CAMBODIAN VAISHNAVA HISTORY AT ANGKOR WAT

By LESLIE HOOK, Wall Street Journal January 25, 2008

SIEM REAP, Cambodia This countrys most famous temple
may be 900 years old, but the message it sets out to convey
is timeless: Angkor Wat is all about glory. The temple is one
of hundreds built by kings of the Khmer Empire to
commemorate themselves and their empire, as well as to
worship their gods. But Angkor Wat stands out from the rest
in artistry, in scale and in popular imagery.
One of the largest religious structures in the world, and the
only religious monument to appear on a national flag,
Angkor Wat has become synonymous with Cambodia at its
most powerful when it was the seat of the Khmer Empire,
stretching from the South China Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
The monumental scale of the temple has the same effect on
visitors today as when it was first built. Angkor Wat has but
a single approach: a wide stone causeway more than a third
of a mile long (thats as long as six football fields end-toend). The entry walkway crosses a moat 600 feet wide (my
guide assures me it used to be filled with crocodiles) and
ends at a wall and gates leading into the center of the

compound. The central compound covers about 400 acres

and once supported a town of about 100,000 people.
With one central tower more than 130 feet high surrounded
by four shorter towers, the center of the temple imitates the
five peaks of Mount Mehru, the mythical mountain at the
center of the Hindu universe. The temple walls (three
concentric rectangles that demarcate the progressively
higher levels of the temple), garden grounds and moat
represent the soil and seas of the earth.
Reaching Mount Mehru is no easy chore: The temples stone
steps are dizzyingly steep more like a stone ladder than a
staircase as a reminder of the effort it takes for humans
to get closer to heaven. And, as if to drive home the point,
the inner sanctuaries of the central tower were accessible
only to the king and a select handful of priests.
When Angkor Wat was built, Cambodia was primarily Hindu
and Khmer culture drew much of its inspiration from India.
Most of the inscriptions at Angkor are in Sanskrit, and the
nymph-like apsaras, or celestial dancers, that grace the
walls derive from Hindu mythology. Later, however, the
Khmer kings became interested in Buddhism, and Angkor
Wat was converted into a Buddhist monastery between the
12th and 15th centuries. The central statue of the innermost
sanctuary likely a statue of Vishnu was removed and a
Buddhist image erected in its place. For several centuries,
the Khmer empire practiced a syncretic faith that combined
Buddhism and Hinduism.
In many ways Angkor Wat is so much larger than life that
the details of the temple get overlooked amid the legends
that surround it. Its easy to forget that it contains nearly
2,000 feet of the finest Khmer bas reliefs in the world. Its
nearly 2,000 celestial apsaras represent the apogee of
Cambodias apsara-carving tradition and provide a detailed
account of court dress and female fashions during the period

of its creation, the elaborate headdresses, heavy jewelry

worn on the arms and neck, and flowing skirts. Traditional
Cambodian dance to this day imitates the apsaras poses
and costumes.
One of the most intricate reliefs decorating the walls of the
temples first gallery depicts the Churning of the Sea of Milk,
a key event in Hindu cosmology in which the world was
created by an epic tug-of-war between gods and demons.
Each side pulled on a giant five-headed snake wrapped
around Mount Mehru, and the subsequent twisting of the
mountain and churning of the seas gave birth to the apsaras
that grace the walls of Angkor Wat, as well as an elixir of
immortality over which the gods and demons subsequently
dueled. In this story, Mount Mehru is not only the center of
the universe, but also the birthplace of the known world.
The Khmer empire included modern-day Burma, Thailand
and Vietnam the largest area ever covered by Cambodia
and laid the foundations for Cambodian culture and art for
centuries to come. In a sign of the temples importance, the
kings palace was most likely on the temple grounds,
although nothing of it remains today. About one million men,
women and children populated the Angkor area, according to
an estimate by French archaeologist Bernard-Philippe
Groslier, making it the largest settlement in the preindustrial
world.
All this manpower was necessary to build the temples, which
were painstakingly erected from giant sandstone monoliths
hewed out of a quarry more than 37 miles away. Rather than
having foundations that sink into the ground, most
Angkorean temples are built on huge mounds of earth that
give them their pyramid shape, the soil excavated from a
moat or from one of the lakes. Some historians theorize that
the blitz of building during the Khmer Empire could have
been accomplished only through a mandatory labor

requirement levied on all citizens, or perhaps even through

slavery.
The grandeur that marked the Khmer Empire was not to
last, however. The royal city of Angkor was repeatedly
sacked by the Thai army during the 14th century, and in
1431 the capital was relocated farther away from Thailand.
Angkor Wat itself by that time converted to a Buddhist
temple continued to function, and for centuries it was
home to a flourishing monastery that attracted pilgrims from
as far away as Japan, even while the former capital city
nearby was gradually overtaken by the jungle. Although the
Buddhists occupying the temple removed most of the
original Hindu art, Angkor Wats habitation and its
continuous maintenance helped the temple remain relatively
intact while many other Angkorean temples now lie in ruins.
Even after surviving the removal of its Hindu art, Angkor
Wat did not entirely escape the turbulence of Cambodias
recent history. The Western part of Cambodia in which
Angkor Wat is located was a Khmer Rouge stronghold
through the 1990s (the Khmer Rouge were ousted from the
capital city, Phnom Penh, in 1979). Restoration work on the
temples took a forced, decades-long hiatus during the wars
that wracked Cambodia through the later half of the 20th
century. The area was unsafe for tourists until about 10
years ago, when the Khmer Rouge signed a peace treaty
that formally ended Cambodias civil war. There was
relatively little physical damage to the temple as a result of
the wars, but they did irreparable damage by destroying
almost all of the remaining written records pertaining to the
Angkorean period. Khmer archaeology scholar Christophe
Pottier of the French Research School of the Far East
estimates that 95% of the relevant documents have been
destroyed in the past three decades, an irreplaceable loss.
In the years since peace has come to Cambodia the
opportunities for looting have also increased, and many of

the finest sculptures have been spirited out of the country

and sold to buyers abroad. Tourism also poses its own set of
dangers, with some temples suffering from overexposure to
footsteps or curious hands. But despite this even as the
physical structures of the temples inevitably decay Angkor
will continue to symbolize something greater than itself. The
memory of the Khmer Empire, and with it Cambodias full
potential, is unlikely to fade anytime soon.
Ms. Hook is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street
Journal Asia.