The Pilgrim’s Guide to Angkor collection is a body of work devoted to learning how to meet Angkor with patience, reverence, and care.
At its centre stands The Pilgrim’s Guide to Angkor, a contemplative companion that approaches the temple world as a living field of instruction rather than a catalogue of monuments. Surrounding it is the A Pilgrimage to… series: a growing set of site-specific volumes, each devoted to a single temple and written as a slow, sustained act of attention.
Together, the collection does not aim to explain Angkor exhaustively, nor to resolve it into history or symbolism alone. Instead, it offers a way of seeing shaped by lived encounter. Each volume is written from prolonged, repeated walking among the stones, attentive to thresholds and causeways, light and enclosure, ascent and stillness, water and reflection. Architecture is treated not as spectacle, but as a teacher—one that instructs through proportion, sequence, and restraint.
The larger guide establishes the shared ground: the ethical, architectural, and spiritual sensibility through which Angkor may be approached. The pilgrimage volumes then slow the pace further, remaining with one site long enough for its particular atmosphere, structure, and rhythm to reveal themselves. Read together, they form a layered pilgrimage—moving from orientation, to attention, to deep familiarity.
Across the collection, attention is understood as a moral act, beauty as a responsibility, and preservation as a form of care grounded in humility rather than mastery. The writing moves between embodied observation, architectural insight, mythic memory, and ethical reflection, always returning to the question of how a sacred place should be met.
The Pilgrim’s Guide to Angkor collection is for readers willing to walk slowly, to look without possession, and to allow understanding to arise through presence rather than accumulation. These books may be read before visiting Angkor, while moving through its temples, or long after—as companions to return to, as one returns to places that continue to teach.
They are offered not as answers, but as invitations: to stand more carefully, to see more clearly, and to listen more deeply.
