JAYAVARMAN VII
In 1177, the Chams sacked Angkor, creating a sense of trauma and crisis throughout the Angkor Empire by attacking and looting the capital.
King Jayavarman VII (1181-1219), ascends to the throne in the sense of crisis that had descended on the Khmer empire. Jayavarman VII studied the doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism, rather than Theravada. His Mahayana faith was the source of his attempt to be a Dharma-king, a bodhisattva, through service and merit making, to liberate himself and his kingdom. Why did he officially establish himself as a Buddhist king, turning his back on the old Hindu deities? Perhaps he and his people had become disillusioned with the Hindu gods, because of their failure to protect the Angkor Empire from being sacked by their enemies, the Cham. Jayavarman VII may have rejected Hinduism because the Cham sacked Angkor, and he may have thought that Shiva failed the Khmer people. The Cham themselves were Hindu, and he may have felt an instinctive revulsion or disgust for the religion of his enemies. He had practiced Buddhism for a long time, and naturally began to accentuate the Mahayana Buddhist aspect of the tantric god-king religion that had long held sway in Khmer dynasties. He withdrew his devotion from the old gods, and began to identify more openly with the Buddhist traditions. His regime marked a clear dividing line with the Hindu past.
Before 1200, art in the temples mostly portrayed scenes from the Hindu pantheon such as Vishnu reclining on a lotus leaf, or the churning of the primeval sea of milk of primal creation. After 1200, scenes from the Buddhist Jatakas, and life of the Buddha, along with scenes of the Ramayana began to appear as standard motif.
Jayavarman VII was elderly, perhaps 60, when he became king. He worked feverishly to accomplish his works in saving the Khmer people and establishing a Buddhist empire, in a race against time.
Jayavarman VII was a “bodhisattva king,” a Buddha-king, something like the Dalai Lama. “He was considered to be a living Buddha, or bodhisattva, turning back from the brink of enlightenment to redeem his people (a new concept in itself) from suffering. By redeeming others in this way, it was thought, a king redeemed himself.” [A History of Cambodia Chandler]
He had a sincere earnest belief of his destiny as a bodhisattva whose path in life was to deliver his people from suffering. The people were objects of his compassion, an audience for his merit-making, his redemption. Images of Jayavarman portray him in the ascetic seated meditation posture with a serene, enlightened expression.
He built numerous public works to serve the people, including, water works, hospitals, temples, hospices for travelers, far beyond any other Cambodian king. Chandler calls him the “most otherworldly of Cambodia’s kings.” Inscriptions say he “suffered from the maladies of his subjects more than from his own; for it is the public griefs that make a king’s grief, and not his own.” Another inscription reads: “Filled with a deep sympathy for the good of the world, the king swore this oath; ‘All beings who are plunged in the ocean of existence, may I draw then out by virtue of this good work. And may the kings of Cambodia who come after me, attached to goodness…attain with their wives, dignitaries and friends, the place of deliverance where there is no more illness.” One sign of the change underway was the building of many monastic buildings, including monasteries (vihara) and libraries. Whereas in former times, all effort had been focused on building the massive temple-mount of the devaraja, now more resources were invested into building monastic residence. There was a shift away from the cult of the king to the cult of the Sangha, which was more “earthly”, in direct contact with the people.
The Preah Khan was example of Jayavarman VIIs building projects. An 1191 inscription at the temple documents the residence of a community of 97,840 people associated with the monastery. The central Buddhist sanctuary contained a beautiful statue of Lokesvara, the bodhisattva, sculpted in the image of Jayavarman’sVII father. Today, a stupa stands there. Shrines dedicated to Vishnu and Shiva are also in the Buddhist temple, showing Jayavarman VII’s continued inclusiveness in supporting Hindu tradition. “Preah Khan housed a portrait statue of Jayavarman VII father, Dharanindravarman, with the traits of Lokesvara, the deity expressive of the compassionate aspect of the Buddha. The symbolism is relentlessly appropriate, for in Mahayana Buddhist thinking the marriage of wisdom (pranja) and compassion (karuna) gave birth to enlightenment, which is to say, the Buddha himself, the enlightened one.”[?] The Preah Khan, Ta Prohn and Bayon are representative of this layout. The Bayon, with the faces looking out in the four cardinal directions, represents the Buddha himself: Jayavarman VII.
Jayavarman VII also built the temple Ta Prahm to honor his parents in 1186. His mother was worshiped there as Pranjaparimita, the Goddess of Wisdom, the mother of the Buddhas. The temple also contained many shrines, including an image of his Kru (guru). The resident monks of the temple were Buddhist, Shivite and Vishnuite.
He considered his city, Angkor Thom, and this temple, The Bayon, to be his “bride”. An inscription says “the town of Yosadharapura, decorated with powder and jewels, burning with desire, the daughter of a good family…who married by the king in the course of a festival that lacked nothing, under the spreading dais of his protection.”
The object of the marriage, the inscription goes on to say, was the “procreation of happiness throughout the universe” – a worthy objective for a Buddha-king.
The building projects commissioned by the Buddha king were redolent with tantric Buddhist symbolism. The word “bayon” means “ancestor yantra” – yantra is a magical, geometric mandala shape. The central image of the of the temple was a Buddha, a portrait of Jayavarman VII himself, sheltered by an enormeous hooded snake.
The haunting faces of the Bayon, looking into the four directions, crowned with a blooming lotus, represent the four Brhamaviharas – love of a Buddha: Loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity looking over the Angkor Empire, and the universe. The trinity of Avilokitshvara, Pranjaparimita and Buddha was central to his thinking and manifest in the projects he commissioned in his lifetime
He constructed the Bayon at Angkor Thom, and established the rising influence of Mahayana Buddhism, after thoroughly defeating the threat of the Champa.
“By the mid-tenth century, the temple mountains each king built to house the lingam representing his potency were becoming mausoleums after his death. Each new king who reigned long enough to build a temple mountain had his lingam installed in it. After his death his ashes or corpse was deposited there, which his spirit lived on in the image of a god.” “In writing about Borobodur (the Javanese Angkor) Paul Mus explained that the temple-mountain was less a magnificent shelter for eh dead than an architectural body, where the magic soul lived on – shifting from a human body to a stone body. The Mahayanist Buddhism of Jayavarman VII permitted such personal cults. Such self-glorification was anathema to the Theravada Buddhism of post-Angkor Cambodia.]
“Villages were assigned responsibility to provide for the maintenance of temples (not only of reigning kings and their dead ancestors, but of some living men of signal eminence too). Multitudes of Khmer peasants ‘contributed’. Ta Prohm had 3,140 villages with 79,000 individuals working to support it; Preah Khan had 5,324 villages and nearly a hundred thousand persons in its service.” [Angkor Life, Stephen Murray]
The peasants and the public rarely or never saw or entered the temples they supported, along with the huge colleges of priests.
“Most scholars considered that the cult of the god-king was quite removed from everyday life. Devaraja was probably a burden without being felt to be much of an inspiration or blessing to those producing the rice surplus that made a religious elite and royal temple building possible. Surely the king inspired awe….” [Angkor Life, Stephen Murray]
Suryavarman II, 1112-1152 was publicly devoted to Vishnu. Angkor Wat was his temple. He believed himself to be Vishnu incarnate. Even though Hindu worship was reinstated, the momentum for the ascendancy of Buddhism continued as a sort of popular revolution as the people increasingly abandoned the failed and burdensome ways of the Devaraja.
From the reign of Jayavarman VII onward, Buddhism was the ascendant religion of the Cambodia, except for a brief period at the end of the 13th century when there seems to have been a brief revival of Hinduism, responsible for he defacement of some of the Buddhist images of Jayavarman’s reign.
Images of Buddha carved into niches in along the path lining a processional way at the Preah Khan, for instance, were crudely removed and defaced in a determined effort to transform the Buddhist complex into a Hindu one in the thirteenth century.
[In legends and literature, Jayavarman VII is sometimes obliquely referred to as the “Leper King” – and Khmer folk legends continue the tradition that a great, king leper king lived in seclusion within the temple palaces. What is that about?]
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