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Singapore – Bugis mosques and temples

December 12, 2011 in Southeast Asia | No comments

The ethnic names of places near Bugis–Little India, the Muslim district–reflect historical patterns of settlement in Singapore. But with the country’s powerhouse economic growth and its policy of achieving diversity in every area, there are no longer strong concentrations of ethnic folk in the area. Nevertheless, significant structures of worship remain. And are well attended.

On the pedestrian Waterloo Street is a traditional Chinese Buddhist temple, the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho temple, founded in 1884 at this location and enlarged a century later to accommodate the throngs of visitors who come there to practice divination with joss sticks. Believed to bring good luck to its visitors, the temple is enormously popular.

 

 

Right next door stands the Sri Krishnan Hindu temple, dedicated to Lord Krishna (an incarnation of the god Vishnu) and adorned with exuberant technicolor statuary.

 

 

Nearby, as it turns out, are also Christian churches and a Jewish synagogue, which (alas) I didn’t see. Singapore is truly an ecumenical country, tolerant of and fostering all religions.

The Masjid Abdul Gaffoor is a handsome mosque located in the Little India area.

Construction began on this mosque in 1907. It is an historic landmark and was extensively renovated in 2003. The juxtaposition of this handsome building, with its stars-and-crescent-moon motif and its cinquefoil windows, with the rather garish modern tower in the distance is–for better or worse–a typical tableau in Singapore.

An even more significant mosque, Masjid Sultan, with its splendid golden dome, dominates the Muslim district.

 

There are numerous other houses of worship throughout Singapore, where people of all ethnicities and believes mingle peaceably.

 

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Cambodia – Oudong region

November 18, 2011 in Photographs, Southeast Asia | No comments

A number of new temples and monasteries have sprung up (or been rebuilt) in the vicinity of Oudong Mountain. We visited several. Alas, I don’t know the name of this temple. I can say only that it is fairly new and beautifully decorated, inside and out. The railings of the stairways and terraces are all seven-headed nagas (serpents), and lions guard the way.

  Inside, the temple is high and spacious. A large Buddha sitting under his Bo-tree dominates the room. His electric halo and fingers touching the ground show that he has achieved enlightenment.

 

 

The walls and ceilings are covered with paintings detailing the various incarnated lives of the Buddha.

 

 

Nearby a golden statue of the meditating Buddha protected by the king of nagas dominates a serene garden.

 

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Cambodia – Everyday life a thousand years ago

October 8, 2011 in Photographs, Southeast Asia | No comments

Besides for its astonishing collection of heads, Angkor Thom’s Bayon temple also contains a marvelous bas-relief depicting scenes from everyday life. I’m sure that someone, somewhere, has an idea of what all these people are doing. Some of them, I can identify. As for the rest, the pictures are charming, but I don’t know. Respond with a comment if you think you have a clue!

Also, please don’t ask me what all those fish and crocodiles and so on are doing up in the sky. Maybe that’s what they get during monsoon season instead of “raining cats and dogs.” Or maybe the bas-relief works its way downwards and there’s some naval scene up above.

   I think the next couple of pictures depict people in houses.

 Now we come to a few that I might identify. A couple of scenes where people are cooking.

  A woman giving birth, perhaps.

Men playing a board game.

And finally, of course, war.

 

 

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Cambodia – Angkor Thom, the Bayon temple

September 30, 2011 in Photographs, Southeast Asia | No comments

Remember the Churning of the Ocean of Milk? The story reappears at Angkor Thom, where the gods on one side and the giants on the other, each pulling at their half of the great serpent, form railings leading to the main entrance of the Bayon temple.

  

You can’t see them well in this picture, but there are huge faces in the stone above the entryway.

In fact, there are huge faces all over the place at Angkor Thom’s Bayon temple. I was going to say the place was crawling with them…but that’s too weird an image. These faces are quite still. They haven’t moved in over nine hundred years. Not much, anyway.

      

 

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Inle Lake – near Phaung Daw Oo Pagoda

August 31, 2011 in Photographs, Southeast Asia | No comments

From the deck of the restaurant where we ate lunch, we could see the splendid temple we would tour shortly.

This pagoda houses five ancient and sacred Buddha images, which are believed to have been brought to Myanmar from the Malay peninsula sometime in the twelfth century. The images are small–only nine to eighteen inches high–and so much gold leaf has been applied to them in this century alone that you can no longer even guess they were once Buddhas. I don’t have a photo, but there is a good image here.

As you might guess, these small statues are uncommonly heavy.

Therefore, it may come as no surprise that when an unexpected storm came up while the Buddhas were being transported on their annual round of the Inle Lake villages and the ceremonial boat capsized, they sank to the bottom of the lake.

The lake is not deep, and four of the five statues were recovered. But search as they may, no one could find the fifth–and largest statue. You can imagine everyone’s surprise when they returned to the temple with the other four statues, and the fifth one was waiting for them there.

Clearly, this one statue didn’t want to travel any more. And so for the last fifty years, only four of the statues make the annual round of the villages.

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After lunch, we took the back way and walked to the pagoda. Dan and I being the kind of tourists that we are, we found the backyards as interesting as the waterfront.

 

 

A canal separated us from the temple. From its bank we watched some young women doing, um, something, involving tin cans and water. Then we crossed the narrow pedestrian bridge.

 

At the temple, groups of people talked or prayed, but we didn’t see anyone applying gold leaf right then.

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Bagan – Seen (scene) along the road

August 10, 2011 in Photographs, Southeast Asia | No comments

You can’t drive anywhere in Bagan without passing temples and stupas. Many of these have names; maybe they all do. But many are just mysterious, ancient, and beautiful structures we just passed by on the way to somewhere else. Hey, it would take a year or more to visit them all!

The next two photos are of Hti-lo Minlo Temple, a place we possibly would have visited, had I not inadvertently forgotten to collect my shoes from the previous temple in my haste to escape a crowd of vendors who were desperate to make a living in this off-season for tourists and knew a sucker when they saw one (I’d foolishly bought something from one of them).

 

 

Yes, I did manage to retrieve the sandals!  ;-)

Below are some other temples and stupas, whose names I don’t know. But they sure are pretty…

          

Possibly, one or two of these might be other views of Htilo-Minlo from other angles on the road, I’m not sure. But I hope that all of these photos will show you something of the beauty and grace of the Bagan landscape.

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