THE EASTERN MIND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 784, 30 July 1954, Page 12

THE EASTERN MIND

THE CULTURE OF SOUTH-EAST ASIA, by Reginald le May; Allen and Unwin, English price 42/-. [N these days, when Indo-China, Burma and Siam have become symbols in the popular mind of a faceless Asiatic. horde, a book such as this is invaluable, presenting as it does in abundant detail the evidence of a living history in these places and a continuity | of culture. It may be argued that dialectical materialism will oust there eyery manifestation of the deeper springs of action and meditation-but only by the doctrinaire critic who has forgotten that men fight less often for intellectual reasons than for food and a restoration of human dignity. This book is not political. Emphatically it is the kind of book one can bathe in and rise from refreshed. Mr. le May traces the seedtime, flowering and fruiting of Buddhist temple-building and statuary from the third century A.D. to the sixteenth. His style at its best approaches the evocative, sensuous beauty of D. H. Lawrence’s writing in Etruscan Places; certainly his approach is always a live one. One detects the reason implicitly throughout the book, and explicitly at the end of the ninth chapter- To Europeans the Khmer forms are generally considered more pleasing, but that is because the European generally prefers the individualistic or human rather than the symbolic form of art. Each is entitled to its share in our appreciation of beauty, but the more we live with and strive to understand the symbolic form, the more we shall tend to enrich our spirit as opposed to our senses. It has taken me personally a long time to realise this truth, but my own experience has been such that I cannot doubt it now. Mr. le May, ‘by the discipline of archaeology, has come to know more than archaeology. His book would be worth its price for the accompanying plates alone. I would refer any intending reader first to the bronze Buddha (fig. 55) for whom the Naga King, the immense coiled and seven-headed cobra, provides a footstool and shade. If he

fs gripped by that, he will be gripped, less dramatically, by the rest; if not, he had better put the book down again.

James K.

Baxter