It’s a smile of knowledge and kindness, of wisdom and mercy. It’s the smile of a bodhisattva, and it appears 216 times in the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom, the last stop on yesterday’s temple tour.

The smiles are both inscrutable and accessible, plain and adorned. They were hewn not in solid rock but in huge blocks of sandstone. The smiles were carved in pieces, and in this way they resemble real human smiles, which are often constructed of humor and rue, laughter and longing. 

                                                                                          
The faces of Bayon are a good memory to take home. A smile of compassion for the people I’ve met, for the lost and hopeless, for children playing marbles in a dry and dusty yard, for shop owners sweeping the dirt floor of their new business, for all the blurred scenery on the road, for life itself.