Legacy of stone
****At Phimai the ancient Khmer lend grandeur to their name
Lloyd Sullivan
(Bangkok Post dd. 23 mei 2006 // DN)
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The Prasat Hin Phimai is one of the best examples of Khmer architecture from the Mahayana Buddhist era. It’s built of sandstone and laterite.
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Buddhist monks pose for a photograph at Prasat Hin Phimai where they were tourists just like the rest of us.
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An artist’s rendering of a scene from a bygone era. There are little villages in Thailand today with homes not very different from those depicted.
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The village of Ban Than Prasat was once home to another rice-growing community estimated to be 2,500-3,000 years old. Artifacts from the period are on display in the village museum.
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In Ban Prasat during the dry season there isn’t a lot for males to do, so they pass the time napping. Or trying to.
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Some Thai women were having a picnic on the temple grounds at Phimai. They couldn’t have picked a more restful spot.
When the average Westerner hears the word “Khmer” he almost automatically adds the French word for “red” (rouge) and conjures up the murderous Marxist ideologues that tried and almost succeeded in destroying Cambodia in the early 1970s. But the original Khmer weren’t a bunch of atavistic, xenophobic, anti-intellectual nihilists. Quite the contrary. They were the light of their age.
The Khmer, or Angkor Civilisation, was founded in Cambodia in the 9th century. As it grew it spread north and east throughout much of modern-day Laos and Thailand as far as the Burma border. The early Lanna and Sukhothai kingdoms of the Thais were in fact wrested from the Khmer as the latter’s influence began to wane in the 13th century, their empire finally crumbling in a series of civil wars following the death of their last great monarch, King Jayavarman VII.
The Khmer were a deeply religious people who embraced both Hinduism and an evolving Buddhism and their temples, the most famous of which is Angkor Wat in northern Cambodia, reflect that duality of religious belief in both construction and artistic embellishment.
I was headed up Highway 2 in Nakhon Ratchasima Province to see one of those temples in the modern town of Phimai just 60 kilometres north of the city of Korat, but since it was a beautiful afternoon and I wasn’t in any hurry, I decided first to take a side trip into the little farming village of Ban Than Prasat.
Ban Prasat is the site of a small-scale archeological dig where they’ve unearthed human remains and artifacts thought to be about 2,500-3,000 years old. I wanted to compare it with Ban Chiang, 5,000 years old, which I’d visited the year before.
I turned off the freeway onto a two lane paved road which took me west through an expanse of paddy fields, the ground lying fallow, the winter crop already in. There were no farmers in the fields, nothing much stirring on the land but foraging cattle and water buffalo.
Unlike Ban Chiang, Ban Prasat was half asleep when I got there, mostly the male half, swallowed up in hammocks suspended under trees, under porches, anywhere shady, like moths in their chrysalises, not much else for men to do in farm towns like Ban Prasat during the off season.
Signs pointed the way to the dig site and museum. There were no cars in the small, unpaved parking lot. I was concerned that the sound of my tyres crunching on the gravel might wake a couple of fellows who were napping on the grounds, but they didn’t budge. Just across the street a trio of middle-aged women sat on a reed mat out in front of a little store, preparing vegetables for the evening meal, happily gabbing, one eye on a toddler or two - no time for napping.
The Ban Prasat Museum is housed in two small stucco-covered buildings with tile roofs and features one of the recently discovered burial pits along with associated historical artifacts: pots, tools, jewellery, as well as several informational displays on local rice culture through the ages.
From what I could see, rice farming hadn’t changed much over the centuries, not in these parts, nor had the associated rituals and festivals. Local people in and around Ban Prasat still believe in the goddess Mae Phosob, overseer and protector of the rice crop, much as their ancestors did dating back who knows how long ago? They still pay homage to her twice a year with offerings of food, betel, cosmetics and weaving thread.
Phimai, just up the road, has a museum as well, the Phimai National Museum, which specialises in restored lintels (headstones) and carved and cast statuary of the Khmer, and is a remarkable repository of the art of that period, both Buddhist and Hindu. It features artifacts from Ban Prasat, too, better jewellery in fact than the little village museum had on display, and I thought if I were a citizen of Ban Prasat hoping to make a few extra tourist baht to supplement my farm income, I might say, “hey, you’re stealing our thunder up there,” but maybe what’s good for Phimai is good for Ban Prasat, too, one hand washing the other, I don’t know.
Just down the road and around the corner, Phimai Historical Park, unlike the National Museum, was pretty crowded when I got there, lots of tourists and vendors both. The tourists had come to see the Prasat Hin Phimai, self-described as one of the most important Mahayana Buddhist temples in Thailand, a Khmer sanctuary dating back 1,000 years; and the vendors had come to sell their food and wares to the crowd. Put all these people in period dress, replace the buses and cars and motorbikes with animal drawn carts, and you might well have been looking at a scene from a millennium past.
The temple restoration, a joint Thai-French project, was largely completed between 1964 and 1969 and features a city wall and gates, the impressive Naga Bridge, a large courtyard and several buildings, all made of laterite and sandstone.
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Demons protect the entrance to the Naga Bridge, a sandstone platform which represents the connection between heaven and earth in Hindu and Mahayana religion.
Their ruins are the latter day voice of the Khmer, the only substantial thing they left to posterity. The limited Khmer writing that exists is carved in stone and concerns itself primarily with religious ritual, royal virtue and certain epic tales of Indian literature.
We know the Khmer were accomplished architects from the remains of their temples, but they were also masters of irrigation, the careful management and diversion of water for agriculture being the foundation upon which their culture was built.
What little is known about everyday Khmer life we get from the chronicle of a Chinese ambassador to the kingdom in the late 13th century. It tells us, that among other things: Khmer dressed without adornment, men and women both going barefoot and bare-breasted, a kind a skirt wrapped around their waists for modesty; that only women engaged in buying and selling; that female beauties were culled from the general population and sent to court (where they may have prospered or languished according to their wiles); that most people lacked furniture in their homes, sitting instead on the floor, eating with their fingers from communal earthen pots, and bowls made of tightly woven leaves. As I wandered about the grounds inside the courtyard of Prasat Hin Phimai, saying hello to some Thai girls having a picnic here, watching some European tourists taking a guided tour there, getting a photograph of a half dozen Buddhist monks who were actually posing for someone else, I thought about the great civilisations that have come and gone in various places around the world in the last 4,000 years: the Sumerians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Incas and Aztecs, the Khmer, and considered the archaeologists of the future who’d one day be digging up our own.
How would they rate us?