The Thai vihara is one of the world’s greatest art forms. It’s also a key center of Thai experience.
The Thai vihara is the main assembly hall in a wat (Buddhist monastery) that lay people can enter. It marked a major cultural shift from the gargantuan temples that the former Khmer rulers built. [click to continue…]
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Gee, I’ve been writing about huge things in the most recent posts. Egypt’s pyramids, the imaginations of ancient Indian seers who composed the Rg Veda. I need a break from those alpha-males.
The Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza–many people measure a civilization by the big things it builds. But other cultures have excelled at objects from everyday life. These societies have been as creative as the ones that have made huge monuments.
Thailand is one of the best examples. Thais have created an enormous range of popular art forms that have graced ordinary life. Let’s take a look at one. [click to continue…]
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In Facts About Djoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara, Egypt; Part One, we saw some of the basic reasons why this is one of the world’s greatest buildings.
But this monument holds many mysteries beneath the surface. We’ll explore them in this post. [click to continue…]
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Djoser’s step pyramid at Saqqara was one of the most dramatic architectural revolutions in world history. There’s no way to overstate its impact.
Let’s explore what makes Djoser’s step pyramid one of the world’s greatest structures. [click to continue…]
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I said that the last post on the Rg Veda was the final one, but nothing is final in the Rg Veda.
The Rg Veda began a tradition that still lives. It’s India’s most prevalent spiritual and literary tradition. More and more meanings were found in the Rg Veda. [click to continue…]
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Priests getting stoned? Celebrations of the warrior Indra kicking butt on the battlefield? Nomadic herders praying for more cows? You can see why the Rg Veda has been criticized for lacking inspiring ideas.
But the Rg Veda contains unique aesthetics that flowered into one of the world’s most creative civilizations. We saw how numerous and how deep its cultural currents were in the last three posts. In this final post, we’ll see one of the main ways in which they inspired some of the world’s most influential spiritual thought. [click to continue…]
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Who’s who in the Rg Veda? Who were the main deities that ancient Indians worshipped in their oldest text?
We’ll find that some of ancient India’s gods were very different from the Greek Olympians. These differences helped set India on a unique intellectual course which has been one of the world’s most creative. [click to continue…]
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Today we’ll proceed more deeply into one of the world’s most influential texts, the Rg Veda.
Many of the high flying philosophies in the Upanisads, and many of the epic visions in the Mahabharata and Ramayana emerged from this older text. Yet the Rg Veda is a dark continent for most people. We’ll find out what makes it special. [click to continue…]
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Yesterday’s post explored reasons why ancient Egyptians built pyramids. Now we’ll fly to a very different culture.
We’ll look at India’s oldest literature, the Rg Veda, in these posts, and see features in it that have helped make India unique. Let’s spread our wings and explore a very unique land. [click to continue…]
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In this last of three parts, we’ll explore more of the rich web of ideas that inspired Egyptians to build so big.
Pyramids were linked with a cycle of myths that was central in ancient Egyptians’ concepts of order. [click to continue…]
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