"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." George Orwell
There's so much here in Angkor to contemplate beyond the stunning beauty of the temple ruins. You could spend a lifetime photographing the temples, exploring them, and digging into the rich history surrounding each of these monuments. This entire area feels like it's caught ina time warp, as the past looms over the present and casts a deep shadow overall who live here and anyone lucky enough to wander through these grounds, enthralled with the leavings of a lost civilization. Becky and I leave here deeply grateful for the opportunity to visit this sacred place. It's going totake a long time to process what we've seen here.
As we walked through these stones, and climbed over the rubble, I found myself thinking about time and power, and the desire of ambitious men to leave a legacy behind them, or to even alter the legacy of their predecessors. Reading through our guidebooks, I discovered that one of the reasons so many of these temples are in disarray is because later kings defaced and destroyed some of the temples created by earlier kings. The religion of the Angkor Empire switched back and forth between Hinduism and Buddhism several times, and with each shift, the iconography of past eras was rendered obsolete, so temples were vandalized, stone frescoes were altered with hasty chisels, and huge stone Buddha statues and Vishnu carvings were beheaded by zealous fanatics trying to reaffirm the primacy of their own Gods. I couldn’t believe it. In my mind, the only kind of people who destroy Buddha statues are people like the Taliban, or dogmatic dictators like Joseph Stalin, who tried to purge Soviet Russia of it’s religiosity by destroying ancient churches in the name of thestate. The idea that this happened every few decades or centuries in Angkor was hard to wrap my head around. “Who beheads a Buddha statue?” I asked Becky, after eying a viciously defaced sandstone Buddha… “It’s not their God,” Becky pointed out. “It’s to show that they’ve conquered…”
I’ve rarely seen a more vivid illustration of warring faiths and their consequences than the ruins at Angkor. The uncomfortable overlap of faiths and ideologies contributed to the ultimate demise of the greatest empire Southeast Asia ever saw. I had always assumed that Buddhism and Hinduism lived alongside each other in relative peace, which must be based on my incomplete understanding of how both evolved concurrently in ancient India. I never imagined this kind of intolerance and violence between two faiths that share a common heritage. I suppose I should know better, given the conflicts between the Abrahamic traditions over the millennia… I suppose men have always thought that part of the power of a God is his ability to demean the Gods of others. That calls to mind a famous quote: “you know you’ve made God in your image when he hates all the same people you do.”
These temples are ruins because they were not protected. Subsequent generations considered them to be an affront to their beliefs. They were pillaged by tomb raiders, raided by locals for their wood, ransacked by invading nations, and as the Angkor civilization failed, their monuments succumbed to nature and these sacred spaces eventually became part of the jungle once again. There’s a profound metaphor in there somewhere about the illusory nature of power. It’s worth remembering… Everything ultimately crumbles back to the earth from whence it came…
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