Category: Asia
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Cambodia, and the trauma of a nation
With the defeat of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese in 1979, the survivors of four years of terror could slowly start picking up the bits and pieces of what was left of their lives. With a quarter of the population dead, almost every family had lost several of its loved ones.…
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Derailment of the mind
This is how I tend to look at people who are guided in their thinking and actions by extreme fanaticism. But one might as well say that the fanatic mind is not derailed; on the contrary, it perceives only one rail, only one track to a certain end which it follows with blinkers on, insensitive…
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Killing Fields
Chamkar Krauch 30 burial pits 450 bodies Me Chbar 1 prison burial pit 300 bodies Veal Batt Kang a rice field 500 bodies Tuol Roung Chrey 1 mass grave 400 bodies Banteay O Ta Krey 35 burial pits 4000 bodies Phlauv Meas 30 burial pits 200-250 bodies Wat Samdech Muny 6 mass graves …
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Democratic Kampuchea
or the invention of hell Angkar, the mysterious name (meaning “the organisation”) behind which the Khmer Rouge government of Pol Pot hid itself, had changed the name of Cambodia into Democratic Kampuchea. During their four years of totalitarian rule, the population was forcefully ‘re-educated’ and indoctrinated by Angkar’s radical communist ideology. A collection of slogans…
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Angkar, Angkor
Two similar images, two similar words, but referring to two very different memorable episodes in the history of Cambodia. Angkar (“the organisation”), being the name the Khmer Rouge used for its own leadership. Between 1975 and 1979, Angkar’s regime of terror caused the death of approximately one quarter of the total population of 8 million…
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The lonely slipper
or Shiva and Parvati in a courtyard “Shiva is man and Parvati is woman; they are the causes of creation. All men have Shiva as their soul, and all women are Parvati. Shiva has the form of the male sign, the lingam, and the goddess has the form of the female sign, the yoni. The…
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Floating Baobab
The decisive moment for this picture came only after it was taken. It occurred to me that it could be interesting to turn the photo 90° anti-clockwise, and that’s what you see here. It suddenly becomes intriguing: it looks as if the tree is floating on a perfectly still water surface, creating a crystal clear…
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The Pachinko temple
During my walks through different neighbourhoods of Kyoto, going from one beautiful temple, garden, or palace to another, I now and then passed buildings like the one in the photo and I’d wonder what kind of place this was and what went on inside. One afternoon I decided to enter a Pachinko parlour as I had…
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The art of tea
Looking at the photos in each of the last four posts, I highlighted a concept that is central to Zen or – in broader terms – to traditional Japanese culture. With the photo of the display in the Tokonoma I brought the word ‘harmony’ into focus, but ‘respect’, ‘purity’, or ‘tranquillity’ would not have been…
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Tranquillity
Zen rock gardens are oases of tranquillity. They are not intended as places we set foot in, but places we quietly contemplate from the outside. They are places for meditation, created in the precincts of Zen Buddhist temples. Ryoan-ji, the rock garden in the picture, dates from the end of the 15th century. With its…
καιρός remembered 