Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 55

Angkor in the Ninth Century vara, raised serious doubts as to the ritualistic purpose of this monument, doubts which led M. Louis Finot to recognize in the central temple of Angkor Thom an old Mahāyānist sanctuary that had been transformed into a Saiva temple, an hypothesis that was fully established by the discovery quite recently of a gigantic Buddha buried deep in the foundations of the edifice.
In 1927 M. Philippe Stern published his most lucid and discerning thesis on the Bayon. Thereafter the town which bore the name of Angkor Thom was no longer the capital founded in the ninth century by Yasovarman I., but a town of the eleventh century built by a great Buddhist sovereign, Süryavarman I.
The reading of the Sanskrit inscriptions on the steles placed at the four corners of this city has since enabled M. Georges Cadès to prove that the walls of Angkor Thom and the Bayon itselt are of even a later date than M. Stern had supposed, and that they date in fact from the last years of the twelfth century. Instead of representing the blossoming and expansion of the art of Angkor, the Bayon and many other monuments of the same style, such as Práh Khan, Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei, Banteay Chmår and the Néak Pean, appertain to a phase of decadence, and we should see in them not the dawn but the twilight of the "Miracle Khmer.” After the striking evidence provided by M. Cædès, it no doubt seems possible at this time that the present Angkor Thom is the city built by a fervent votary of Buddhism, Jayavarman VII., after the year 1177, the year when the old capital had been taken by assault and pillaged by the Chams, the implacable enemies of the Khmer people
This point being settled, it was necessary to find out the position of the first town of Angkor, the Yasodarapuri of the ninth century. M. Stern had proposed to locate it around the Phinnéanakás, the stepped pyramid of which, ornamented with lions and elephants carved in stone and crowned by a small sanctuary, occupies the middle of an extensive rectangular enclosure in the north-west quarter of Angkor Thom. But this hypothesis, though attractive in many respects, presented serious difficulties. It was while examining closely the arguments marshalled by M. Stern in support of his conjecture that the idea occurred to me of looking for the centre of the first Angkor, not within but outside of the area comprising the town of Jayavarman VII. At the same time I wondered whether perchance this centre had not corresponded with the Phnom Bakhèng, the Saiva temple situated upon a small wooded hill not far from the southern gate of Angkor Thom, and which you have seen on one of my slides; in other words, this temple might have represented the “Central Hill,' the sanctuary that had been devoted formerly to the cult of the God-King.
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