Khmer Empire

A later inscription dates the empire's founding to 802, when Jayavarman II had a brahmin perform a rite on the Kulen hills that established him as universal monarch and instituted the cult usually called devaraja. What the term meant is still argued: an older reading made the king a living god, while more recent scholarship reads it as the cult of a divine protector of kingship rather than the deification of the man. Either way the consecrated ruler and the state cult were bound together, and every strong king marked his reign by building.

They built in a form borrowed from Indian cosmology and made monumental: the temple mountain, a stepped pyramid standing for Mount Meru, surrounded by a moat standing for the encircling ocean. The greatest of them, Angkor Wat, was raised by Suryavarman II from about 1113 as a temple to Vishnu, unusually oriented to the west, its galleries carrying nearly two thousand apsara figures and a bas-relief of the churning of the ocean of milk more than forty metres long. It remains the largest religious structure ever built.

Around the temples lay a landscape of vast reservoirs, the barays, and canals. Whether these were primarily irrigation works supporting a hydraulic state or ritual constructions modelling the cosmic ocean was argued for decades; Charles Higham's survey concludes, with the aerial and excavation evidence, that they were both at once.

The sharpest religious turn came with Jayavarman VII, who took the throne about 1181 after driving out a Cham invasion and ruled as a Mahayana Buddhist. He rebuilt the capital as Angkor Thom around the Bayon, whose towers carry more than two hundred serene faces usually identified with the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, and founded Ta Prohm and Preah Khan as monasteries whose inscriptions list their staffs in thousands. The same inscriptions record more than a hundred rest houses along the roads and a network of hospitals dedicated in the name of the healing Buddha, and describe the king's compassion for his subjects as the motive.

The reaction after his death was violent. Under his successors images of the Buddha across the empire were chiselled out, recut as lingas or hidden, and Angkor Wat's Vishnu cult was restored, a campaign of iconoclasm still visible on the walls.

Neither party won. From the thirteenth century Theravada Buddhism spread up from the Mon and Sinhalese world and took hold at the popular level, and the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan, who spent a year at Angkor in 1296 and 1297, describes yellow-robed monks, shaven heads and a single image of the Buddha as ordinary sights. The court moved south to Phnom Penh after Angkor was sacked around 1431, and Theravada Buddhism has been Cambodia's religion since.