Temples of Southeast Asia and India

South of China, where the monsoon rules and the rivers run down from the Himalaya to the warm seas, this global golden age took its own magnificent form, and it left its signature not in libraries or ledgers but in stone, in some of the largest and most astonishing religious monuments ever raised by human hands. Here, Indian civilization met the seafaring cultures of Southeast Asia, and the meeting produced a distinctive genius: the temple as a model of the cosmos, the mountain of the gods rebuilt on earth so that a king might stand at its center where heaven and earth meet.

The greatest of them all still stands in the Cambodian forest. The Khmer Empire, which ruled much of mainland Southeast Asia for six centuries, built at Angkor the largest city of the entire pre-industrial world, a sprawling hydraulic metropolis of perhaps three-quarters of a million people, its life organized around vast reservoirs and canals that stored the monsoon rains and fed the rice that fed the multitude. At its heart the king Suryavarman the Second raised Angkor Wat, still the largest religious monument on the planet, an entire artificial mountain of stone carved to represent Mount Meru, the axis of the Hindu universe, its miles of galleries covered in reliefs, including one that depicts the gods and demons churning the ocean of milk to draw out the nectar of immortality, using a vast serpent as their rope. A later king, Jayavarman the Seventh, turned the empire toward Buddhism and built the Bayon, its towers carved with enormous serene stone faces gazing out in every direction. Nearby, on the island of Java, an earlier dynasty had already raised Borobudur, a colossal stepped pyramid of two million blocks arranged as a three-dimensional map of the Buddhist path, up which a pilgrim climbs, level by level, from the world of desire toward enlightenment at the summit.

Behind these monuments lay the deep and continuing brilliance of India itself, which had already given the world, in the Gupta golden age and after, gifts we still use every day without knowing their origin. It was Indian mathematicians who developed the place-value number system and perfected the concept of zero as a true number, the quiet revolution that makes modern calculation possible; the very digits you would write a sum with descend from theirs, carried to us through the Arabs of two chapters ago. Indian astronomers calculated the length of the year and proposed that the Earth rotated on its axis; Indian metallurgists forged the great iron pillar of Delhi that has stood in the open for sixteen centuries without rusting. And India was also, in these centuries, a great exporter of the inner sciences: it was from India that Buddhism carried its map of the mind across all of Asia, and it was to the high plateau of Tibet that a particular treasure of esoteric Buddhism traveled, where practitioners developed one of the most systematic explorations of consciousness, death, and meditative states any culture has ever attempted. The Tibetans even preserved a tradition of terma, of hidden teachings deliberately concealed by past masters to be discovered by the right seeker at the right future time, a beautiful and literal image of the theme this whole Part has been circling: knowledge placed carefully into hiding, so that it might survive to be found again.

Four regions, then, one age. The Islamic house of learning, the kingdoms of Africa, the Silk Road superpower of China, and the temple-civilizations of monsoon Asia, all of them brilliant, all of them connected, all of them lit while one small peninsula of western Europe is remembered, wrongly, as the whole of a "dark" age. Seen properly, these centuries were a plural and radiant global epoch, nearly continuous from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Nearly continuous, but not quite. For there remained an entire half of the human world that this teeming Old World network did not touch at all, that had been developing in total isolation for more than ten thousand years, running in parallel its own magnificent experiment in what human beings become. It is time to cross the ocean.