Or do they choose not to? A Frenchman named Henri Mouhot visited the 'lost kingdom' of Angkor in the 1850s, and when his descriptions were published in France, they caused a sensation and earned Mouhot the prestige of discovery. It was an erroneous attribution, of course -- the Portuguese, for instance, probably beat him there by three hundred years -- but the inevitable controversy over every "land discovery" only proves that there's no such thing. Mouhot scolded the Khmer for neglecting their patrimony by letting the temples languish in the jungle, an accusation that helped France hide its imperial appetite behind a mask of conservationist philanthropy. Their occupation of Cambodia began just a few years after Mouhot's book was published.

It would be easy, and essentially correct, to reproach the West for expropriating Angkor; but the Cambodians' own dominion over the temples has long been loose -- and again I must resist cynicism, and censor my complaint that the Cambodians don't care, the Cambodians let their heritage molder. Instead I've come to believe that they don't obsessively preserve and protect Angkor because they trust it, and their faith needs no upkeep. Surely the houses of the gods can protect themselves, as they protected those who built and prayed in them. Let Angkor live as long as it will, as long as it already has, until it wills no more, and sheds its earthly body -- as all creatures do in the end. God-kings built these temples to celebrate their Hindu and Buddhist spiritualities, both of which seek our liberation -- the Hindu moksha -- into the glorious infinity of nonbeing. The temples await their own moksha. For now, they are quite literally performing the Hindu role of Forest Dweller, in which the elder, having spent a long life working, raising a family, and serving a community, goes humbly into the woods to explore life's ineffable mysteries. But Angkor's forest retreat is more perfect than any human's could ever be; rather than entering the trees, the temples are letting the trees enter them.

Perhaps that's why I deleted paragraphs of angry despair at Western tenure over Angkor, of frustration that the Cambodians let the jungle erode Ta Prohm, and of disappointment that they don't loudly declare the temples Cambodia's, nor order us to stop climbing all over the stones and flashing the soles of our feet. I hated that some Westerners claimed to seek "Asian" divinity at Angkor yet mistreated the Asians living around it -- but not as much as I hated how many more tourists seemed to seek nothing more than a sight to tick off a list, cheap drugs, and an exotic passport stamp. Yet this too seems pointless to regret because I keep arriving at the hard and reflexive conclusion that we seek ourselves where we travel. The Buddhists may laugh at us gently because they know anatta: we have no selves, no souls. Neither does Angkor; no one owns it; it doesn't matter who pays to preserve it or that it is preserved at all. Like the jungle that irresistibly reclaims them, the temples will survive all of its inhabitants and all of its visitors.

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