Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  The Khmer Rouge was a neo-Maoist organization that took its cue from the devastating Cultural Revolution in China. It wanted to purify Cambodia of all outside influences in a misguided attempt to turn the clock back to the great age of Angkor. The Khmer Rouge attempted to create something akin to a second Khmer empire. In the end that wasn’t possible — no more so than trying to turn Europe back into the weave of absolute monarchies it had once been, or re-creating the Confederate States of America.

  Vana was born in the dying days of the Khmer Rouge terror. He was a gentle soul who spoke English quite well. So for the next few days I rode behind him on his little motor scooter in the hot tropical wind.

  The word khmer means “slave,” an ethnonym adopted later by Cambodia’s Thai and Vietnamese conquerors. What a telling epithet. The history of Cambodia is a story like no other right up to the present day. It’s such a long, sad tale, a saga of kings, snakes, rivers, and gods. But like any good saga, one has to start at the beginning, in this case with the fabulous city of Angkor.

  Vana and I zipped up a vaguely paved road. Astride the scooter, I squinted through the dust and sunlight. There was no indication that we were about to come upon one of the wonders of the world. A snake wiggled across the road, while a monkey sat in the shade of a tree. We buzzed past them and approached a moat running beside the road. The water in it flashed sharply in the sun. And then, just on the other side, the outer walls of Angkor Wat appeared.

  Angkor Wat is a temple that was built in the early years of the twelfth century. It is said to be the most perfect piece of architecture in the world. We rounded a corner and went up onto a dirt trail between some trees. Vana halted the scooter, and I hopped off. Before us was the Rainbow Bridge. It crossed the moat and went in through the outer gates. I walked under the archway and found myself in darkness for a moment. Then I emerged into a world I couldn’t believe and got my first good look at Angkor Wat. Suddenly, I was faced with one of humanity’s great accomplishments. It was gorgeous, breathtaking, an edifice that no amount of adjectives could fully capture.

  Vana stood behind me, silent, allowing me to take in the view. When I finally turned, he came up beside me. “Do you see the lotus towers?” he asked. I saw them, one in each corner of the great building, and a fifth, the most massive, rising from the cenre of the temple, intricately carved, soaring darkly and majestically into the sky.

  The ancient Khmer people adopted an old Hindu belief that a temple must be built to exact mathematical proportions. If the measurements of the temple were perfect, they thought, then there would also be perfection in the universe.

  I was looking at perfection.

  Angkor Wat is huge. It’s actually the largest religious monument in the world and is even larger in area than St. Peter’s in Rome. This temple took more than thirty years to erect and is only one of hundreds throughout the jungle in northern Cambodia. It’s a Hindu temple dedicated especially to the god Vishnu.

  Three immense terraces rise above a wide plain. The Rainbow Bridge sweeps in toward them. The balustrades are long carved snakes. These are called nagas — “snake” in Sanskrit — and they’re an especially prominent symbol here. This was the stuff I was searching for — how these ancient minds thought, how they encoded their world.

  Between the outer walls and the temple itself were wide fields where a few dozen villagers swung scythes. I couldn’t figure out if they were actually harvesting something or whether they were cutting the long grass around the temple. But I knew Angkor Wat was built by such people once upon a time. The scene I was witnessing wasn’t so different from what it would have been eight hundred years earlier.

  I entered the temple and had it almost to myself. A few villagers were gathered around their morning meals, but there were very few tourists. Slowly, I climbed from level to level, and at the top, the third terrace, up a steep set of rock steps, I came into the inner sanctum. Only the king and his high priests were allowed here in ancient times. From this vantage point I could survey the whole complex. The lotus towers represent the five peaks of holy Mount Meru. Vana told me all this, though I had no idea what Mount Meru was supposed to be. Pointing out across the fields, he said that the outer walls represent the mountain ranges that hem in the Earth, and outside that, the deep and tranquil moat suggests the infinite seas that surround the world. So, in effect, Angkor Wat is the world, the entire universe.

  This metaphor was one of the first of many I needed to understand. The temple is the world. I thought about that, remembering my studies in linguistics. Metaphors are much more than literary devices, far more than poetic tricks. A proper metaphor stands in for a whole field of meaning.

  In fact, the human mind is uncannily good at constructing these metaphorical systems. Languages are infused with such metaphors, and they’re often so subtle that we have no idea we’re working under conceptual umbrellas. For example, love in English is “madness” so that we are “crazy for someone.” They drive us “out of our minds.” To understand in English is “to see.” We talk about it with such phrases as “Am I making myself clear?”, “Do you get the picture?”, and “Let me point it out to you.” Happiness is up (“I’m on top of the world,” “Things are looking up,” “That boosted my spirits”), and sadness is down (“I’m feeling down,” “My spirits sank,” “I fell into a depression”).

  Metaphors pervade language. They lie beneath the surface but form the context by which we systematize our thinking. Each language has them, though they vary from language to language so much that cross-cultural misunderstanding often arises from a misreading of the underlying metaphors. Whole structures of meaning, entire ways of seeing the world, are embedded in the phrases we utter. And these are truly the foundations of our Palace of Words.

  Vana led me up to the second terrace. There were Buddhist monks there, the young males in saffron robes, the old women in white. They were burning incense, and on a kind of patio, an old man I had assumed was a monk had doffed his robes. He was bare-chested and sinewy. With an old broom he swept the stones where a puddle of water had gathered from the last rainstorm. It was hard to tell how old he was, perhaps sixty or even seventy, but I stopped and watched him for a while. His thin arms pumped the broom, and the whisking of its stalks echoed throughout the stone architecture. Strangely entranced, I followed his movements until he glanced up at me. This was the first truly old person I’d seen here, and there was something powerful in that. Even Vana seemed profoundly respectful of this peasant monk, and after a few moments, he pulled me away and out onto the first terrace.

  Around the outside of the lower terrace ran the legendary bas reliefs of Angkor Wat. They go on for eight hundred metres along the side of the massive building, then around a corner and onward for a total of almost three and a half kilometres of carvings. Along the western walls, aligned as they are with the blood-red sunsets, are scenes of violence, destruction, and death. Here I found battle scenes from the history of Angkor — curving and swirling armies locked in frozen stone. The soldiers of the great enemy, the Cham troops of ancient Vietnam, march across the walls, glaring out across the centuries.

  In the other direction, on the eastern walls, the rising of the morning sun illuminates a set of very different carvings. These are the Hindu creation myths, and one, a set of carvings that runs almost four hundred metres, has become more famous than all the rest. It tells the story of the Churning of the Sea of Milk.

  I had come here specifically to see this lengthy saga in stone as a sort of personal test, as a way to plunge myself into an utterly alien world. The Churning of the Sea of Milk is a central story in the Hindu epics. To understand it one must comprehend something about the god Vishnu. Hinduism, I must admit, is among the most confusing of religions for me. Hundreds and even thousands of gods attend the world. Some of my bewilderment rests in the fact that gods such as Vishnu can appear in different incarnations. After all, I still have problems figuring out the Holy Trinity in Catholicism, so what luck
would I have with a god who appears in at least nine different forms?

  Vishnu, the Preserver, descends to the rescue of the world whenever it’s threatened by catastrophe. Nine times it has happened. A tenth is still to come. Vishnu appears as different avatars, sometimes as a human (as in his incarnation as the man, Krishna), sometimes as an animal. Always, though, he guides the world to ultimate triumph over chaos.

  So this set of carvings represents one of Vishnu’s nine incarnations, in this case as a turtle. What happened was that before the world existed as we know it the gods and demons battled with one another. The fighting went on for so long and grew into such violence that the very emergence of the universe was lost in a swell of anarchy.

  Here, I admit, I’m already unclear about the details. I keep, of course, trying to wedge the story into my own Western conceptions, but it simply won’t fit. At any rate, Vishnu appeared to these feuding gods and demons and gave them a task in which they would seemingly work against one another but in reality would act together. Confused? Don’t worry. I was, too, until I saw the line of carvings at Angkor Wat. The task was a tug-of-war, very much like the game we know in the West.

  The gods would pull on one side and the demons on the other. The rope itself was really a snake — the naga symbol again. The only difference between this cosmic match and a simple tug-of-war game was that the rope, or in this case the snake, had wrapped itself around a mountain between the two pulling sides — Mount Meru, of course, the same peak that Angkor Wat represents.

  So with the gods tugging on one side and the demons on the other, they slowly began to churn this mountain, like the agitator in the centre of a washing machine. Back and forth they went until the mountain swung around one way and then the other so that it churned the cosmos. Vishnu, now in the form of a turtle, held the mountain on his back, and together the gods and demons spun the universe into being.

  A strange story indeed, but it was exactly what I was looking for — something so different, so loaded with alien metaphors that I would have to struggle mightily to make any real sense of it. I wanted to find something so profoundly outside my own experience that I could see just how far the elastic band of human thought snapped.

  What do these long lines of carved figures mean? They tug on a giant snake, turning a mountain, churning the Sea of Milk. I can only reach for a Western metaphor: The Sea of Milk is our own Milky Way, the deep stars of night. That made sense to me — the gods spinning the universe into existence. And with the spiral galaxies left as confirmation of this swirling and churning, the metaphor seemed appropriate.

  Of course it’s not. I was nowhere near the mark.

  It’s a difficult exercise, teasing out metaphors. According to the Hindu epic, the churning cast off magical elephants and exotic dancing girls called apsaras (whose beautiful images are all over Angkor). They have nothing to do with our modern Western conceptions of the universe. I’d done the best I could to figure everything out, but I was no Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, or Joseph Campbell. I couldn’t identify the archetypes that matched up with any of the myths I was familiar with. I couldn’t sort out the metaphors of this odd story. They were simply not available to my ways of thinking.

  Later Vana told me there was more to the story. He explained it carefully, watching me nod when I understood, going back over it when he noticed I wasn’t getting it. The snake, the naga, was named Vasuki. This snake, being looped around the mountain and tugged back and forth by the gods and demons … well, he gradually became sick. Finally, he started to throw up. He vomited out a terrible blue poison, just as the universe was being churned into existence. Vishnu, already holding up the mountain, could do little but witness the blue vomit spreading like a mushroom cloud. Another of the great Hindu gods, Shiva, appeared and swallowed the poison even as it threatened to destroy the new world. Shiva drank down the dangerous venom, which burned him so badly that it left his throat a frightful blue. But in his sacrifice he saved the world.

  Now there was something vaguely familiar. A god and a sacrifice. It fitted in with another story I’d heard.

  A couple of hundred years ago, when the first real contacts were made between Cambodia and the West, a young missionary appeared in the jungle eager to preach the gospel of Christ. The man tried to introduce the idea of Jesus to the villagers. He attempted to impress upon them the importance of Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross, showing the local people his wooden crucifix and explaining everything. But they were profoundly uninterested.

  An old villager, taking pity on the missionary, told the visitor about the Churning of the Sea of Milk, about the snake Vasuki and the spinning and the spewing out of his venom. The missionary, who apparently was a clever young chap, thought about everything for a long time and then painted his own little figure of Jesus a deep shade of blue. He brought it out again, and this time, slowly, comprehension lit the eyes of the villagers. The missionary held up the blue crucifix for all to see. It was the sacrifice of the god, he explained. He sacrificed himself in order to save the world. The stories were the same.

  So metaphors can, with difficulty, be unfolded. Jesus, in this case, needed to be blue. That was the Khmer — actually, the Hindu — symbol for sacrifice. The villagers understood that, and so, too, did I.

  Over the next few days Vana took me to temple after temple on his puttering scooter. At one temple I was followed for an hour or so by a bright young boy who must have been about seven years old. I’d seen many children put to work here. I called this little guy Cowboy because of the print of a cartoon cowpuncher on his ragged T-shirt. He told me he would be my guide, but for the most part I showed him around the place, explaining as best I could what my guidebook was telling me about the history and architecture of this particular temple. At the end I bought him a Coca-Cola, and he seemed delighted with the deal. So Cowboy, probably much as Vana had done before him, was learning English.

  It’s dangerous, though. The kids can make a decent living learning a foreign tongue, but there’s a cost. Another small slice of the world becomes generic, a part of the all-consuming face of the West. Should I be feeding the children Coca-Cola? Will it turn their young throats blue?

  Vana and I developed a strange relationship, as well. After spending each day tramping around Angkor, we returned in the evenings to Sweet Dreams. Usually, he would ask if I was hungry and then disappear around the back to the kitchen. One night Vana came out with a dish of food. He insisted that I sit and be served by him, as if he were a waiter or even a servant. I tried to get him to sit, too, and finally, uncomfortably, he slid beside me, unsure of his role. This action went against everything he knew. That we could be equals, that we could be friends, was alien to him.

  We talked some more, and he seemed to lighten up a bit. Finally, he leaned into me and said, “Tomorrow I can take you to the Linga River. This is something you must see.”

  “All right.”

  “It’s far,” he warned.

  “That’s okay.”

  “So we go early?”

  “All right.” I braced myself to get up in the dark hours before dawn.

  Vana took me farther north than most people go — to the outlying ruins of the old city of Angkor. In the distance, as we scootered over the potholed road past water buffalo and rice paddies, were the sacred mountains, the Phnom, and along the way we witnessed people harvesting the land as they had for centuries. We stopped once while Vana got his bearings. We had already been travelling for more than an hour and our destination was drawing near.

  Finally, we arrived at a nondescript trail, and Vana asked me if I was really up for the walk that lay ahead. It was four or five kilometres to the top, he said, and the day was scorching. I told him I did lots of hiking in Alberta in the mountains near where I lived. Of course, I knew this would be different. Here I would be slogging through the jungle. I talked of bears, Vana spoke of snakes, and we each tried to scare the other all the way up the hot, winding trail.

  Af
ter a while, we came to a river and followed a red-earth path along its banks. Here and there we saw signs that the ancients had preceded us. Faces were carved into the rocks in the river, and water splashed over them eerily. Eventually, the river opened into a pool with a cascading waterfall. We scampered across the rocks like children, and I noticed that my skin had grown browner. For the first time I felt as if we were friends, as if I were justified being here.

  We sat at the top of the waterfall, and Vana told me another story. Cambodia has always been famous for its folktales. They might even be older than the Hindu epics and are certainly at the heart of what it means to be Cambodian. The Hindu books came to Cambodia with the omnipresent Sanskrit. Modern Khmer is now written in this same swirling text, but ancient Khmer survives on its own, untempered by outside influences, and is most purely heard in folktales. Like Aesop’s fables, the Cambodian tales are often allegories. They have morals to be learned and are frequently thinly veiled references to real situations and human folly.

  When the world was still young, Vana told me, and the palaces of Angkor were newly constructed, there was a young king on the throne. He was, of course, delighted with his magnificent new city. In fact, he thought it was the distilled essence of beauty.