The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms

Kids

This is the trip I was talking about. Sometime we have to go to Indonesia Java Thailand Burma Cambodia and Vietnam to see the history of the Hindu  and Buddhist kingdoms and the architecture/statue art they left behind. It's not a holiday as lying in the beach and vegetating but this is exciting as well. Can you imagine walking in the footsteps of our ancestors? Their dreams and prayers. Their joys and sorrows. 

One day when I grow up, I'm going to go to Afghanistan as well. Don't think I can take you too but it's a plan. And I'm planning the Antarctica trip. That should be violent and exciting :) so be prepared with your sea sickness pills :) I absolutely loved Galapagos. It was a holiday and trip which was absolutely bonkers. We need to do more of that. 

But fascinating reading this article kids. 

Love

Baba

The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms by William Dalrymple
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/may/21/great-and-beautiful-lost-kingdoms/
(via Instapaper)

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Buddhism Along the Silk Road, 5th–8th Century

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 2, 2012–February 10, 2013

Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, Fifth to Eighth Century

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, April 14–July 27, 2014

Bridgeman Images A tower at the Ta Prohm temple, founded by the Khmer king Jayavarman VII, Angkor, Cambodia, late twelfth–early thirteenth centuries

“People of distant places with diverse customs,” wrote a Chinese Buddhist monk in the mid-seventh century, “generally designate the land that they admire as India.”
Xuanzang was a scholar, traveler, and translator. When he wrote these words in the seventh century, he had just returned from an epic seventeen-year, six-thousand-mile overland pilgrimage and manuscript-gathering expedition to the great Indian centers of Buddhist learning. Buddhism by then had been the established religion of most of South and Central Asia since it was taken up by Emperor Ashoka in the third century BC, around three hundred years after the Buddha’s death in northern India. The account Xuanzang wrote of his journey, Buddhist Record of the Western World, makes it clear that the places he passed through from western China to the Hindu Kush were then very largely dominated by Indic ideas, languages, and religions.