ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY PHILIPPE LARDY

Most of us in asia find paradise very easily—by picking up the brochure that tells us Koh Samui has a Paradise hotel and Nepal is home to the Nirvana Garden, while the Shangri-La chain has just opened a new property somewhere far from a Himalayan mountain pass. Paradise in Asia has been found so often that it's been marketed, subleased, regained and then rebuilt. And as soon as we make it to, say, Leh—or Koh Phi Phi, or Lhasa, or Luang Prabang, or Ubud—we see that so many others have decided to get away from it all that it looks only marginally less crowded than Tokyo's Ginza district on a Monday morning.

Asia has long been one of the great cradles of the very notion of paradise, luring seekers of truth and enlightenment from every corner to the Himalayas, the idyllic beaches of Southeast Asia, the rigorous temples of Japan. But whether in Marco Polo or James Hilton (and his Lost Horizon), paradise is likely to look more human than paradisal as soon as a human lands there. Though Hollywood, official architect of paradise, gave us a happy ending to Lost Horizon—Robert Conway, having forsaken the land of "Shangri-La," finally scrambles through snowstorms and near-death back to its entrance—the original book is more suitably ambiguous. The onetime Oxford don is last seen as "a wanderer in two worlds," far from his utopia and haunted by all he has left behind.

The central paradox of paradise, of course, is that it is only presumed to exist when nobody has seen it. Set eyes on the place, and you're liable to bring it back into the realm of the mortal. And if paradise is the state of absolute perfection, the only changes that can come to it involve imperfection. That gorgeous strip of beach in the Philippines, seen by no one, is soon the site of an Arcadia resort, a Xanadu massage parlor and a Lotusland travel agency, offering trips to other supposed paradises a few kilometers away.

The important thing about paradise, in the Lost Horizon myth, is that it really exists nowhere except in the mind: Shangri-la ought to exist, even if it doesn't on earth, is the book's message, and we all need some ideal Tibet in our head to get us through the afternoon in the deadlocked traffic of Jakarta. Even when Heinrich Harrer did stumble into something of a pastoral never-never land in his Seven Years in Tibet, just as he was befriending the teenage Dalai Lama, Chinese troops approached, and paradise was lost, as it always is. Shangri-la now exists mostly in Harrer's memoirs, or in the unreal place we long to find somewhere in those snowcapped mountains.

The Dalai Lama would likely have told Harrer, if he'd been told that his home was paradise, that it was indeed, provided one was prepared to see it in that light. The mind, as Milton wrote, "can make heaven of hell, and a hell of heaven." A tiny apartment in Shanghai is paradise for a rural worker in Sichuan province, and a seven-star hotel in Bel Air is often not so paradisal for the frantic movie producers who take their worries there. My current paradise is a drab suburb in nowhere Japan that entices mostly with what it doesn't have: crowds, distractions, the press of the world. Someone could build a cinema here and make it more perfect—but then my favorite convenience store might disappear.

The paradises we find around us, Asia has always taught us, are as ephemeral, as subject to the whims of history, as everything else in the fallen world. Bali can only get worse, or get tarted up to look like someone else's artistic notion of what is better. The paradises inside us are ephemeral, too, but at least we can always find a new way of rehabilitating them, or, when one illusion is gone, replace it with another. Those utopian souls in search of the perfect wave, the temple away from it all, the Thai village that has never seen a foreigner, won't ever find what they're looking for—because their finding it makes it something different. But those who keep a provisional paradise inside of themselves—which might even possess some of the elements of Shangri-la—are resting on much more solid ground. On many a Zen temple, a sign above the entrance reads: "Look beneath your feet."

Pico Iyer is a longtime contributor to TIME, and the author, most recently, of the collection of essays Sun After Dark

Aug. 18, 2004	Aug. 19, 2003	Aug. 20, 2003