Theravada Buddhism

Throughout Southeast Asia, Buddhist monks abound, and visitors are spellbound. Theravada Buddhism is practiced most prominently in Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Thailand and Sri Lanka. The Theravada Buddhists believe that one cannot attain Nirvana by simply living an ethical life, by devotion or by the grace of gods or spirits. Rather, insight can be achieved only through experience, critical investigation and reasoning. Attaining insight is completely a matter of personal responsibility. The Buddhas are nothing more than teachers of the Noble Eightfold Path to the Four Noble Truths: (1) Dukkha (suffering), (2) Dukkha Samudaya (cause of suffering), (3) Dukkha Nirodha (cessation of suffering), and (4) Dukkha Nirodha Gamini Patapada (pathway to freedom from suffering). Suffering is the state in which all humans live, tied to the cycle of birth, illness, aging and death. We suffer due to the Five Hindrances to self-awakening and liberation from the illusion of reality: (1) sensual desire, (2) anger or ill-will, (3) sloth or boredom, (4) restlessness or worry, and (5) doubt. While not entirely impossible for a lay person to attain Nirvana, it is the monks who are thought be be on the path to enlightenment.

Laos: Land of One Million Elephants

What a difference a day makes when leaving Cambodia for Laos. While Cambodia is flat, Laos is a beautiful, lush and mountainous country, even though it is land locked. While Cambodia suffers from overwhelming poverty and illiteracy, Laos fares better, particularly as the influence of Vietnam has waned and that of Thailand has risen. Laos is notably well kept and absent the begging children common in Cambodia. On the other hand, Laos remains firmly within the sphere of communist totalitarian regimes. Like Cambodia, the French occupied and colonized Laos (90 years in Cambodia, about 50 years in Laos). After the French abandoned its colony in Laos, the royal family returned to rule the country. Under the Geneva Accord of 1962, Laos was officially recognized as a neutral state. The Vietnamese used Laos as a springboard for attacks on the French in Vietnam, ignoring Laos' neutral status. The Chinese and Vietnamese used Laos to supply loyal forces in South Vietnam, and the Americans launched a war known as the "Secret War" in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stymie the Viet Cong. Nixon relied on airpower, dropping an average of one planeload of bombs, every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years on this tiny nation (with a population at the time of approximately 4 million). The U.S. dropped about half a ton of bombs per Laotian by 1973.

Tonle Sap

Tonle Sap is the largest lake in Southeast Asia and is home to a floating village of mostly Khmer people who live in makeshift shacks that float on the lake and are moored to the shores and to each other. Mothers and daughters barely past toddler motor in skiffs to catch up with boats carrying tourists and at breakneck speeds the young girls jump from skiff to boat with a basket of sodas or snacks in the hope of making a dollar. But the lake has its beauty and this floating community holds an undeniable fascination for those who water out to watch the sunsets.

Killing Fields

Throughout Cambodia the signs of one of the worst genocides and most horrifying and perplexing brutalities of all time are in plain view. The Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million of its own people, brutalized millions more in horrific labor camps, starved the people and killed them when they became useless. I will be posting a series of pictures of pictures taken by the Khmer Rouge inside a high school in Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge converted into a torture and extermination facility, while forcing two million residents to evacuate the city into labor camps throughout the countryside. Even today, former members of the Khmer Rouge are welcomed into the ranks of one of the most corrupt and repugnant governments on the planet, a government that continues to starve its people and ensure that the populace remains illiterate and uneducated, while the "elite" fleece the country of financial support mostly from China and demand bribes and payola from the impoverished. 35% of the country makes less than $1 a day. Those who criticize the government still disappear. As the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, parents sell their 12-year old girls into prostitution as the sex tourists prey on this people's suffering.

Angkor Wat

The largest religious structure in the world by area at 120 square miles, Angkor Wat comprises roughly 1,000 ancient temples conceived and constructed from the 10th to 13th centuries. The majesty of the temples reins despite competing religious tides from Buddhism to Hinduism, during which religious symbols, statutes and carvings were erased for all time, despite robber barons, including imperialists and corrupt governments, and brutal wars. It is one of the most photographed places in the world and so, when I return, I will post only a few that are uniquely my own perspective. Merry Xmas from Angkor Wat.

Return from Ladakh

I have returned from Ladakh, from remote villages in the Himalaya, where Tibetan Buddhism flourishes in hearts and the minds of the Ladakhi people. Their lives are simple, focused on hard work, family and faith. Ladakh is virtually unreachable by the outside world for nine months of the year, buried under snow and ice. With temperatures of 50 below, Ladakhis remain cloistered indoors with family in their mud-brick, windowless hovels, relying on light from the cow-dung fires that warm their homes and are used to cook meals. During the three months of summer, Ladakhis work hard preparing for winter. Life-size prayer wheels are at the center of each village. Monasteries and Buddhist temples dot the varied landscape, built centuries earlier into the mountain walls, allowing for the quiet and stillness essential to the Monks seeking the path to enlightenment. Mystical iconographic wall paintings and statues of Gods and Buddhas fill the ancient chambers of these religious shrines. The sounds of Monks chanting their mantras, calling to their Bodhitsavas for guidance, freeing themselves of samsara, human suffering, a natural product of our human desires, resonate in the pure mountain air. But most stunning is the heart of the Ladakhi people, their contentment with the simple elements of their lives and with full confidence that human existence is the closest state of reincarnated being on the wheel of life to attaining Nirvana. A more open, genuine and friendlier people could not exist anywhere no matter the degree of technological advancement or high on the mountain of financial power or success.

Stay tuned for images from Ladakh, the last true remaining ancient Tibet, situated 18,000 feet in the Himalayas, in the Kashmir state, tucked in between Pakistan and China.  The following is from "A Journey in Ladakh: Encounters with Buddhism" by Andrew Harvey: "Nothing I had read or imagined prepared me for the splendour and majesty of the mountains that first day; that was the first gift Ladakh gave me, a silence before that phantasmagoria of stone, those vast wind-palaces of red and ochre and purple rock, those rock faces the wind and snow had worked over thousands of years into shapes so unexpected and fantastical the eye could hardly believe them, a silence so truly stunned and wondering that words of description emerge from it very slowly, and at first only in broken images--a river glimpsed there, a thousand feet below the road, its waters sparkling in the shifting storm-light, the path below on the bare rocky surface moving with sheep whose wool glittered in the sunlight, small flowers nodding in the crevasses of the vast rocks that lined the road, rocks tortured in as many thousand ways at the mountains they are torn from, sudden glimpses of ravines pierced and shattered by the light that broke down from the mountains, of the far peaks of the mountains themselves, secreted in shadow, or illuminated suddenly, blindingly, by passing winds of light."