and/or www.mantra.com/jai (Dr. Jai Maharaj)
2011-10-20 19:25:42 UTC
Forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2011/10/vat-phou-temples-ancient-history.html
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
An Angkoran ruin in Laos
October 19, 2011
Loading Image...
Vat Phou in Laos, Stuff.co.nz 20111018
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
Stuff.co.nz
18 October 2011
In the fifth century, Champasak was thought to be the centre of the
Laotian universe. Today it's a drowsy one-car village clutching the
western bank of the Mekong River in southern Laos and home to the
tiny Hindu-built Vat Phou, which some archaeologists believe may have
been the first Angkor temple ever built.
At a glance, Vat Phou doesn't seem like the kind of structure that
would initiate an empire. A tiny prayer hall at the top of a
precarious stone stairway, with two reception halls on the plains
below, Vat Phou lacks the jaw-dropping awesomeness of temples in
Cambodia's Angkor Archaeological Park. But as with the Angkor
temples, its symbolism is extraordinary.
Tucked under the phallic-shaped mountain peak of Phu Kao -- thought
to represent Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the
Hindu cosmology -- Vat Phou was worshipped as the embodiment of
Shiva. The spring nearby was associated with Shiva's wife, the
goddess Parvati. Water runs underground from Phu Kao's peak, rising
through Parvati. From here, passing a series of barays (man-made
dams) and linga (phallic statues), water flows into the Mekong,
blessing everything on its journey south.
Full story here
http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/international/5800903/Vat-Phou-temples-ancient-history
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
Leisa Tyler
Last updated 05:00 18/10/2011
Loading Image...
Tristan Savatier - Getty Images
UNDER THREAT: The ruins of Vat Phou in southern Laos hold secrets
that are being destroyed by development.
In the fifth century, Champasak was thought to be the centre of the
Laotian universe. Today it's a drowsy one-car village clutching the
western bank of the Mekong River in southern Laos and home to the
tiny Hindu-built Vat Phou, which some archaeologists believe may have
been the first Angkor temple ever built.
At a glance, Vat Phou doesn't seem like the kind of structure that
would initiate an empire. A tiny prayer hall at the top of a
precarious stone stairway, with two reception halls on the plains
below, Vat Phou lacks the jaw-dropping awesomeness of temples in
Cambodia's Angkor Archaeological Park. But as with the Angkor
temples, its symbolism is extraordinary.
Tucked under the phallic-shaped mountain peak of Phu Kao - thought to
represent Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the Hindu
cosmology - Vat Phou was worshipped as the embodiment of Shiva. The
spring nearby was associated with Shiva's wife, the goddess Parvati.
Water runs underground from Phu Kao's peak, rising through Parvati.
From here, passing a series of barays (man-made dams) and linga
(phallic statues), water flows into the Mekong, blessing everything
on its journey south.
I learn this while poring over a satellite map with Daniel Davenport,
an articulate but debated Australian archaeologist working in
Champasak and author of the Vat Phou Guide: Following in the
Footsteps of Angkor's Pilgrims, a tourist compendium on the area that
Davenport is self publishing.
"Vat Phou could quite well have been the first, the pre-eminent,
Angkor temple," he says, explaining that early worshippers took a
piece of Vat Phou stone and placed it under every subsequent temple
they built.
On the map, Davenport points out a well-defined line leading from one
of the reception halls at Vat Phou to the temple of Angkor Wat. "This
used to be a pilgrims' road during the Khmer Empire," he says,
referring to the kingdom that reigned over much of south-east Asia
between the ninth and thirteenth centuries and used the Angkor
Archaelogical Park as the capital. "They had roadhouses every six
miles (nine kilometres) with accommodation, food, shelter for the
animals and hospitals; six miles being the average distance a bullock
cart could travel in a day."
However, archaeologists at Vat Phou know a lot less than they would
like to. "We have excavated about 5 per cent of the area," says
Laurent Delfour, a French architect who has been working with UNESCO
to manage the site for the past three-and-a-half years. "That
translates as 5 per cent knowledge on the area. We believe that Vat
Phou marked the beginning of the Angkor Empire but nothing is
certain."
What is certain is the race against time Champasak's hidden treasures
face. A new highway linking the town with the regional capital of
Pakse and the Thai border post of Chong Mek, has already disturbed
six ancient temples beneath the ground. Champasak was designated a
World Heritage zone in 2001; building without assessments, and
approval, is not permitted.
"The Laos Ministry of Information and Culture did a little research
into the area where the road was going," says a long-term Champasak
resident who requested anonymity. "But the findings were just pushed
aside and work on the road accelerated."
The local government is hoping the road, which will extend to the
Cambodian border, will bring in busloads of tourists.
Parcels of land on the road to Vat Phou have been partitioned for
infrastructure such as entertainment complexes and restaurants.
At a glance, Champasak doesn't seem to have changed since my first
visit in the late 1990s, when the trickle of visitors who made it
this far south stayed in bamboo-built bungalows and getting to Pakse,
50 kilometres away, required crossing the Mekong by ferry, then
negotiating a muddy trail into town.
Champasak's streets are still lined with gently decaying colonial
buildings and shop-houses selling refreshments such as pho and tam
mak hung - spicy papaya salad. The preferred mode of transport has
been upgraded from bicycle to motorbike. There is also a clutch of
recently opened boutique hotels. The Hotel Inthira Champanakone has
14 rooms set around a white colonial mansion that used to be a
Chinese trading house. A few kilometres outside Champasak, a new
River Resort is under construction. The 24-room La Folie Lodge on Don
Daeng Island, on the opposite side of the river, has manicured
gardens and a lovely pool.
Champasak even has a spa. Run by a French couple, Champa Spa offers
Laotian-style massages from $US6 ($NZ7.84), in an old wooden house
using home-made herbal oils.
The town's greatest find is more surreptitious. Frice & Lujanie, an
unassuming two-table restaurant on the front porch of a 1950s
bungalow, uses eighteenth and nineteenth century recipes drawn from
northeast Italy's Friuli region. Everything from the pasta to the
porchetta is home-made and, best of all, you can stuff yourself silly
on a budget. My bill for two people, including several glasses French
table wine, comes to less than $US25 (NZ$31).
From Champasak, you can take a long-tail wooden boat south to Si Phan
Don, literally translated as "four thousand islands". Here the Mekong
stretches its girth across 14 kilometres and splits into countless
tributaries, forming an archipelago of islands and sand bars peppered
with palm trees and fishermen's stilt-built villages. An hour or two
east by car is the Bolaven Plateau, a cool, misty mountain range
teeming with tracts of old-growth rainforest, waterfalls and coffee
plantations.
Introduced by French colonists in the early twentieth century, coffee
is southern Laos's biggest export. It has instigated a small tourism
industry, with plantations opening on-site restaurants and hotels. A
roadside cafe serving Laotian-style coffee means strong robusta beans
ground and strained through a cotton sock, then mixed with a generous
dollop of sweet condensed milk.
The region's greatest hit is still Vat Phou. Accessible via a set of
77 stone stairs that rise past old frangipani trees and deity
statues, the tiny temple is as enchanting as its surrounds. Behind is
a sheer cliff face; below stretches the moss-green plains that hold
the riddles of ancient cities and civilisations.
At the heart of the temple, which barely measures five metres by
three, is a towering stone Buddha (Buddhism replaced Hinduism here in
the thirteenth century), crowded by three smaller statues and a
spread of offerings: flowers, incense, garlands and a Sprite bottle,
with straw. They have been left by the local caretakers and a trickle
of visitors who still worship here. It's quiet, peaceful and
absolutely captivating; for now...
- Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/international/5800903/Vat-Phou-temples-ancient-history
S. Kalyanaraman
Member, Action Committee Against Corruption in India (ACACI)
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of this post may not
have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the
poster. The contents are protected by copyright law and the exemption for
fair use of copyrighted works.
o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name, current
e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others are
not necessarily those of the poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted material the use of
which may or may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This material is being made available in efforts to advance the
understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democratic, scientific, social, and cultural, etc., issues. It is believed
that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research, comment, discussion and educational purposes by
subscribing to USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more information
go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article for purposes of
your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.
Since newsgroup posts are being removed
by forgery by one or more net terrorists,
this post may be reposted several times.
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.com/2011/10/vat-phou-temples-ancient-history.html
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
An Angkoran ruin in Laos
October 19, 2011
Loading Image...
Vat Phou in Laos, Stuff.co.nz 20111018
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
Stuff.co.nz
18 October 2011
In the fifth century, Champasak was thought to be the centre of the
Laotian universe. Today it's a drowsy one-car village clutching the
western bank of the Mekong River in southern Laos and home to the
tiny Hindu-built Vat Phou, which some archaeologists believe may have
been the first Angkor temple ever built.
At a glance, Vat Phou doesn't seem like the kind of structure that
would initiate an empire. A tiny prayer hall at the top of a
precarious stone stairway, with two reception halls on the plains
below, Vat Phou lacks the jaw-dropping awesomeness of temples in
Cambodia's Angkor Archaeological Park. But as with the Angkor
temples, its symbolism is extraordinary.
Tucked under the phallic-shaped mountain peak of Phu Kao -- thought
to represent Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the
Hindu cosmology -- Vat Phou was worshipped as the embodiment of
Shiva. The spring nearby was associated with Shiva's wife, the
goddess Parvati. Water runs underground from Phu Kao's peak, rising
through Parvati. From here, passing a series of barays (man-made
dams) and linga (phallic statues), water flows into the Mekong,
blessing everything on its journey south.
Full story here
http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/international/5800903/Vat-Phou-temples-ancient-history
Vat Phou temple's ancient history
Leisa Tyler
Last updated 05:00 18/10/2011
Loading Image...
Tristan Savatier - Getty Images
UNDER THREAT: The ruins of Vat Phou in southern Laos hold secrets
that are being destroyed by development.
In the fifth century, Champasak was thought to be the centre of the
Laotian universe. Today it's a drowsy one-car village clutching the
western bank of the Mekong River in southern Laos and home to the
tiny Hindu-built Vat Phou, which some archaeologists believe may have
been the first Angkor temple ever built.
At a glance, Vat Phou doesn't seem like the kind of structure that
would initiate an empire. A tiny prayer hall at the top of a
precarious stone stairway, with two reception halls on the plains
below, Vat Phou lacks the jaw-dropping awesomeness of temples in
Cambodia's Angkor Archaeological Park. But as with the Angkor
temples, its symbolism is extraordinary.
Tucked under the phallic-shaped mountain peak of Phu Kao - thought to
represent Mount Meru, the sacred mountain at the centre of the Hindu
cosmology - Vat Phou was worshipped as the embodiment of Shiva. The
spring nearby was associated with Shiva's wife, the goddess Parvati.
Water runs underground from Phu Kao's peak, rising through Parvati.
From here, passing a series of barays (man-made dams) and linga
(phallic statues), water flows into the Mekong, blessing everything
on its journey south.
I learn this while poring over a satellite map with Daniel Davenport,
an articulate but debated Australian archaeologist working in
Champasak and author of the Vat Phou Guide: Following in the
Footsteps of Angkor's Pilgrims, a tourist compendium on the area that
Davenport is self publishing.
"Vat Phou could quite well have been the first, the pre-eminent,
Angkor temple," he says, explaining that early worshippers took a
piece of Vat Phou stone and placed it under every subsequent temple
they built.
On the map, Davenport points out a well-defined line leading from one
of the reception halls at Vat Phou to the temple of Angkor Wat. "This
used to be a pilgrims' road during the Khmer Empire," he says,
referring to the kingdom that reigned over much of south-east Asia
between the ninth and thirteenth centuries and used the Angkor
Archaelogical Park as the capital. "They had roadhouses every six
miles (nine kilometres) with accommodation, food, shelter for the
animals and hospitals; six miles being the average distance a bullock
cart could travel in a day."
However, archaeologists at Vat Phou know a lot less than they would
like to. "We have excavated about 5 per cent of the area," says
Laurent Delfour, a French architect who has been working with UNESCO
to manage the site for the past three-and-a-half years. "That
translates as 5 per cent knowledge on the area. We believe that Vat
Phou marked the beginning of the Angkor Empire but nothing is
certain."
What is certain is the race against time Champasak's hidden treasures
face. A new highway linking the town with the regional capital of
Pakse and the Thai border post of Chong Mek, has already disturbed
six ancient temples beneath the ground. Champasak was designated a
World Heritage zone in 2001; building without assessments, and
approval, is not permitted.
"The Laos Ministry of Information and Culture did a little research
into the area where the road was going," says a long-term Champasak
resident who requested anonymity. "But the findings were just pushed
aside and work on the road accelerated."
The local government is hoping the road, which will extend to the
Cambodian border, will bring in busloads of tourists.
Parcels of land on the road to Vat Phou have been partitioned for
infrastructure such as entertainment complexes and restaurants.
At a glance, Champasak doesn't seem to have changed since my first
visit in the late 1990s, when the trickle of visitors who made it
this far south stayed in bamboo-built bungalows and getting to Pakse,
50 kilometres away, required crossing the Mekong by ferry, then
negotiating a muddy trail into town.
Champasak's streets are still lined with gently decaying colonial
buildings and shop-houses selling refreshments such as pho and tam
mak hung - spicy papaya salad. The preferred mode of transport has
been upgraded from bicycle to motorbike. There is also a clutch of
recently opened boutique hotels. The Hotel Inthira Champanakone has
14 rooms set around a white colonial mansion that used to be a
Chinese trading house. A few kilometres outside Champasak, a new
River Resort is under construction. The 24-room La Folie Lodge on Don
Daeng Island, on the opposite side of the river, has manicured
gardens and a lovely pool.
Champasak even has a spa. Run by a French couple, Champa Spa offers
Laotian-style massages from $US6 ($NZ7.84), in an old wooden house
using home-made herbal oils.
The town's greatest find is more surreptitious. Frice & Lujanie, an
unassuming two-table restaurant on the front porch of a 1950s
bungalow, uses eighteenth and nineteenth century recipes drawn from
northeast Italy's Friuli region. Everything from the pasta to the
porchetta is home-made and, best of all, you can stuff yourself silly
on a budget. My bill for two people, including several glasses French
table wine, comes to less than $US25 (NZ$31).
From Champasak, you can take a long-tail wooden boat south to Si Phan
Don, literally translated as "four thousand islands". Here the Mekong
stretches its girth across 14 kilometres and splits into countless
tributaries, forming an archipelago of islands and sand bars peppered
with palm trees and fishermen's stilt-built villages. An hour or two
east by car is the Bolaven Plateau, a cool, misty mountain range
teeming with tracts of old-growth rainforest, waterfalls and coffee
plantations.
Introduced by French colonists in the early twentieth century, coffee
is southern Laos's biggest export. It has instigated a small tourism
industry, with plantations opening on-site restaurants and hotels. A
roadside cafe serving Laotian-style coffee means strong robusta beans
ground and strained through a cotton sock, then mixed with a generous
dollop of sweet condensed milk.
The region's greatest hit is still Vat Phou. Accessible via a set of
77 stone stairs that rise past old frangipani trees and deity
statues, the tiny temple is as enchanting as its surrounds. Behind is
a sheer cliff face; below stretches the moss-green plains that hold
the riddles of ancient cities and civilisations.
At the heart of the temple, which barely measures five metres by
three, is a towering stone Buddha (Buddhism replaced Hinduism here in
the thirteenth century), crowded by three smaller statues and a
spread of offerings: flowers, incense, garlands and a Sprite bottle,
with straw. They have been left by the local caretakers and a trickle
of visitors who still worship here. It's quiet, peaceful and
absolutely captivating; for now...
- Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/international/5800903/Vat-Phou-temples-ancient-history
S. Kalyanaraman
Member, Action Committee Against Corruption in India (ACACI)
End of forwarded message from S. Kalyanaraman
Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti
o Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. The contents of this post may not
have been authored by, and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the
poster. The contents are protected by copyright law and the exemption for
fair use of copyrighted works.
o If you send private e-mail to me, it will likely not be read,
considered or answered if it does not contain your full legal name, current
e-mail and postal addresses, and live-voice telephone number.
o Posted for information and discussion. Views expressed by others are
not necessarily those of the poster who may or may not have read the article.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This article may contain copyrighted material the use of
which may or may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner. This material is being made available in efforts to advance the
understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic,
democratic, scientific, social, and cultural, etc., issues. It is believed
that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without
profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included
information for research, comment, discussion and educational purposes by
subscribing to USENET newsgroups or visiting web sites. For more information
go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this article for purposes of
your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the
copyright owner.
Since newsgroup posts are being removed
by forgery by one or more net terrorists,
this post may be reposted several times.