Angkor Wat

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Angkor Wat is a temple complex in northwestern Cambodia, built in the first half of the twelfth century as the state sanctuary of the Khmer Empire and dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. It is the largest religious monument ever constructed, and the single building has stood at the center of Cambodian identity for so long that its silhouette occupies the national flag.

The temple was raised under the king Suryavarman II, whose reign began around 1113, as part of the great capital at Angkor north of the Tonle Sap lake. The name records its long second life: Angkor is the city, wat the monastery or temple, so that the whole reads as the temple-city, the name a later age fixed on a place its first builders called something else. What the first builders made was a Vaishnava foundation, and that itself was a departure. Khmer state temples before it had largely served Shiva; Suryavarman gave the new center of his kingdom to Vishnu instead, the preserver who holds the worlds in being, and identified his own rule with the god who keeps the cosmic order from coming apart.

The shape of the universe in sandstone

The plan is not incidental but deliberate cosmology rendered in stone. A broad moat — roughly a hundred and ninety meters across and close to five kilometers in circuit — encircles the whole, standing for the cosmic ocean that surrounds the world. The rising terraces within map the mountain-ranges and continents of Hindu sacred geography, ring within ring, the outer walls the encircling ranges. At the heart, five lotus-bud towers in a quincunx — one central, four at the corners — represent the peaks of Mount Meru, the axis of the world where the gods dwell and around which the heavens turn. To walk inward across the causeway and up through the galleries is to cross the ocean, pass the ranges, and arrive at the mountain at the center of things. The site covers some hundred and sixty hectares; it is not a model of the cosmos placed inside a building, it is a building that is the cosmos, drawn at a scale a person can walk.

That the correspondence was meant precisely, and not merely evoked, is the contention of the art historian Eleanor Mannikka, whose study of the temple’s measurements argues that key distances encode the lengths of the four yugas, the great ages of Hindu time — the moat’s width in cubits answering to one age, the long western approach to another — so that to traverse the plan in space is also to travel the ages in time. Not every scholar accepts the full scheme, but the principle behind it is not in doubt: the Khmer architects built numbers and orientations into the stone, and the building was meant to be read as much as entered.

The orientation is the one element that resists a settled reading. Khmer temples face east, toward the rising sun; Angkor Wat faces west. West is the quarter of Vishnu, which would explain the choice on its own. West is also the direction of the setting sun and of death in Hindu thought, and the bas-reliefs run counter-clockwise — the direction of funerary rite — which led an earlier generation of scholars, among them George Coedès and Maurice Glaize, to read the building as Suryavarman’s own funerary temple, a place where the dead king would be joined to the god he had served. The two readings, Vishnu-association and royal mausoleum, are not exclusive and have never been forced apart; the stone holds both at once, and the question has stayed open.

The world-record galleries

Along the outer enclosure run some of the longest continuous bas-reliefs in the world — roughly eight hundred meters of carved sandstone, the most extensive narrative gallery in stone anywhere. Eight great panels turn the walls into a single unspooling scripture. From the Mahabharata attributed to the sage Vyasa comes the Battle of Kurukshetra, the slaughter of the Kauravas and Pandavas that is the epic’s terrible center, carved here as a wall of locked combatants running yards on end. From the Ramayana comes the Battle of Lanka, Rama and his army of monkeys against Ravana and his demons. One panel leaves myth for record entirely and shows Suryavarman II himself, the living king on his elephant amid his marching army, one of the rare contemporary portraits of a Khmer sovereign. Another stages the Heavens and Hells, with Yama the judge of the dead presiding and the tiers of reward and torment ranged below him.

The longest-remembered of all is the Churning of the Sea of Milk. Gods and demons take the two ends of the cosmic serpent and, using a mountain as the churning-stick and the serpent as the rope, pull in turn to turn the ocean of milk — Vishnu in his tortoise form supporting the mountain at the pivot — until the churned sea yields, among its treasures, the amrita, the elixir of immortality that the gods seek and the demons would seize. The whole reach of the panel is the labor of dragging the deathless thing up out of the deep, and the temple that holds it was raised by a king who meant, in life or in death, to be lifted to the same place.

From Vishnu’s house to the Buddha’s

Though founded as a Vaishnava shrine, Angkor Wat did not remain one. As the Khmer court turned increasingly to Buddhism in the following centuries — first the Mahayana esotericism of the late Angkorian kings, then, from around the thirteenth century, the Theravada that would become Cambodia’s enduring form — the temple was gradually adapted to Buddhist use. Buddha images were set in the galleries; some Vishnu imagery was reworked. The great standing eight-armed Vishnu of the western entrance, cut from a single block of sandstone and known to Cambodians as Ta Reach, the King of the Ancestors, kept its place through the change: for a time it wore a Buddha head in place of its own, and its original was restored to it in a conservation campaign at the turn of the present century. Khmer worshippers, Buddhist and otherwise, still bring offerings to its feet. The transition from Vishnu’s house to the Buddha’s was not a rupture but a long sedimentation, one cult settling over another without ever clearing the ground, and the building carries both strata still legible.

For this reason the popular image of a lost city swallowed by jungle and then recovered by outsiders misses what actually happened. Theravada monks maintained a presence at the site straight through the decline of the wider city — when the Khmer capital shifted south toward the region of Phnom Penh, the temple stayed a living place of worship and pilgrimage, never wholly abandoned. The French naturalist Henri Mouhot, whose posthumously published journals did much to make Angkor famous in Europe after his visit around 1860, reported a marvel half-claimed by forest — but he found monks already in residence. The “rediscovery” was a European arrival at a place that had its worshippers all along, and the local custodianship that kept the temple in use is the reason it survived to be arrived at.

The temple in scholarship

The modern study of Angkor begins with the surveying and epigraphic work of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, the French institution that from the early twentieth century mapped, cleared, and conserved the Angkor monuments and deciphered the Sanskrit and Khmer inscriptions that date and dedicate them; the historian George Coedès, working from those inscriptions, fixed much of the chronology of Suryavarman II and the Vaishnava founding that scholarship still uses. Eleanor Mannikka’s Angkor Wat: Time, Space, and Kingship (1996) is the standard statement of the measured-cosmology reading. The deep history of the Khmer state that built it is set out in Charles Higham’s archaeological surveys of the civilization of Angkor. The temple and the wider complex were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1992, and the continuous Theravada custodianship that carried it across the centuries — the fact that undoes the “lost ruin” story — has been documented in the Yale study of Buddhism at Angkor between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Set beside the other great sanctuaries that turned stone into a claim about the order of things — the Parthenon on its Athenian rock, the dome of Florence Cathedral, the vault of Notre-Dame de Paris — Angkor Wat is the one that did not represent its cosmos from outside but tried to be it. For the people who built and used it, the architecture was not a picture of the universe so much as a working model of it: a place where the order of the heavens was made present on earth and where a king could be joined, in life or in death, to the god at the center of things. The ambition was to build the shape of the universe and then live inside it. Pilgrims still climb its galleries and monks still tend its shrines — a Buddhist sanctuary now, the Vishnu of its founding long since succeeded by the Buddha — and the model of the cosmos is still entered the way it was built to be entered, from inside.

→ Related: Mahabharata · Mount Fuji · Parthenon · Khmer Empire · Vishnu · Buddhism · Hinduism · Shiva · Vyasa · Immortality · Florence Cathedral · Notre Dame De Paris · Buddhism Theravada