Angkor Wat and Bayon sculpture
It was King Suryavarman II (ruled 1113–49), an ambitious and military ruler, who founded and built the awe-inspiring temple complex of Angkor Wat, the largest stone monument on earth. Suryavarman II was devoted to Vishnu, who since the 7th century had been god of war for the kings of Cambodia.
The general king extended Cambodian control from the Malay Peninsula in the south, west along the Burmese border (now Myanmar) and east to Vijaya, the Champa capital (actual Central South Vietnam), and re-established ‘imperial tribute’ missions (effectively trade) to the Northern Song court, when he was given the status of ‘great vassal’ by the Chinese emperor.
He was succeeded by his much younger Buddhist brother Tribhuvanadityavarman, who during his 30-year reign undertook only one expedition against the Dai Viet which failed due to bad weather.
Unlike his older brother who had built no Buddhist sanctuaries, be built eight Buddhist temples of which Beng Mealea is the biggest. This huge Buddhist building programme supports the attribution to his reign of the many stone and bronze sculptures of crowned and bejewelled Buddhas seated on serpent thrones.
At the end of the 12th century, king Jayavarman VII (about 1182–1220), who raised the earlier Hindu cult of devaraja (god-king) to its peak, was the first ruler to dedicate a Khmer state temple (the Bayon) to the Buddhas of the Mahayana. He considered himself a bodhisattva, an enlightened intermediary between the gods and man, and erected a large stone Buddha seated on a naga in the central sanctuary of the Bayon temple, with multiple towers enigmatic smiling faces the size of a man.
