JOHN STANMEYER—VII FOR TIME

ANSWER MY PRAYER: For this Balinese woman making an offering to the rice gods, paradise is a bountiful harvest

To believe in paradise is easy, but imagining it is not. Poets and prophets have had to show us the way. Buddha proffered enlightenment, an existence without suffering. The Vikings dreamed up Valhalla, a hall of dead heroes battling by day and feasting by night for eternity.

Dante famously described a heaven ruled by reason, while the writer Jorge Luis Borges confided,

"I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library."

The list goes on, with each paradise based on different conceptions of God, reality, salvation and delight. How to disentangle a concept that is so personal—and at the same time so universal? The memory of your first kiss, a sip of coconut milk on an infernal summer afternoon, the grasping hand of your newborn child: these are moments we all would have stretched into eternity. As the stories in this fifth edition of Time's annual Asian Journey issue demonstrate, the continent is home to patches of earthly paradise, signposts to a fulfilling afterlife, remnants of a world we have lost. These are not mere destinations.

Paradise can be an ideal, a state of being, a discovery—a candle lit in the darkness.

Nirvana, at its core, is nonphysical. Perhaps the closest we can ever get to touching paradise is to reach for it. Something deeply ingrained in mankind drives us to that quest.

To say anything more would be a stretch, anything less, inhuman.

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