DEITIES, DEMI-GODS & DECADENCE

Angkor is deep in the north-west Cambodian jungles that surround it and that long submerged it. The temple of Angkor Vat was built early in the twelfth-century by King Suryavarman II to the glory of the Hindu God Vishnu. About a mile to the north lies the royal walled city of Angkor Thom, with its five huge gates and its fifty towers of Bayon in the ruined city of Preah Khan; seat of a dynasty that rose to imperial splendor only to vanish without any traces beyond these in stone.

Lokesvara; a popular bodhisattva who helped men achieve ultimate release from worldly pains in the complete spiritual reward of the state of nirvana. s

At the time of Angkor’s glory, the influence of Buddhism, transported from India shortly after Hinduism, had also become great in Indochina. Many shrines were dedicated to ”bodhisattvas”, or future Buddhas. Khmer kings often had themselves represented in such form, indicating that through their kindness and munificence they had achieved sainthood. Preah Khan was proclaimed to be holier even than Allahabad in India, and the waters that surround it were thought to cleanse mud from the soul.

The humanism introduced to Angkor by Buddhist feeling expresses itself in bas-reliefs that depict the people,s daily life under Khmer civilization.

Angkor tells its story in fabled temples and sculptures made by nameless artists in the service of demigod kings. For many years, Cambodians, who knew of the tree strangled, partly buried treasure of their jungles; viewed the ruins with a kind of superstitious horror. To them it was a ghost town of sort, haunted by unpredictable spirits. Another version, is that the missionaries, alarmed by the thought that their unexpected discovery might ignite an old religion or give added strength to the present Buddhism, prudently kept quiet about the great ruined buildings, monuments and temples in the heart of Cambodia. Surely these stone deities, these great uncompromising faces, could only attract the Cambodians back to idolatry. Better to leave it all alone in the crawling vines and underbrush of tropical jungle.

Angkor Vat. Celestial nymphs

The history of Angkor is a history of a short, glorious and destructive empire. The Khmers, the people of central Cambodia, whose ancient capital was Angkor, recorded their rise and fall over five centuries; their conquests, achievements, their prides and sorrows, their religion and their pleasures, all in stone. To an enthralling extent, Angkor is a sculptured book of history and legend intertwined.

Late in the seventh century a rebellion began in one of Cambodia’s vassal states. It was to prove overwhelmingly successful, for it captured the whole country and established the Khmer dynasty as its rulers. In the more than fifty years of Jayavarman II’s reign, there began the sweeping conquests of the Khmer’s abroad, and the building of the fantastic city of Angkor Thom at home. The Khmer armies had the strength to extract nervous and conciliating tribute from places as remote as Malaya and all the time the legends of the wonder and wealth of Angkor grew.

Bas-Relief Angkor Wat

It is not surprising that a truly compelling kind of ”folie de grandeur” began to grip the Khmer kings. They worshipped their Gods in the temples they had built, but simultaneously they deified themselves. Their religion was changing from Hinduism to Buddhism as successive waves of priests and pilgrims came to Angkor, but the Khmers transmuted it into a Buddhism unlike any other form in the world. At the same time they kept a kind of overlay of Hinduism in the forms of their religion. When the temple of Bayon was built, it embodies this new mixture of ideas. With its immense stone faces, it s a design unknown in the parent culture of India.

e deity. Angkor Wat. At the time when these figures were being cut, cathedral builders in Europe were decorating facades with comparable images." width="614" height="819" />

Devata. female deity. Angkor Wat. At the time when these figures were being cut, cathedral builders in Europe were decorating facades with comparable images.

In those features, the long calm eyes, the mouth set just short of a smile, the expression of knowledge and authority, the long ago Khmers and their subject peoples saw both the portrait of Lokesvara, the Compassionate Buddha, and equally, the face of their king in constant watchfulness over even the distant reaches of the empire. Yet they seemed to find no contradiction in the fact that the temple was also dedicated to Shiva. There is a curious fact to set against the supreme arroagance of the lives of th Khmer god-kings. There is no record of their deaths and no one knows where they were buried.

The bas-reliefs of Angkor are its greatest wonder and most explicit record. Thousands upon thousands of brilliant craftsmen and artisans labored under the royal command to describe with unparalleled precision the life of the Khmers at their most glorious period. The climactic scenes from Hindu mythology , essential to their arts and religion, are spread in a great turbulent panorama across these walls. The great armies with their battalions of cavalry , their brigades of foot soldiers, their elephants jeweled and decorated for fantastic wars, charge across the walls, pennants flying, lances ready, and crossbows drawn all done with great intensity and vitality.

Built later than the temple, the royal city of Angkor Thom shows a decadence of style; yet many consider its towers of Bayon the most powerful of the great Khmer monuments.

There are also quieter scenes depicting the lavishness of court life, the musicians, the dancers, the courtiers. Or the everyday activity of the royal city with its workers, craftsmen and traders. And always present, in everything, are the gods and the demons and the mythological kings; an evocation of a life, an age, a whole world. Palace dancers and temple dancers are depicted everywhere, carved on hundreds of pillars and lintels; they are among the most elegant women in the world. They are draped in diaphanous cloth, with impossibly tiny waists and their hair is dressed in elaborate loops and knots and wound with pearls and flowers. The traditionally enigmatic half-smile of the dancer is always on their lips.

If Angkor Vat represents the height of the achievements of the Angkorean period, it is also the symbol of the finish of an empire. It seems incredible in retrospect that the building, carving, decorating, sculpturing of Angkor Vat was completed in about thirty years. This is one third of the time that it took to construct one of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. which are mostly about a tenth the size. Yet in that fact itself is the most convincing clue to the destruction of Khmer rule  and the disintegration of its power.

It is after Jayavarman VII’s reign that Angkor presents its greatest mystery. The Khmer’s simply dropped out of history for no recorded reason. The most reasonable explanation is attacks from Siam and the coastal nations of Annan and Cochin China which eventually defeated them, looted its treasures and took captive its best citizens. As the magnificence of Angkor disintegrated, the remaining people returned to the land to scratch a living however they could, leaving their great lost capital to the encroaching jungle.

”Mouhot’s journals were shipped to Europe after his death. His writings were collected and published posthumously in a book called Travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos, and began to popularise Angkor in the West. Perhaps none of the previous European visitors to Angkor wrote as evocatively as Mouhot, who included interesting and detailed sketches. His assumtive statements and flambuoyant theories—arrogant by any standards—found a receptive audience in Europeans of the colonial era, capturing their imaginations.

Mouhot had compared Angkor to the pyramids, for it was popular in the West at that time to ascribe the origin of all civilization to the Middle East. For example, he described the Buddha heads at the gateways to Angkor Thom as “four immense heads in the Egyptian style,” and he wrote of Angkor:

“One of these temples—a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michael Angelo—might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome, and presents a sad contrast to the state of barbarism in which the nation is now plunged.”

Of course it didn’t help that the locals whom Mouhot had met had attributed the buildings to the works of “god kings” and “giants,” but rather than look into their culture of mythology, Mouhot had rushed to fill in the gaps, erroneously asserting that Angkor was the work of an earlier civilization than the Khmer. Ever the superior European, he assumed that the authors of such grandeur were a disappeared race, and fallaciously dated the creation of Angkor back to over two millennia, to around the same era as Rome. For although the very same civilization which built Angkor was alive and right before his eyes, Mouhot considered them in a “state of barbarism” and could not believe the Khmer were civilized or enlightened enough to have built it:

“At Ongcor, there are …ruins of such grandeur… that, at the first view, one is filled with profound admiration, and cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race, so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works?”