Word: jayavarman
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...Phnom Kulen is the holiest mountain in Cambodia and a picnic destination for Khmer families. But few foreigners visit. On this peak in 802, King Jayavarman II declared himself a Hindu god-king and kicked off the four-century Angkor period of Khmer history that produced the Angkor temples, constructed of Phnom Kulen's sandstone. The Khmer Rouge used the mountain as a final stronghold for two decades after losing power in 1979, so it's only been three years since visitors have again been able to enjoy the cool waters and artistic treasures...
...same authority could extend to portraits of historical figures--Khmer kings. Portrait is a relative term here. There is no knowing whether the last great Angkor king, Jayavarman VII, actually looked like the stone effigy made of him in the late 12th century, and it is most unlikely that he ever sat for its sculptor. (No social prestige attached to being a Khmer sculptor, and not a single artist's name in all the 1,000 years of Cambodian art has been recorded.) Which hardly matters, since the subject of this dense, exquisitely carved image is less a man than...
...Hindu, but the Bayon was built as a Buddhist shrine. While Angkor Wat soars, the Bayon suffocates. It is crowded with 54 sandstone towers, each with four carved visages of a complacently smiling future Buddha, or bodhisattva. The faces are probably likenesses of the temple's builder, King Jayavarman VII. The King, whose vigorous rule turned out to be the death rattle of the Angkor civilization, went on perhaps the greatest building spree of all Khmer kings, but the sandstone available by his time was of a much lower quality than that used at Angkor Wat. When first discovered...
...CAMBODIA. One of the greatest kings of early Buddhism was Cambodia's Jayavarman VII, the builder of Angkor Wat. Today leftist Prince Sihanouk, as Cambodia's Chief of State and High Protector of the Buddhist religion, assiduously cultivates the god-king role. Following the Buddhist road of the middle, intones Sihanouk, he means to be halfway between capitalism and Marxism at home and neutralist abroad...
Beautiful As the Moon. Near the end of the 8th century, the mighty King Jayavarman II founded the first great dynasty of Angkor, and for the next 300 years the Khmers added steadily to their glory. They were prodigious engineers: their moats, canals and reservoirs made the land so fertile that hunger was virtually unknown. One inscription honors a king, not for his conquests but for creating a reservoir "beautiful as the moon, to refresh mankind and to drown the insolence of the other kings...