TO THE REMARKABLE TEMPLES – April 6

note- a lot of the extra details are quoted/taken from “Lonely Plant Cambodia”

ANGKOR WAT

So continuing on with the adventures with my parents…. after two and a half days at our site we tuk-tuk’d it to Siem Reap for the next four nights. We spent the first afternoon getting settled into our air-conditioned hotel. Went to a pretty good Indian restaurant for dinner and planned out our ancient temple visit over the next few days.

Tuesday morning we got up early to beat the heat and headed to the largest and most famous 12th century Angkor Wat temple complex. It’s said to be the largest religious complex in the world.

It is truly challenging to attempt to put into words, OR to even try to capture its sheer architectural, symmetrical greatness via photography… it’s more of quite the gradual step by step experience that you feel while walking through the entry causeway to the inside, and around and finally up into the upper temple area. It is surrounded on the outside by a large moat, 190m wide that forms a giant rectangle measuring 1.5k – 1.3k. Then there is a very long stone corridor in the very center that provides a magnificent view of the temples as you slowly approach them. Then once you get into the entry way, you realize the grandeur of the place, and wonder what Suryavarman II (r1112-52) did in his lifetime to deserve getting this built as a funerary temple. He must have been rather liked, rather popular or else a really demanding guy. I mean really, the time, dedication and effort, artistry, architecture and everything that is encompassed in this very well thought out structure is almost too much to take in. Every way you turn your head there is something interesting that catches the eye. The way that the windows are perfectly placed, or the archways that are positioned down the bas-relief corridors frame and crop the most interesting symmetrical shots from your very own visual space in your head creates this very clean, simple lucid feeling as you walk through. It makes you want to step back in time and meet the genius who was sketching this structure out in his or her sketchbook prior to ordering people to ship these huge sandstones via boat from north down the Siem Reap River to be constructed and artistically carved into and perfectly placed at their very exact locations. Pretty darn amazing. I mean look at the detail of the bas-relief that is carved into a column. This is about 1ft by 1.5ft of area and there is this type of stuff on columns ALL AROUND this entire temple. Can you imagine the people who were literally chipping away at this stone back in the day? How many people did it take to complete such a task? Here are a few other images and I’ve got a bunch more on the photo link that you can peek at. Needless to say it is quite a stunning structure to walk through and is quite mind-blowing to think about how in the world they completed such a building without modern day machines.



Excerpt from Lonely Planet Cambodia
SYMBOLISM: The temple is oriented towards the west. West is symbolically the direction of death, which once led a large number of scholars to conclude that Angkor Wat must have existed primarily as a tomb. This idea was supported by the fact that the magnificent bas-reliefs of the temple were designed to be viewed in an anti-clockwise direction, a practice that precedents in ancient Hindu funerary rites. Vishnu, however is also frequently associated with the west, and it is now commonly accepted that Angkor Wat most likely served both as a temple and a mausoleum for Suryavarman II.



Visitors to Angkor Wat are struck by its imposing grandeur and at close quarters its fascinating decorative flourishes and extensive bas-reliefs; however a scholar at the time of its construction would have reveled in its multilayered levels of meaning in much the same way as a contemporary literary scholar might delight in James Joyce’s Ulysses. David Chandler, drawing on the research of Eleanor Moron, points out that the spatial dimensions of Angkor Wat parallels the lengths of the four ages (Yuga) of classical Hindu thought. Thus the visitor to Angkor Wat who walks the causeway to the main entrance and through the courtyards to the final main tower, which once contained a statue of Vishnu, is metaphorically travelling back to the first age of the creation of the universe. It also replicates the spatial universe in miniature. The central tower is Mt Meru, with its surrounding smaller peaks, bounded in turn by continents (the lower courtyards) and oceans (the moat). The seven-headed naga becomes a symbolic rainbow bridge for man to reach the abode of the gods.


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Anyhow – it was really great to finally walk through this complex and we will no doubt go again when either our next visitors come or, maybe one final time before we head back.