Thursday, November 1, 2007

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Today, we went to Neak Pean, a sacred site whose name means “entwined nagas.” The site was originally comprised of five pools of water with purifying qualities.

In order to avoid excessive visual clutter, I have posted some other cool pictures of nagas at Lee’s other blog, (and may add to them as I sort through the thousands of pictures I took while here) but I chose the two from this sacred site for specific reasons which will become clear below.

The naga is a visual legominism, that is, a sacred teaching written down and encoded so that it will not be lost. In its original form, there was a specific and "correct" symbolism to the naga. Much of it has been diluted, altered, or otherwise corrupted, but we can find the chief elements of it in many of the images here in Cambodia.

In its correct form, the naga is a serpent that has seven heads. The symbol probably originally came from India, where yoga schools used it to indicate the living energy that rises up through the human body from the base of the spine and circulates. Adopted for Buddhist iconography, typically, we see Buddha seated on it, with the serpent (a cobra) rising up behind him directly behind the backbone, and spreading its hood with its seven heads over him. Traditionally, it is said that the serpent sheltered Buddha while he spent his many years in ascetic meditation under the Bodhi tree before he attained enlightenment. That is to say, Buddha worked in the shadow of the naga.

The seven heads of the naga represent the seven chakras. They correspond directly to the points on the enneagram, with the largest head in the center of the seven headed serpent representing the point do. The three heads on the right-hand side represent the notes re, mi, fa, or the numbers 1, 2, 4. This constitutes the lower triad in the human body, that is, the root, sex, and solar plexus. The three smaller serpent heads on the right-hand side of the naga represent the notes sol, la, si, or the numbers 5, 7, 8. This is the upper triad corresponding to the heart, throat, and third eye.

In some even more sophisticated symbolism, we sometimes find Garuda-- the fleshy vehicle we inhabit-- in the center of the naga figure. This symbolism corresponds directly to Leonardo da Vinci's placement of man within the circle which corresponds so strikingly to the work man does within the inner enneagram in order to open his flowers. And indeed, nagas are often studded with flowers, circular areas representing blossoms. Not to mention the interesting and stunningly coincidental connection between Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of the Mayan priesthood, and this hybridized symbol of Garuda surmounting nagas.

...Come to think of it, given the many very peculiar similarities between Cambodian art and Mayan art, maybe it's not a coincidence at all.

As if the point that this energy opens the flowers was not driven home enough, it is not uncommon to see the central naga in a group spitting a chain of lotus flowers out of his mouth. And, to make matters even more interesting, at Neak Pean (see the above photo) you will see a clear depiction of a spinal column running up the back of one of the two nagas at the fountain center. In fact, this not-very-abstract representation of the spine frequently runs up the front of other nagas as well.

On the front of the two nagas at Neak Pean we also see a large flower corresponding to the circulation of energy in the lower story triad, and a smaller flower corresponding to the upper story triad.

So here we have a complex figure, passed on from Hindu practice into Buddhism, which depicts the enneagram, to work with the flowers, the flow of energy through the spine, the circulation within the upper and lower triads, and so on. It is probably no coincidence whatsoever that exactly the same creature -- a cobra -- appears on the diadem of Egyptian pharaohs, in the position of the third eye. (in secular terms, it symbolized the kingdom of lower Egypt.)

The symbol was used by esoteric schools thousands of years ago all over the world. What we have today are many different versions of it, most of them changed in one manner or another, but all of them referring to the very same work that we undertake when we seek an inner connection.

There is a great deal of information about inner work within these symbols. It's worth studying them for their inner significance as well as their beauty.

One last caveat: Please forgive me if there are typos or weird misstatements anywhere in this post. I dictated a good portion of it, which can lead to comical misspellings, and I'm in a hurry to post before the hotel toasts my internet connection, which has been poor at best from here in Cambodia.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

The Hermit

Maybe it goes without saying that the culture which produced Angkor Wat had different priorities than our own.

Just how different is debatable. After all, the people who lived in that world had to earn a living, feed their families, and deal with the usual emotional uproars of life, just as we do. Nonetheless, the overwhelming emphasis on religion is clear. As in contemporary Medieval Europe, the divine right of Kings held sway… emphasis on divine. The political authorities of the era had no authority without religious authority. Hence the huge temples at the very center of every city. The entire society revolved in a circle around the religion du jour.

…And, if you were an authority and didn’t have a temple, hell, you had to build one, sometimes, fast.

The iconography on the temple walls at Angkor recapitulates Hindu mythologies in the same manner that the stained glass at Chartres tells the story of the Bible. In both cases, the temples served as visual “books” for the largely illiterate populace, showing them, in tangible imagery, what they had heard at the feet of their parents or grandparents.

All over the world, at that time, there was a flowering of religious architecture—along with a blossoming of a kind rarely seen since, a moment when spiritual masters as intensely profound and diverse as Dogen, Meister Eckhart, and Rumi brought their work and their messages to mankind. A moment that may not have seen its like since. Something unique and remarkable was at work on the planet at that time—what, we can hardly guess at, but during the 12^th, and 13^th centuries, a remarkable divine influence was making itself felt across the globe.

We don’t know who the masters of Angkor were- aside from inscriptions dedicating temples, they left few to no records behind. But we can be sure they must have been there, from the touches they left behind: the extraordinary architecture, the subtle and refined artistic sensibilities, the utterly magnificent expounding of Hindu mythology on temple walls.

One particularly touching element in this grand show of pageantry is a small, consistent image that crops up all over the walls of almost every temple we saw here. That element is the very nearly ubiquitous image of the hermit.

The hermit is a smaller, almost uninteresting figure who crops up again and again in the scrollwork, the baroque Hindu fleur-de-lis covering columns and lintels. (The scrollwork motif at Bantey Srei owes more than a little to traditional Greco-Roman design: anyone who has seen the artwork at Pompeii and Herculaneum might reasonably presume that the style slowly filtered east, into unknown lands.)

This morning seemed like a good time for a last look at Angkor. Braving a rather fierce morning sun, Neal and I walked, for the second time, along the outside galleries of the inner temple compound at Angkor. Each of the four walls—close to 80 meters or so a side? -- is densely populated with elaborate depictions of Hindu Gods and their countless minions, living out epic battles and mythic encounters.

On the east wing of the temple is what turned out to be my personal favorite: the story of churning the sea of milk (with a naga that extends almost the entire length of the wall, as it happens) to create the elixir of immortality (I’ll try to get to a discussion of the esoteric meaning of that very cool myth in the next post or two.)

As we walked around the galleries from west to south to east to north with the circus of supernatural bas-reliefs on our left, on our right was the row of columns that supports the ceiling of the gallery, undecorated…

except at the base.

At the base of each side of every column, the figure of a bearded hermit, legs folded, hands together in prayer, engages in meditation. In the midst of all the explosive imagery, the unruly hubbub of eternal mythic confrontation,

Of course we could argue this is just a coincidence. But perhaps, just perhaps, there was an understanding being expressed here: an understanding that the root of all being springs from a silent, hidden effort, from a very private, very serious wish to deepen our connection with the planet.

The iconography of the hermit leads us to the question: what supports our effort?

The effort of society?

The effort of the planet?

The relentlessly repeated motif of the mundane, humble, inglorious hermit points us in the direction of containment. Of quiet work, silent work.

Work that lies outside the glamorous allure of the Gods in battle.

...as of today, some cool additional pictures of nagas are now posted at lee's other blog.

May your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.