms of karmic cause and effect, that was far more palatable.

DIVINE LIGHT,MURDEROUS LIGHT The flames crackle. On the pyre burn discarded mattresses, discarded easy chairs, discarded tires. A discarded god also burns: the fire blackens the body of Pol Pot. At the end of 1998, the man who killed with such abandon died at home, in his bed. No plague had ever so reduced the population of Cambodia. Invoking the sacred names of Marx, Lenin, and Mao, Pol Pot erected a colossal slaughterhouse. To save time and money, every charge came complete with sentence, and every jail had a door to a common grave. The entire country was a great burial mound and a temple to Pol Pot, who purified society to make it worthy of him. Revolutionary purity demanded liquidating the impure. The impure: those who thought, those who dissented, those who doubted, those who disobeyed.

But even as this largest ever Hindu temple was being erected in Cambodia, another set of Indian ideas was travelling westward. The effect of these ideas – more practical and utilitarian than the arts which were transmitted eastwards – would be even more revolutionary than those which

From their earliest years Cambodian children learned that ambition and personal aspiration should not, could not, be a part of their character. Be satisfied with the life you have, the monks told them, no matter how poor or menial. Education “simply took children from the rice fields and then gave them back to the rice fields.” Girls were instructed to expect even less. They were not permitted to attend even the temple classes. Instead, their mothers taught them subservience and docility. Nothing embodied that idea more than the Chbab Srey, a piece of traditional literature that described a woman’s place in the home, written in the form of a mother talking to her daughter. One passage said: “Dear, no matter what your husband did wrong, I tell you to be patient, don’t say anything ... don’t curse, don’t be the enemy. No matter how poor or stupid, you don’t look down on him. ... No matter what the husband says, angry and cursing, using strong words without end, complaining and cursing because he is not pleased, you should be patient with him and calm down your anger.” The Chbab Srey was required reading in the schools until 2007,

This is heaven- sunshine, coffee, and muffin." "You're so different from everyone else," he teased. "How so?" she asked, and took another eager bite. "Other girls are so worried about the way they look." "What?" She sprayed out part of the muffin and coffee. "What's wrong with the way I look?" "Nothing," he answered, but there was amusement in his eyes. "You look great." She handed back the muffin and the coffee, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. "Then why did you say I don't worry about the way I look?" "I just mean other girls spend hours in front of the mirror and you obviously don't. You seem like the right kind of person to go on adventures with," he answered in a dreamy kind of way. "That's what I want to do. Go on a dig, maybe. Wouldn't you like to uncover mummies or discover an unknown temple in the jungles of Cambodia?" "Why?" she asked with a rising sense of uneasiness. "When you're safe and at home, adventures might seem like fun, but when you're living them, they're not." "I thought you'd enjoy roughing it," he explained. "You don't seem to care about appearances.

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The pyramids in Egypt and the temple at Angkor Wat built for Suryavarman II in Cambodia—what do they have in common? They share the conceit that the soul of the dead lives on in the stone. That hard gray gilded edifice is not merely tufa or granite. It is the abstract become concrete, the ineffable expressed, the soul in the stone. It is hard to know who needed this conceit more: the king who ordered his own memorial or the priest who attended him. Im- mortality was at stake for the king. For the priest, it was his liveli- hood. While the king was alive, the priest thrived on his living presence. But kings do not live forever. The problem was how to make the beat go on when the drummer left town. The answer seemed simple: Don’t let him leave. Let the stone become the soul. We need a word for this. I suggest incairnation. Incairnation is a big idea. It is no accident that kings, priests, medicine men, writers, composers, artists of all stripes, have taken it up. After all, incairnation is precisely what happened to the Earth. The Earth was a stone that became imbued with life. The incairnators of history were trying to replicate that ancient magic act. [- Samuel Jay Keyser]

With colored sand, Buddhist monks create mandalas—intricate geometric and cosmic diagrams that can take weeks to craft—and then destroy them in minutes, to reflect the transitory nature of material life.4 The colossal Buddhist temple on the island of Java at Borobudur and the Hindu-Buddhist temple complex at Angkor in Cambodia are believed by some to be three-dimensional architectural mandalas and are still among the largest religious structures in the world.