“Communion with the Infinite”

"The care and veneration shown by the Valley's inhabitants for their settlements and towns, their temples and holy places, are closely matched by their concern for the natural environment, in the sowing and harvesting of the rice which is their staple diet..Thus, farming becomes an artistic creation. Over the centuries, the face of the land has been shaped by this process. Thousands of terraces have been constructed and landscape veined by countless canals to irrigate the growing rice. This great task of landscaping has been carried out with no other tools but simple hoes..Now the valley has hardly an acre of land which has not been pressed into use. Here man has genuinely conquered the earth — but without destroying it. In close creative interplay, man and nature have developed together. When the dry winter etches the grey tones of the terraces against the white backdrop of mountain peaks, the handiwork of man is most clearly seen for a few short weeks. Soon the heavy monsoon rains turn the picture into a waterscape, with hundreds of small lakes rising in tiers. Then, very soon, the rice begins to grow — looking from a distance like light moss — and fills the landscape with innumerable shades of green. Finally comes the ripening, and the rice takes on a burning brightness ranging from yellow to orange..The settlements themselves, built of the same material and the same earth, also change with the seasons, always maintaining their essential relationship with the soil on which they stand..Until now this people has preserved intact its environment, maintained its traditional way of life based on its system of the extended family and continued undisturbed its communion with the spiritual and the infinite..But today the people of Kathmandu Valley face a critical choice: whether to build their future quietly on the foundations of their past, and go on living in their paradise, or to opt for a 20th-century way of life so often beset with commercialism and the errors of misapplied technology.".The writer, an Austrian town planner, worked as a United Nations expert in Nepal from 1965 till the mid-1970s. He helped direct a monument survey of the Valley. This excerpt is from a longer piece printed in the December 1974 issue of the UNESCO Courier.