Angkor Wat

← Encyclopedia

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. Its plan is not incidental but deliberate cosmology rendered in sandstone. A broad moat encircles the whole, standing for the cosmic ocean; the rising terraces within map the mountain-ranges and continents of Hindu geography; and the five lotus-bud towers at the heart represent the peaks of Mount Meru, the axis of the world where the gods dwell. The orientation is unusual among Khmer temples in facing west rather than east, which has been read both as an association with Vishnu and as evidence that the building served as the king’s funerary temple — a question scholarship has not settled. Along the outer galleries run some of the longest continuous bas-reliefs in the world, carved with scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata and with the Churning of the Sea of Milk, in which gods and demons together turn the cosmic ocean to draw out the elixir of immortality.

Though founded as a Vaishnava shrine, Angkor Wat did not remain one. As the Khmer court turned increasingly to Buddhism in the following centuries, the temple was gradually adapted to Buddhist use, and Theravada Buddhist monks have maintained a presence at the site into modern times — one of the reasons it was never wholly abandoned even after the wider city of Angkor declined. European visitors in the nineteenth century reported it as a marvel half-lost to forest, but the persistent local cult means the popular notion of a “rediscovered” ruin overstates the case; the temple had its worshippers throughout.

For the practitioners who built and used it, the architecture was not a representation of the cosmos 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. The empire that raised it is gone. The mountain it was meant to be remains standing.

→ Related: Mahabharata · Mount Fuji · Parthenon