Religion and Temples in the Khmer World

From the ninth through the fifteenth centuries, Khmer temples in present-day Cambodia housed Hindu and Buddhist images and drew support from royal and other patrons. Hindu worship of Shiva and Vishnu continued alongside Buddhist traditions, including Mahayana and later Theravada practice. Inscriptions record particular foundations and their supplies, while temple sculpture shows which images patrons installed.

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Hindu images and royal foundations

Shiva could be worshipped through a linga, a stone emblem placed in a temple sanctuary. A Cambodian linga and architectural base dated about 975 in the Metropolitan Museum represents Shiva’s generative power. The museum notes that some Khmer kings placed a linga on the summit of an important temple as part of royal regalia, making the deity’s presence part of a royal foundation.

Vishnu appeared in sculpted form and in stories carved on temple walls. At Prasat Kravan, dedicated in 921, brick reliefs show Vishnu in several mythic forms. At the eleventh-century West Mebon, a sanctuary stood within the reservoir of the West Baray. Its placement linked Vishnu’s cult to the temple’s constructed water setting.

Jayavarman VII’s Mahayana foundations

Jayavarman VII ruled in the late twelfth century and founded major Buddhist institutions and monuments. His support for Mahayana Buddhism is visible in Bayon, Ta Prohm and Preah Khan. Mahayana honored bodhisattvas, beings on the path to Buddhahood who help others escape suffering. Preah Khan’s central Buddhist sanctuary stood among subsidiary Hindu shrines, placing distinct cults within one complex.

An inscription at Say Fong in present-day Laos dates a royal hospital and its shrine to the healing Buddha to 1186–1187. It names the Buddha with two bodhisattvas, Sunlight and Moonlight, and records the people who maintained the foundation. Two state doctors treated patients; storekeepers distributed remedies and rice; cooks supplied food, water and fuel; and women heated water and ground medicines. Priests and an accountant were appointed by the royal monastery’s superior. The inscription assigns one daily measure of rice to divine worship and sends the ritual leftovers to the sick. In this foundation, Buddhist devotion, medical care and staff labor were materially connected.

Bayon’s religious change

Jayavarman VII’s Bayon held a colossal Buddha sheltered by a naga, the serpent protector, in its central sanctuary. Later evidence records a different cult there: an inscription dated 1327 names a Shiva linga in the central temple. A scholarly study also describes Buddha icons at Bayon reworked as lingas and Buddha figures chiseled from other temples built by Jayavarman VII. The evidence establishes a major religious change, though scholars debate which ruler led the image destruction.

Theravada practice and reused monuments

Theravada Buddhism, transmitted through monastic communities and teachings preserved in the Pali canon, gained influence in the region during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Zhou Daguan, a visitor to Angkor in 1296–1297, described Buddhist monks among the religious specialists he encountered. At the Baphuon, stone from the earlier Shiva temple was reused to build a large reclining Buddha on the west side. Blocks from one sacred structure thus became part of a new Buddhist image.

Angkor Wat, built as a Vishnu temple, became a Buddhist pilgrimage site in later centuries. Khmer inscriptions dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries record offerings and acts of worship there; Japanese visitors also left seventeenth-century writings. These records show Buddhist practice within the continued use of an older royal monument.