4
JAYAVARMAN VII AND THE CRISIS OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
From the time of Suryavarman II’s death around 1150 until Jayavarman VII’s coronation in 1182, only one dated Cambodian inscription has survived. Much of what we know about this period must be filtered through inscriptions carved at Jayavarman’s behest, reflecting his view of the world as well as what he wanted people to believe about his early life. Because he was not, apparently, an entirely legitimate contender for the throne, his early years, like those of so many Cambodian founder-kings, are poorly documented.
Jayavarman’s biography was pieced together by George Coedes, who saw him as a pinnacle of Cambodian history rather than as an aberration.1 Jayavarman’s inscriptions and what they tell us about his point of view make radical departures, in many ways, from what had gone before. Because of his radicalism and grandeur, Jayavarman VII has tended to dominate the historiography of Cambodia, particularly since Coedes’s work in the 1930s. His reign, as we shall see, contained several mysteries and contradictions. Recent scholars have called Coedes’s hagiography into question.
Jayavarman belonged to the so-called Mahiharapura dynasty. He appears to have been a first cousin of Suryavarman II and the son of a royal prince, Dharanindravarman, who may have reigned briefly as king and who was certainly a fervent Buddhist. B.P. Groslier has cast doubts on the first of these assertions because it is so poorly documented and because it places Jayavarman in the direct line of succession in a way that makes the facts we know about his life even more difficult to understand.2
It seems likely, all the same, that Jayavarman as a young man served in some capacity at Yasovarman’s court. From 1166 to 1177, Jayavarman appears to have lived away from Angkor, perhaps in the vicinity of the temple now known as the Preah Khan in Kompong Svay, where Claude Jacques has located the city of Jayadityapura, and also in Champa. A portrait statue of him, manifestly earlier than others produced later in his reign, has been found at Preah Khan in Kompong Svay.3 Was the city subservient to Angkor or a rival to it? How did Jayavarman relate to the usurper-king who followed Yasovarman to the throne? Even more important, what were his relationships with Champa to the east? We need to ask these partially unanswerable questions in order to place Jayavarman’s reign, following his accession in 1178, in the context of his early life and in the framework of Cambodian foreign relations.
JAYAVARMAN VII AND BUDDHIST KINGSHIP
Throughout his life, it seems, Jayavarman immersed himself in the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism—the variant still followed in much of northern Asia. More than any other king, he labored to integrate Buddhist with Cambodian ideas of kingship. Buddhist kingship, as he practiced it, differed in several ways from the more eclectic Hindu model that had been followed for centuries at Angkor and was to form the ceremonial basis of Cambodian kingship until the institution was temporarily overturned in 1970. In the traditional version, a king was thought to enjoy, whether he was alive or not, a special relationship with a particular deity—usually Siva, more rarely Vishnu, occasionally the composite of them both known as Harihara—to whom his temple-mountain was eventually dedicated. The kings used this special relationship to explain their grandeur while their subjects assumed that the relationship had something to do with the provision of adequate rainfall.
Because Cambodian society was organized hierarchically, and because the king was thought to centralize the kingdom, most Cambodians, like their contemporaries in medieval Europe, probably recognized the necessity for a king. Rare inscriptions, and perhaps the act of constructing reservoirs, indicated that an individual king occasionally had his subjects’ general welfare on his mind. In human terms, however, the king was nearly always a distant, mysterious figure concealed inside an awesome palace. The notion that he was accountable to his people does not seem to have caught on. Inside his palace, and within the network of kinship and preferment relationships extending from it, the king was the master and the victim of a system whereby people clamored for his favors, for titles, for the right to own slaves or sumptuous possessions.
Buddhist kingship, of course, grew out of this Indian tradition (the Buddha had been an Indian prince), but in Jayavarman’s reign these notions were modified in several ways. Jayavarman was no longer seen as the devotee of a divinity or as drawn up to the divinity in death. Instead, Jayavarman sought to redeem himself and his kingdom by his devotion to Buddhist teachings and by the performance of meritorious acts.4
Before examining how these ideas of kingship were acted out during his reign, we need to stress that his program was not aimed at reforming Cambodian society or at dismantling such Hinduized institutions as Brahmanism, slavery, and kingship. Far from it. In his conservatism, his ongoing tolerance of Hinduism, and his elitist frame of reference, Jayavarman VII was a recognizably twelfth-century king, although in Cambodian terms he was also perhaps a revolutionary one.
Put very starkly, the difference between a Hindu king and a Buddhist one is akin to the difference between a monologue that no one overhears and a soliloquy addressed to an audience of paid or invited guests. A Hindu king’s rule was an aggregation of statements—rituals, temples, poems, marriages, inscriptions, and the like—that displayed his grandeur, acumen, and godliness. A Buddhist king made similar statements, but he addressed many of them, specifically, to an audience of his people. This made the people less an ingredient of the king’s magnificence (as his thousands of followers had always been) than objects of his compassion, an audience for his merit-making and participants in his redemption. This, at least, is what many of Jayavarman VII’s inscriptions and temples appear to have been saying.
Why did Jayavarman VII choose to break with the past? Scholars have several explanations. These include his apparent estrangement from the court at Angkor, combined with his resentment toward the usurper who had proclaimed himself king in 1167; and his having a “master plan” of buildings, ideology, and kingship that had been maturing in his mind after years of study and very possibly the influence of a scholarly, ambitious wife. These proposals are helpful, but they do not identify the real key to Jayavarman’s reign—the Cham invasion of Angkor in 1177. Paul Mus and Jean Boisselier have argued that we can see Jayavarman’s entire reign as a response to this traumatic event.5
Jayavarman’s own links with Champa were close, and in the 1160s, he may have spent several years there. It’s likely that his absence from Angkor was connected in some way with his being out of favor at the Cambodian court, for he returned home only after Yasovarman II had been deposed. As the sources of our uncertainty are Jayavarman’s own inscriptions, all that is clear about the prelude to the Cham invasion of 1177—and indeed about Jayavarman’s early career—is that later on he found little to boast about in these obviously formative years, some of which he may have spent in his mother’s home city of Jayadityapura, east of Angkor.6
Because inscriptions tend to trace the causes of war to royal ambition, treachery, and revenge—that is, to the world of the Ramayana—it is difficult for us to determine exactly why Champa invaded Cambodia, by land certainly in 1177 and perhaps by water in 1178.7 The prospects of booty and prisoners were certainly part of the Cham rationale; so were memories of earlier defeats. The expedition traveled to the Great Lake, and the Siem Reap River, taking the city of Yasodharapura by surprise: “With a powerful fleet, he pillaged it and put the king to death, without listening to any proposal of peace.”8
Jayavarman appears to have been in Champa at the time of the 1177 invasion. In the following year he assembled a mixed Khmer-Cham army of supporters for a new campaign against the Chams at Angkor, defeating them in battle, although an inscription suggests that it was a Cambodian prince, not Jayavarman himself, who killed the Cham king “with a hundred million arrows.” When Jayavarman arrived at Angkor after the invasion, he found the city “plunged into a sea of misfortune” and “heavy with crimes.” Some of these troubles could be traced in his mind to the unmeritorious reigns of predecessors; others to the fractionalization of power inside the kingdom, referred to in an inscription written by his wife: “In the previous reign, the land, though shaded by many parasols, suffered from extremes of heat; under [Jayavarman] there remained but one parasol, and yet the land, remarkably, was delivered from suffering.”9
Jayavarman VII was crowned in 1182–83, therefore, owing little to his predecessors and much, as his inscriptions tell us, to his acumen, his Buddhist faith, and his victories in battle. It’s clear, however, that the period between victory and assuming power must have been filled with political negotiations and further conflicts—with the “many parasols,” perhaps. Over the next thirty years or so (the precise date of his death is unknown), he stamped the kingdom with his personality and his ideas as no other ruler was able to do before Norodom Sihanouk in the 1960s and Pol Pot later on. Like these two figures, Jayavarman may have wanted to transform Cambodia and perceived himself as the instrument of that transformation.
Much of the interest in his reign springs from the tension inherent in the words Buddha and king. Using the Hinduized apparatus of kingship and the material grandeur associated with it, Jayavarman also sought in all humility, if his inscriptions are to be believed, to deliver himself and all his people from suffering. As a king he had roads built throughout his kingdom, perhaps to accelerate his military response to uprisings or invasions but also to facilitate access to areas rich in resources that could be exported to China via the Cham seaports that were now subservient to Angkor. This nationalization of kingship by a man who was arguably the most otherworldly of Cambodia’s kings has given Jayavarman’s reign a contradictory appearance. Sentences about the man soon fall into the pattern of “on the one hand” and “on the other.”
For example, many of the bas-reliefs on the Bayon, depicting battles against the Chams, contain vivid scenes of cruelty. Similarly, some of Jayavarman’s inscriptions praise his vengefulness and his skill at political infighting vis-à-vis the Chams. On the one hand, the portrait statues of him that have come down to us depict him as an ascetic deep in meditation.10 From his so-called hospital inscriptions we learn that “he suffered from the illnesses of his subjects more than from his own; the pain that afflicted men’s bodies was for him a spiritual pain, and thus more piercing.”11 Yet, on the other hand, his roads, temples, “houses of fire,” reservoirs, and hospitals were thrown up with extraordinary haste between his coronation in 1182–83 and the second decade of the thirteenth century; some were completed after his death. There were so many of these projects, in fact, that workmanship was often sloppy, and by the end of his reign local supplies of sandstone and limestone for use at Angkor may have begun to run out.12 Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, inscriptions tell us, labored to erect and maintain these constructions built, at the ideological level, to deliver them from pain. To a twenty-first-century eye, this seems ironic, but we should remember that suffering in Buddhist terms should not be taken merely in a physical sense; it must also be related to the purposes of life and to the ways that suffering of certain kinds can serve the teachings of the Buddha.
Why was Jayavarman’s building program carried out with so much haste? He was perhaps as old as sixty when he reached the throne; the buildings may have constituted a race against time. The program may have been part of a process of personal redemption, although the sins for which he was atoning are not clarified by his inscriptions. What we know about the first years of his reign comes from inscriptions written at a later stage. These years were probably spent in deflecting yet another Cham attack, in quelling a rebellion in the northwest, and in reconstituting Yasodharapura for the first time as a walled city. Major shifts in population, as usual, followed these military campaigns, as the Preah Khan inscription of 1191 suggests: “To the multitude of his warriors, he gave the capitals of enemy kings, with their shining palaces; to the beasts roaming his forests, he gave the forests of the enemy; to prisoners of war, he gave his own forests, thus manifesting generosity and justice.”
As it would be with other Cambodian kings, making a sharp distinction between Jayavarman’s politics and his religion, between temporal and spiritual powers, and between his ideas about himself and his ideas about his kingdom would be wrong. Before we dismiss him as a megalomaniac, however, it is worth recalling that had no one shared his vision or believed in his merit, he would never have become king, especially starting out from such a weak position, and he certainly would not have been able to remain in power. Many high officials, brahmans, evangelical Buddhists, and military men probably saw advantages in the physical expansion of the kingdom, partly by means of royally subsidized religious foundations and partly through bringing previously hostile or indifferent populations under some form of control. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, in fact, Angkor was extracting tribute from much of what is now Thailand and southern Laos as well as from Champa, occupying the coastal areas of central Vietnam. To these corners of the known world the multiple half-smiling faces of Jayavarman’s temple-mountain and his portrait statues addressed their benignly powerful glance.
At the same time, as Michael Vickery and others have suggested, considerable resentment must have built up against Jayavarman VII in the course of his reign among disaffected members of the elite, and among formerly privileged Hindu practitioners who resented the king’s conversion. These elements of Khmer society, at the instigation of a later monarch (but which one?), probably were responsible for the anti-Buddhist iconoclasm that affected many of Jayavarman’s major temples after his death.13
The art historian Philippe Stern, who studied Jayavarman’s reign in detail, perceived three stages in the development of his iconography and architecture.14 These coincide with the three phases of construction that Stern had noted for earlier Cambodian kings—namely, public works, temples in honor of parents, and the king’s own temple-mountain.
The public works of earlier kings, as we have seen, usually took the form of reservoirs (baray). Other projects such as roads and bridges were also built, but they are seldom noted in inscriptions. But Jayavarman’s program departed from the past. His hospitals, probably established early in his reign, were an important innovation, described in the stele of Ta Prohm. Four of them were located near the gateways to Angkor Thom. Others were built to the west of Angkor into what is now northeastern Thailand and as far north as central Laos. About twenty hospital sites have so far been identified. The Ta Prohm inscription says that the hospitals could call on the services of 838 villages, with adult populations totaling roughly eighty thousand people. The services demanded appear to have been to provide labor and rice for the staffs attached to each hospital, or approximately a hundred people, including dependents.15 The hospital steles give details about the administration of the hospitals and about the provisions and staff allocated to them.
A second set of Jayavarman VII’s public works consisted of “houses of fire” placed at approximately sixteen-kilometer (ten-mile) intervals along Cambodia’s major roads. There were fifty-seven of these between Angkor and the Cham capital and seventeen more between Angkor and a Buddhist temple-site at P’imai in northeastern Thailand. The exact purpose of these buildings is unknown.16
Finally, there was Jayavarman’s own reservoir, known now as the northern Baray and during his reign as the Jayatataka, located to the northeast of Yasodharapura.
These innovations stemmed from what Jayavarman saw as his mission to rescue his subjects, as the hospital inscription says:
Filled with a deep sympathy for the good of the world, the king swore this oath: “All the beings who are plunged in the ocean of existence, may I draw them 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.”17
THE TEMPLES OF JAYAVARMAN VII
In the second stage of Jayavarman’s reign he erected temples in honor of his parents. The first of these, now known as Ta Prohm (“Ancestor Brahma”), was dedicated in 1186. It honored Jayavarman’s mother in the guise of Prajnaparamita, the goddess of wisdom, conceived metaphorically as the mother of all Buddhas. The temple also housed a portrait statue of Jayavarman’s Buddhist teacher, or guru (the word kru means “teacher” in modern Khmer), surrounded in the temple by statues of more than six hundred dependent gods and bodhisattvas. The syncretism of Cambodian religion is shown by the fact that Shaivite and Vaisnavite ascetics were given cells on the temple grounds alongside Buddhist monks and learned men. The appearance of Ta Prohm today gives a poor idea of its original appearance, for unlike the other major temples at Angkor, it has never been restored; instead, it has been left to the mercy of the forest.
The next temple complex to be built by Jayavarman VII is known nowadays as the Preah Khan (“Sacred Sword”). Its inscription says that it was built on the site of an important Cambodian victory over the Chams, and its twelfth-century name, Jayasri (“Victory and Throne”), may echo this event. No other inscription mentions this battle, fought so close to Yasodharapura as to suggest a second Cham invasion of the city. Groslier, however, has argued that it took place and has proposed that it is depicted in bas-reliefs at the Bayon.18
Preah Khan was dedicated in 1191 and houses a portrait statue of Jayavarman’s father, Dharanindravarman, with the traits of Lokesvara, the deity expressive of the compassionate aspects of the Buddha. The symbolism is relentlessly appropriate, for in Mahayana Buddhist thinking the marriage of wisdom (prajna) and compassion (karuna) gave birth to enlightenment, which is to say, to the Buddha himself, the Enlightened One.19 In this stage of Jayavarman’s artistic development, Lokesvara appears more and more frequently, and throughout his reign, the triad of Prajnaparamita (wisdom), the Buddha (enlightenment), and Lokesvara (compassion) was central to the king’s religious thinking. The placement of the two temples southeast and northeast of the new center of Yasodharapura (later occupied by the Bayon) suggests that the three temples can be “read” together, with the dialectic of compassion and wisdom giving birth to enlightenment represented by the Buddha image that stood at the center of the Bayon, and thus at the heart of Jayavarman’s temple-mountain.
The inscriptions from these two “parent temples” show us how highly developed the Cambodian bureaucracy had become, particularly in terms of its control over the placement and duties of the population, but also in terms of the sheer number of people in positions of authority who were entitled to deposit and endow images of deities inside the temple. Ta Prohm housed several thousand people, as its inscription attests:
There are here 400 men, 18 high priests, 2,740 other priests, 2,232 assistants, including 615 female dancers, a grand total of 12,640 people, including those entitled to stay. In addition, there are 66,625 men and women who perform services for the gods, making a grand total of 79,265 people, including the Burmese, Chams, etc.20
Similarly, the people dependent on Preah Khan—that is, those obliged to provide rice and other services—totaled nearly 100,000, drawn from more than 5,300 villages. The inscription goes on to enumerate the men and women who had been dependent on previous temple endowments. Drawn from 13,500 villages, they numbered more than 300,000. The infrastructure needed to provide food and clothing for the temples—to name only two types of provision—must have been efficient and sophisticated.
Three interesting points emerge from the inscriptions. One is that outsiders—“Burmese, Chams, etc.”—were accounted for in different ways than local people were, perhaps because they were prisoners of war without enduring ties to individual noblemen, priests, or religious foundations. Another is that the average size of the villages referred to in the inscriptions appears to have been about two hundred people, including dependents—still the median size of rice-growing villages in Cambodia in the 1960s. Finally, the inscriptions indicate that the temples, although dedicated to the Buddha and serving as residences for thousands of Buddhist monks, also housed statues and holy men associated with different Hindu sects. Jayavarman VII obviously approved of this arrangement, for we know that he also retained Hindu thinkers and bureaucrats at his court. Indeed, it is probably more useful to speak of the coexistence of Hinduism and Buddhism in Jayavarman VII’s temples, and perhaps in his mind as well, than to propose a systematic process of syncretization.
The jewel-like temple known as Neak Po’n (“Twining Serpents”) once formed an island in the Jayatataka and was probably completed by 1191, for it is mentioned in the inscription of Preah Khan:
The king has placed the Jayatataka like a lucky mirror, colored by stones, gold, and garlands. In the middle, there is an island, drawing its charm from separate basins, washing the mud of sin from those coming in contact with it, serving as a boat in which they can cross the ocean of existences.21
The island with its enclosing wall, constructed in a lotus pattern, represented a mythical lake in the Himalayas, sacred to Buddhist thinking. Around the temple, as at the lake, four gargoyles spew water from the larger lake into the smaller ones. The temple itself, raised above the water by a series of steps, was probably dedicated, like Preah Khan, to Lokesvara, whose image appears repeatedly in high relief on its walls.
Groups of statues were also placed at the four sides of the temple. Unfortunately, only one of these, representing the horse Balaha, an aspect of Lokesvara, can be identified with certainty; two others are probably representations of Siva and Vishnu. Jean Boisselier has argued that the presence of these gods inside the enclosure can be read as a political statement, showing that the former gods of Angkor were now submitting to the Buddha. But why should they do so? Boisselier, following Mus, has suggested that Shaivism and Vaisnavism were seen to have failed the Cambodians when the Chams were able to capture and occupy Angkor in 1177. Lake Anavatapta, moreover, was sacred not only to all Buddhists but particularly to Buddhist rulers, or chakravartin, beginning, legend asserts, with the Emperor Asoka, who was able magically to draw water from the lake to enhance his own purity and power.22
In this second phase of his iconography, Jayavarman VII may also have sponsored additions to many earlier structures—notably the temples of P’imai in northeastern Thailand and Preah Khan in Kompong Svay.23
The sheer size of these foundations suggests a trend toward urbanization under Jayavarman VII, or at least a tendency to herd and collect large numbers of people from peripheral areas into the service of the state. It seems likely that Jayavarman VII, like Suryavarman II before him, was attracted to the idea of increasing centralization and the related idea of bureaucratic state control. Perhaps these ideas formed part of what he perceived as a mission to convert his subjects to Buddhism or were connected with organizing people to respond swiftly to foreign threats.
The second phase was marked by several stylistic innovations. These included the motif of multifaced towers inaugurated at the small temple of Prasat Preah Stung and carried to its apex in the entrance gates to the city of Angkor Thom and, ultimately, in the hundreds of faces that look down from the Bayon, the stone walls surrounding the entire city, apparently for the first time in Angkorean history, and the causeways of giants outside the gates of the city.
These constructions can be read in terms of both politics and religion. Boisselier, following Mus, has compared the wall-building at Angkor Thom to a fortified Maginot Line, supposedly offering an impenetrable defense against any Cham invasion. At the same time, the walls can be said to represent the ring of mountains that surround Mt. Meru or Jayavarman’s temple-mountain, the Bayon.
After capturing the Cham capital in 1191, Jayavarman probably spent the rest of his reign at Yasodharapura. At this point, his buildings began to show signs of hasty construction and poor workmanship, as well as of a shifting ideology. The temple that was to become the Bayon, for example, was radically altered at several points in the 1190s and probably in the thirteenth century as well. 24
An inscription from the end of Jayavarman’s reign describes the city as his bride: “The town of Yasodharapura, decorated with powder and jewels, burning with desire, the daughter of a good family . . . was married by the king in the course of a festival that lacked nothing, under the spreading dais of his protection.”25 The object of the marriage, the inscription goes on to say, was “the procreation of happiness throughout the universe.”
At the center of the city was the Bayon, a common folk-title for Angkorean monuments in the nineteenth century, when they were being named by the French,26 with its hundreds of gigantic faces, carved in sets of four, and its captivating bas-reliefs depicting everyday life, wars with Champa, and the behavior of Indian gods. The temple at one time housed thousands of images. Its central image, discovered in the 1930s, was a statue of the Buddha sheltered by an enormous hooded snake, or naga. The statue had been forcibly removed from its honored position by iconoclasts, probably after Jayavarman VII’s death, and had been thrown into an airshaft.
There has been considerable controversy about the symbolism of the temple and about what was meant by the causeways leading up to it, with giants (asura) and angels (devata) engaged in what looks like a tug of war, grasping the bodies of two gigantic snakes. Some have argued that the causeways represented the well-known Indian myth of the churning of the sea of milk. Others have agreed with Mus, who saw them as rainbows, leading people out of their world into the world of the gods. At another level, the asuras represented the Chams and the devatas, Cambodians. In this respect, it is tempting to perceive the city, and most of Jayavarman’s works, in dialectical terms. For example, as we have seen, the pair of Lokesvara (compassion/father) and Prajnaparamita (intelligence/mother) give birth to the Buddha (enlightenment, thought to be the child of wisdom and compassion), i.e., Jayavarman VII himself. We have encountered this turn of mind before, in the cult of Harihara and in the opposition and synthesis in Cambodian popular thought of divinities associated respectively with water/moon/darkness and earth/sun/brightness. Similarly, the struggle between the Cambodians and the Chams, acted out along the causeways and in the bas-reliefs at the Bayon and at Banteay Chhmar, can be seen as bringing to birth the new, converted nation of Cambodia, in which the Buddha has won over the Hindu gods of Champa. This dialectic may well be the “message” of the Bayon, which Boisselier has called the “assembly hall of the city of the gods” because of the great number of images that had been sheltered there.27 Once again, the message can also be read in terms of the civil polity, and so can the half-smiling faces that dominate the temple. As so often in Angkorean art, it would be narrow and inaccurate to interpret these haunting faces as representing only one kind of deity, performing one kind of task. In a way, for example, they serve as guardians of the Buddha and his teachings; in another, glancing out in the four directions, they oversee the kingdom and perhaps represent civil and military officials of the time. Boisselier, who has argued that they are princely manifestations of Brahma, has noticed also that their tiaras resemble those worn by the Cham asuras along the entrance causeways. None of the identifications so far has been completely persuasive.28
Another extraordinary feature of the Bayon, found also at Banteai Chhmar, is that its bas-reliefs depict historical Cambodian events rather than, say, incidents in the Ramayana or some other literary work that coincide with or resemble historical events.29 Battles depicted on the Bayon and at Banteay Chhmar are fought with recognizable twelfth-century weapons, and other panels depict ordinary people buying and selling, eating, gambling, raising children, picking fruit, curing the sick, and traveling on foot or in ox-carts. Nearly all the customs, artifacts, and costumes depicted in the bas-reliefs could still be found in the Cambodian countryside at the end of the colonial era. Although the voices of these people are missing from Jayavarman’s inscriptions, they move across his bas-reliefs with unaccustomed freedom, citizens at last of the country they inhabit, adorning a king’s temple as they never had before.
Unless more inscriptions come to light from Jayavarman’s reign, he will remain mysterious to us, because there are so many ambiguities about his personality, his reign, and his ideas. The mystery springs in part from the wide-ranging social and ideological changes that characterized thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Cambodia and may have been due in part to forces that Jayavarman or people near him set in motion.
Another source of ambiguity can be traced to the uneasy coexistence in Jayavarman’s temples and inscriptions of an overwhelming compassion and an overwhelming will, of a detachment from things of the world—symbolized by the horse Balaha at the Neak Po’n—and a detailed program aimed at transforming the physical world of Angkor, which had been degraded, in Jayavarman VII’s eyes by the Cham invasion. A third mystery is the silence, both in terms of buildings and inscriptions, that followed Jayavarman’s reign and appears to have begun in his declining years. We have no way of telling if Jayavarman was in some sense to blame for this unusual silence, as in subsequent inscriptions he is hardly ever mentioned. The patterns of continuity, stressed so often in earlier inscriptions, seem to have been broken or damaged severely by his reign.
THERAVADA BUDDHISM AND THE CRISIS OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
The largest change affecting Cambodia in the thirteenth century was the conversion of most of its people to the Theravada variant of Buddhism, discussed below.30 What role Jayavarman VII played in this conversion or what his response to it may have been is impossible to judge. The history of his reign, from a personal perspective, seems to be the story of the imposition of one man’s will on a population, a landscape, and a part of Asia ostensibly in the service of an ideal, Mahayana Buddhism. In its allegedly “liberating” fashion, it bears a fortuitous resemblance to the ideology of Democratic Kampuchea, which was also imposed from above. It is very doubtful that Jayavarman VII saw the Cambodian elite as his class enemies, as Pol Pot did, or that he preferred “forest people” to those living in Yasodharapura, but his selective break with the past, his wars with neighbors, the grandeur of his building program, and what appears to be his imposition of a new religion all have parallels with the 1970s. Interestingly, the only feature of Angkorean life singled out for praise by Democratic Kampuchea was precisely the full-scale mobilization of the people that Jayavarman VII, but very few other kings, managed to carry out.
Some writers have connected Cambodia’s conversion to Theravada Buddhism to the upheaval that affected Southeast Asia in the wake of the Mongol invasions of China; others have seen it as evidence of the growing influence of Mon- and Thai-speaking peoples, who were already Theravada Buddhists, on the people of Angkor. We know that wandering missionaries from the Mon-language parts of Siam, from Burma, and from Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka) played an important part in the process and that Cambodian pilgrims visited Ceylon to learn about Theravada Buddhism and to obtain clerical credentials. We also know some of the agents of the change, but it is difficult to say why conversion was so rapid and so widespread. Some scholars argue that the Theravada variant, unlike Brahmanism or Mahayana Buddhism, was oriented toward ordinary people. A more likely explanation, advanced by L.P. Briggs,31 is that the increasing interaction between Khmer- and Mon-speaking residents of the Thai central plain, with the Mons being devotees of Theravada Buddhism, led gradually, over a half century or so, to the conversion of Khmer speakers farther east. We have no way of telling what aspects of the sect were more attractive than others, or which segments of society were drawn most rapidly to it. The conversion in any case was by no means total, for the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who visited Angkor in 1296–97, noted that Brahmanism and Shaivism, as well as Theravada Buddhism, still enjoyed the status of approved religions.32
In other words, it is likely that the thirteenth century, one of the least-recorded of the Angkorean centuries in terms of datable inscriptions, was marked at Angkor by a serious religious upheaval or by a succession of upheavals, which had political causes and effects as well.
The end of Jayavarman VII’s reign and the reign of his successor, Indravarman II (r. 1200–70), are obscure, although we know that Indravarman, like Jayavarman VII, was a Buddhist who may have extended some of his predecessors’ works. Inscriptions found at the Bayon have little to say about the last phase of Jayavarman’s life. Those at the four corners of his city, apparently all inscribed at the time of his death; however, provide helpful references to Jayavarman’s wars against the Chams and the Vietnamese. These inscriptions are written, Coedes contended, in execrable Sanskrit. Several of them (like some of the bas-reliefs at the Bayon) are unfinished, almost as if the workmen had dropped their chisels on receiving news of the king’s death.33
Surveying the art of the post-Angkorean era from another perspective, Ashley Thompson has written:
The wild iconographic mingling of the vegetable, animal and human that announces the divine above each sanctuary threshold is gone. Images of fantastic creatures and powerful gods no longer populate the landscape. . . . The sensuality and majesty of the divine virtually disappear.34
This dearth of written information coincides with a critical period of Cambodian and Southeast Asian history. The thirteenth century was a period of crisis throughout the region—a time of rapid change, significant movements of population, foreign invasions, altered patterns of trade, the appearance of new religions, and shifts in the balance of power.35 On the mainland a major change was the spread of Theravada Buddhism at the expense of state-sponsored and caste-enhancing Hindu cults. In the long run this change had several ramifications. In Cambodia and Thailand, brahmans retained their ceremonial positions at court but otherwise were diminished in importance. The rich mythical and literary bases of Indian literature and iconography, reflected up to now in bas-reliefs, sculpture, architecture, and inscriptions, narrowed perceptibly to satisfy the more austere requirements of Theravada aesthetics and Cambodian literature, like the local version of the Ramayana, came to be suffused with Buddhist values.
In terms of foreign relations, the two most important developments affecting Cambodia at this time were the weakening of its control over populations in present-day Thailand and the expansion of Chinese commercial activities in Southeast Asia under the Mongols and the early Ming. Although Cambodian cultural influence remained strong in the central plain (where the Thai capital of Ayudhya was to be founded in the fourteenth century), Cambodian political control over the rest of the region diminished. Principalities that formerly sent tribute to Angkor, such as Sukot’ai and Louvo, now declared their independence symbolically by sending tribute to the Chinese court. So did principalities in Laos and others to the south. Angkor was once again vulnerable to invasion from every direction but the east, as Champa was no longer a power to be reckoned with. A Thai invasion, in fact, occurred toward the end of the thirteenth century and is recorded by Zhou Daguan.
ZHOU DAGUAN’S ACCOUNT OF ANGKOR, 1296–97
The record by Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan of his stay in Cambodia in 1296–97 is the most detailed account we have about everyday life and the appearance of Angkor.36 Zhou’s memoir is rich in circumstantial detail as he was not constrained by the Indian traditions that remove ordinary people from literary consideration. In his account, for example, we see Cambodians bathing, selling goods, and marching in processions. From our point of view, it is a shame that Zhou devoted so much of his short manuscript to exotic revelations of “barbarian” life. In fact, although he provided us with what amounts to a newsreel—or perhaps a home video—of his stay at Angkor, our appetites are whetted for the feature film he might have made had he known (or cared) about the gaps that have persisted ever since in the historical record.
The account, in translation, runs to fewer than forty pages, divided into forty sections. These range from a short paragraph to several pages and topically from religion, justice, kingship, and agriculture (to name only four) to birds, vegetables, bathing customs, and slaves. Many features of thirteenth-century Cambodian life that Zhou described—including tools, draft animals, and aspects of rural commerce—are still observable today, and others—such as slavery, sumptuary laws, and trial by ordeal—endured in modified form until the nineteenth century at least.
Five of Zhou’s sections deal with religion, slaves, festivals, agriculture, and the king’s excursions. Zhou found three religions enjoying official status at Angkor: they appear to have been Brahmanism, Theravada Buddhism, and Shaivism. The brahmans, Zhou noted, often attained high positions as officials, but he could find little else to say about them: “I don’t know what the source of their doctrine is. They have nowhere that can be called an academy or place of learning, and it is hard to find out what books they study.” The Theravada monks, known colloquially by a Thai phrase (chao ku), closely resembled their counterparts in Theravada Southeast Asia today: “They shave their heads and dress in yellow. They leave their right shoulder uncovered, and wrap themselves in a robe made of yellow cloth and go barefoot. And wear yellow robes, leaving the right shoulder bare. For the lower half of the body, they wear a yellow skirt. They are barefoot.”
Like the palace and the houses of high officials, Zhou tells us, Buddhist monasteries could have tile roofs, but those of ordinary people had to be made of thatch. Zhou was impressed by the simplicity of the Theravada Buddhist wats, noting that (unlike Mahayana temples in China) they contained “no bells, cymbals, flags, or platforms,” housing only an image of the Buddha made of gilded plaster. Finally, Zhou described the method used to inscribe palm leaf manuscripts, which persisted well into the twentieth century, particularly in the case of religious and historical texts.
The Shaivites, whom Zhou called “followers of the Dao,” inhabited monasteries that were less prosperous than Buddhist ones. “They don’t make offerings to an icon, only to a block of stone, like the altar stones of the gods of the earth in China.” Although monastic Shaivism declined in importance after the abandonment of Angkor and soon disappeared altogether, Indianized cults, including the use of linga, continued into modern times, and officials calling themselves brahmans continued to work at the Cambodian court, where they were entrusted with the performance of royal rituals and with maintaining astronomical tables.
Zhou’s account makes it clear that many of the people living at Angkor were in some sense slaves, for he tells us that “those who have many slaves have more than a hundred; those who have only a few have from ten to twenty; only the very poor have none at all.” He went on to say that slaves were generally taken as captives from mountain tribes, a practice that persisted into the colonial era. It seems likely, in fact, that this is the way Cambodian society built itself up over time, gradually absorbing and socializing “barbarians,” who figure in such large numbers in the inscriptions in Angkorean times. In Zhou’s account, slaves were set apart from other people by several prohibitions: “They are only allowed to sit and sleep under the house. If they are carrying out their tasks then they can come up into the house, but they must kneel, join their hands in greeting and bow to the floor before they can venture forward.” Slaves enjoyed no civil privileges; their marriages were not even recognized by the state. Forced to call their masters father and their mistresses mother, they tried frequently to escape and, when caught, were tattooed, mutilated, or chained.37
Although Zhou is informative about people at court and about slaves, he is vague about the proportion of society in the 1290s that was neither in bondage nor part of the elite. Clearly, the people with “a few” slaves would fall into this category; as would the private landowners, discussed in an earlier context by M.C. Ricklefs,38 and the Sino-Cambodians who were active in local and international trade. Special privileges were extended to the elite and to religious sects and special prohibitions applied to slaves, but about those in between—the people, in fact, who probably made the kingdom prosper—we know far less than we would like.
When Zhou goes into detail, however, his account is often illuminating. His description of what he called a new year’s festival, which occurred toward the end of November, is a good example of his narrative skill:
A large stage is set up in front of the royal palace. There is room on it for a thousand or more people. It is hung everywhere with globe lanterns and flowers. Facing it on a bank more than two or three hundred feet away are some stall structures that are made of wood joined and bound together, like the scaffolding used to make a pagoda. Every night they put up three or four of these, or five or six of them, and set out fireworks and firecrackers on top of them. The various provincial officials and great houses take care of all the costs. When night comes the king is invited to come out and watch. He lights the fireworks and firecrackers which can be seen a hundred li [about a mile] away. The firecrackers are as big as the rocks thrown by trebuchets and make enough noise to shake the entire city.
This ceremony, probably observed by Zhou himself, appears to have been celebrated at the end of the rainy season, when the waters of the Tonle Sap begin to subside, setting in motion the first stages of the agricultural year. After the move to Phnom Penh in the fifteenth century, the ceremony became known as the water festival and was similarly marked by fireworks, floats, and royal patronage until the monarchy was overthrown in 1970. The festival was revived, along with the monarchy, in 1993.
As to agriculture, Zhou noted that three or even four rice harvests a year were possible—a statistic singled out by Democratic Kampuchea in its efforts to revolutionize production. It is unlikely that this abundance applied throughout the country, for at Angkor several harvests were possible only because of the concentration of manpower there, the rich alluvial soil, and the water storage system perfected in the region over several hundred years. Another factor was the peculiarly helpful behavior of the Tonle Sap. According to Zhou’s comments on the agricultural cycle’s relationship to this beneficent body of water:
For six months the land has rain, for six months no rain at all. From the fourth to the ninth month, it rains every day, with the rain falling in the afternoon. The high water mark around the Freshwater Sea Tonle Sap can reach some seventy or eighty feet, completely submerging even very tall trees except for the tips. Families living by the shire all move to the far side of the hills. From the tenth month to the third month there is not a drop of rain. Only small boats can cross the Tonle Sap.
The “miracle” of the Tonle Sap amazed many subsequent travelers to Angkor. As long as the region supported a large population, the deposits left by receding water provided useful nutrients for the soil. Even after Angkor was abandoned, the lake remained the most densely populated natural fishbowl in the world, providing generations of Cambodians with much of the protein for their diet.
We would welcome the chance to interrogate Zhou Daguan about the working of agriculture at this time. For example, how was the rice surplus handled? Were cultivators for the most part free people or some kind of slaves? Did agriculture differ markedly at Angkor from that in other parts of the kingdom? How much land was in the hands of members of the royal family and how much was controlled by Buddhist wats? What did this control imply?
As we have no answers to these questions, we must be grateful to Zhou for what he gives us. His description of rural marketing, for example, could easily have been written about rural markets in Cambodia today:
The local people who know how to trade are all women. . . . There is a market every day from around six in the morning until mid-day. There are no stalls only a kind of tumbleweed mat laid out on the ground, each mat in its usual place. I gather there is also a rental fee to be paid to officials.
It seems likely, in view of Cambodia’s trade with China, that many Chinese had by this time settled in Cambodia to engage in commerce. According to Zhou, the products exported by Cambodia in the thirteenth century were those that had been exported since the time of Funan; they were to form the bulk of Cambodian exports until the twentieth century. These were high-value, low-bulk items such as rhinoceros horns, ivory, beeswax, lacquer, pepper, feathers, and cardamom. Imported products included paper and metal goods, porcelain, silk, and wicker. It is unclear from Zhou’s account how products were paid for although it seems unlikely that government-sponsored currency was in circulation. Zhou was fascinated by the king reigning at Angkor during his visit (Indravarman III, r. 1296–1308). The king had reached the throne, Zhou remarked, in a curious manner:
The new king was the old king’s (Jayavarman VIII’s) son-in-law. When his father-in-law died, the new king’s wife secretly stole the gold sword and gave it to him. The old king’s own son was thus deprived of the succession. . . . The new king had a sacred piece of iron embedded in his body, so that if anything like a knife or a arrow touched him he could not be injured. With this to rely on, he ventured to come out of his palace.
These events, which had taken place just before the Chinese embassy’s arrival, are alluded to discreetly by some inscriptions that date from Indravarman’s reign. One of them refers to the “old age” of Jayavarman VIII and a “host of enemies” inside the kingdom. Another, echoing a sentiment in one of Jayavarman VII’s inscriptions, mentions that Indravarman shaded the country with his single umbrella, whereas no shade had existed before, under “a crowd of [such] umbrellas.”39
The transition between the reigns of Jayavarman VIII and Indravarman III, in fact, probably marked a sharp transition in Cambodian history, although we do not learn of it from Zhou Daguan. Under Jayavarman VIII in 1285, the last stone temple, the Mangalartha, was erected in the Angkor region. It was built by a high-ranking official and dedicated to Siva; the “single umbrella” to which its inscription refers may well have been Jayavarman’s intolerant Hinduism. We know that Indravarman III was careful to sponsor Theravada Buddhists as well as brahmans, and it is tempting to speculate about a religious ingredient in his apparently nonviolent coup d’état.
The king’s procession, like so much else in Zhou’s account, gains in interest when compared with similar processions recorded in the colonial era.40 It becomes clear in comparing the procession with the one marking Sihanouk’s coronation, or other twentieth-century processions for which records have survived, that ceremonial Cambodian life and the hierarchical arrangement of such events changed little between Angkorean times and our own era. In Zhou’s words:
Each time he came out all his soldiers were gathered in front of him, with people bearing banners, musicians and drummers following behind him. One contingent was made up of three to five hundred women of the palace. They wore clothes with a floral design and flowers in their coiled-up hair, and carried huge candles, alight even though it was daylight. There were also women of the palace carrying gold and silver utensils from the palace and finely decorated instruments made in exotic and unusual styles, for what purpose I do not know. . . . Palace women carrying lances and shields made up another contingent as the palace guard. . . . All the ministers, officials and relatives of the king were in front, riding elephants. Their red parasols, too many to number, were visible in the distance. . . . Late came the king, standing on an elephant, the gold sword in his hand and the tusks of his elephant encased in gold. He had more than twenty white parasols decorated with gold filigree, their handles all made of gold.
Zhou then described a royal audience of the sort that Indravarman conducted on a daily basis and closed his account by remarking superciliously, “We can see from this that although this is a country of barbarians, they know at first hand that they have a supreme ruler.”