Angkor / Rabindranath Tagore

“What is the truth of this world? It is not in the masses of substance, not in the number of things, but in their relatedness, which neither can be counted, nor measured, nor abstracted. It is not in the materials which are many, but in the expression which is one. All our knowledge of things is knowing them in their relation to the Universe, in that relation which is truth.” (1)

Moving through the vastness of Angkor’s archaeological complex, I felt the togetherness of opposites.

A sense of strength and fragility combined.
The strength of nature. The fragility of nature.
The strength of human beings. The fragility of human beings.
The strength of fragile things.
The fragility of strong things.
One tangled with the other, alternating endlessly…

In Sanskrit, the word dvanda means a series of opposites in creation. “An unbreakable continuity of relation in the physical world between heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and rest. That is why these opposites do not bring confusion in the world but harmony.” (2)

Following my visit, I went back to my collection of poetry and essays by Tagore and found ‘the harmony of opposites’, a key concept of the Upanishads, which overlapped nicely with my impressions of Angkor.

In this post, I am sharing a few excerpts from the Essays as a preliminary introduction before developing a longer piece about this concept.

“In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their individual separateness. But the day reveals the greater unity which embraces them. The man whose inner vision is bathed in an illumination of his consciousness no longer awkwardly stumbles over individual facts of separateness in the human world.” (3)

“Reality in all its manifestations reveals itself in the emotional and imaginative background of our mind. We know it not because we can think of it, but because we directly feel it (…) Truth reveals itself in beauty. For if beauty were mere accident, a rent in the eternal fabric of things, then it would hurt, would be defeated by the antagonism of facts. Beauty is no phantasy, it has the everlasting meaning of reality.” (1)

“Think of all the thousands kinds of small and large noises that are perpetually sounding - and think of all the shaking, stirring, coming, going, swirling and so on - yet what a tiny part of it do we notice. The main reason for that is that, like a fisherman, our mind is able to throw only a single net, and take up only that little bit that is caught in one throw. When it sees, then it doesn’t hear well, when it hears then it doesn’t see well. When it thinks, then it does not see or hear well.” (3)