What happened in 802? From the Sdok Kak Thom Incription, incised in A.D. 1050 in northwestern Cambodia-a major source for Cambodian chronology and religious history-we learn that in this year the monarch we call Jayavarman II, residing in the Kulen hills to the north fo what was to become the Angkor complex, participated in a ritual whereby he became a “universal monarch.” The ceremonies also celebrated devaraja, a Sanskrit term that translates as “god king” or “king of the gods,” unquestionably a cult linking the monarch with Siva. The ceremony had apparently been preceded some years earlier by an “auspicious magic rite” celebrated at the cult sit of Ba Phnom in the southeast.
Jayavarman II and his son, Jayavarman III , left no inscriptions of their won, and this has encouraged scholars, unitil recently, to suggest that the importance granted to these kings as “founder of Angkor” has been exaggerated. The Sdok Kak Thom inscription is primarily concerned with the sacerdotal family that, for more than two hundred years, officiated at the devaraja celebrations. And yet the biographical details that the inscription provides are very useful. Jayavvaman II apparently resided in five parts of Cambodia at different time in his career. He Mekong Basin, near Sambor, before moving west to occupy Aninditapura, to the north and east of the Tonle Sap, or Great Lake.
What was jayavarman doing in these places? With all the facts we know about him-more extensive than for many later kings-there is still something mysterious about him. Who was he? Where did he come from?In a persuasive essay, Claude Jacques has argued that he arrived (or returned) from a place called “Java”(perhaps the island of that name, perhaps a kingdom in Sumatra) around A.D 770, when he was about twenty years old. One of his first actions, according to a tenth century inscription found in the area of Ba Phonm, was to perform a ceremony that “made it impossible forJava to contro holy Cambodia.” We do not know what the ceremony involved or why Jayavarman II was impelled to declare his independence at this time and in this way. Coedes has pointed out that although the ceremony clearly preceded the one performed on Mt. Kulen, it could easily have been one of several, in many parts of the kingdom, as Jayavarman moved through them over the next thirty years.
The references are tantalizing and incomplete. Was the ceremony performed at Ba Phnom imported from Java? Or was it one that linked Jayavarman II with ancestral spirits at Funan? The ceremony was important enough to be noted in an inscription concerned primarily with other things two centuries later. Given Ba Phono’s enduring importance as a cult site, as recently as the 1940s, the second explanation is tempting, but evidence is lacking to support it.
The rest of Jayavarman’s early career has been traced by Jacques and Oliver Wolters. Primarily, it involved a series of military campaigns and the formation of alliances, through marriages and grants of land, with locally powerful people willing to transfer some of their allegiance to a newcomer claiming to be a universal monarch. An undated inscription gives the borders of Jayavarman II’s kingdom as being “China, Champa, the ocean, and the land of cardamons and mangoes” –perhaps located to the west.
The assimilation of the Angkorean region into “Kambuja-desa” occupied more than twenty years. No inscriptions have survived from this period, and temples appear to have been small or made of perishable materials. These undocumented years are crucial all the same, for at this time the related notion of nationhood and kingship, remolded to fit the Cambodian scene, appear to have been gathering force. Both terms should be used with caution. “Nationhood” may have meant little more than having a name (Kambuja-desa) with which to contrast one’s fellows with outsider,owing their allegiance to a particular”universal” king, whose relation to them resembled Siva’s relationship with the other gods. Perhaps both these ideas came in from Java, but they were probably already known from the Indian literature of statecraft, familiar to Brahmans known to have been in Cambodia at this time.
The evidence for the suggestion springs from inscriptions carved long after Jayavarmand’s death. But Wolters and Jacques have argued convincingly that in his progress through Cambodia, the future king welded together an assortment of disparate regions into some sort of self-aware community. Whether or not Jayavarman II succeeded in this task (or even if the task was what he had in mind) is open to question because of the obscurity that surrounds his reign. But it is clear that was different from what their own, more provincial ancestors had been able to achieve. Jayavarman II also served a more practical purpose. Cambodian folk thinking has always placed great emphasis on the veneration of ancestoras, or nak t , associated with particular places. Once the royal capital of Cambodia came to be at Hariharalaya (present day Roluos), where Jayavarman II finally settled, subsequent kings came to honor him as a king of ancestral “founder-spirit” of the sort that every Cambodian village possessed until recently.
Although it is no longer tenable to say that the cult of the devaraja ws in some way a ritual process by which a king became a god , or a “god-king” the evidence of ritual and ideologicall connections between Cambodian kings and the god Siva is extensive, even if the devaraja cult as such may not have played as large a part in the socialization of Cambodian kingship as the authors of the Sdok Kak Thom inscription would like us to believe, The cult, in other words, was a royal cult, rather than the definitive one; Hermann Kulke has argued persuasively that the cult involved a statue of Siva, himself devaraja, or king of the gods, that was paraded through the streets of Angkor-and other royal capitals at festivals-in remembrance, perhaps, of the role the cult had played at the beginning of the Angkorean period, when Jayavarman II freed Cambodia from java.
