Angkor Thom

The Bayon at the centre of Angkor Thom carries more than fifty towers, and almost every one of them is cut into four enormous faces looking out to the four directions. They are calm, heavy lidded and nearly identical, and standing among them is the experience the building was designed to produce: whichever way a visitor turns, the same face is already looking back.

Scholars have argued for more than a century about whose face it is. The usual identifications are the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, who in Mahayana teaching attends to the suffering of the world in every direction at once, or Jayavarman the Seventh himself represented in that role, and the two readings are not exclusive in a tradition where a king could be presented as the earthly expression of a compassionate power.

Charles Higham sets the building inside Jayavarman the Seventh's programme of hospitals, rest houses and temples raised across the empire after a period of war and occupation, which gives the faces a political sense as well as a devotional one. The galleries below the towers are carved with a different register entirely: naval battles on the Tonle Sap, market scenes, cockfights, women cooking, men gambling. A monument built to be looked up at also recorded, at eye level, what ordinary life in the twelfth century capital looked like.

Angkor Thom is unusual among great religious complexes in having changed allegiance twice while the stones stayed where they were. The Khmer state had been Hindu, with Angkor Wat raised to Vishnu in the twelfth century. Jayavarman the Seventh made his new walled capital and its state temple Mahayana Buddhist. Within a few generations a Hindu reaction under later rulers went through the site systematically, cutting Buddha images out of niches and recarving some of them as linga or as ascetics, and the damage is still legible on the walls.

Theravada Buddhism then became the settled religion of Cambodia, and it is Theravada practice that continues at the site today. George Coedes described this kind of layering across mainland Southeast Asia, where Indian religious forms were adopted, localised and then displaced by later Indian forms without the political centre moving. The result at Angkor Thom is a single monument that carries the evidence of its own arguments. Four routes lead into the walled enclosure through gates flanked by long rows of stone figures hauling on the body of a serpent, a scene usually read as the churning of the ocean of milk, which is a Hindu myth used to frame the entrance to a Buddhist king's city. The complex is managed today as part of the Angkor archaeological park, and it is a working place of worship as well as a heritage site.