,by Jim Goodman
Wandering through the ruins of Angkor
Thom, Angkor Wat and subsidiary sites in the vicinity, one is constantly
consumed by a sense of wonder. After
all, much of its original splendor still stands. Thai armies from Ayutthaya attacked and
ravaged it so badly nearly six centuries ago the government abandoned it for a
new capital further east. Not all the
residents left, but their numbers and resources were insufficient to repair or
maintain the monuments.
They were also powerless to prevent
private looting of valuable sculptures, which became especially acute under
French colonial rule, when authorities permitted their removal. Some
of Angkor’s masterpieces were openly marketed to various museums, especially
the Guimet Museum in Paris. Others were
surreptitiously sold to rich private collectors. Cambodia’s long civil war in the 70s and 80s
and its immediate aftermath resulted in further damage and theft.
Eventually peace and security returned
to the area. Angkor won recognition as a
World Heritage Site and destruction and theft have ceased. Despite the damage and vandalism over the
centuries much of Angkor’s heritage remains.
Thai soldiers removed many outstanding religious sculptures when they
ransacked Angkor, which were in turn looted by Burmese soldiers attacking
Ayutthaya at the end of the 16th century.
But the Ayutthaya forces did not level the city to its foundations. The temples remained intact, though stripped
of their gold embellishments, and so did much of the decorative art, which is
so impressive today.
Thanks to modern research we know a lot
about the organization of Angkor, its social divisions, how the people lived,
both upper and lower classes, what clothes they wore and what food they
ate. We know how they procured the
materials to build the city and how artisans produced their work. The one big mystery is just who these master
craftsmen were. We can determine when a
particular item was created, but not the name of the artisan. None ever ‘signed’ their work. Perhaps it was all for the greater glory of the
gods, or the state that employed them, but apparently not for the greater glory
of their personal reputations.
While we have the names of the kings who
sponsored the construction, extension or renovation of the buildings, the name
of only one architect for any part of the work has survived. An 11
th century inscription congratulates
and promotes Gunipativarman upon completion of the Baphuon and the East
Baray. Similar evidence involving other
architects or any sculptors does not exist.
The Angkor government kept written records, but on perishable materials
like palm-leaf. Very few of them have
survived. Perhaps some manuscripts
mentioned specific artists or their achievements or awards. We’ll never know.
We are not even
sure of what social class the artisans came from; Brahmins, commoners,
slaves/servants attached to the temples?
Or were they part of a designated, state-sponsored, separate class? Whatever the case, they were most likely
organized in guilds, with an established training program for the novices. Experienced sculptors would be responsible
for major works like the big Standing Vishnu in Angkor Thom, the dancing
apsaras,
the ‘Leper King’ or the faces of Jayavarman VII over the gates of Angkor
Thom. The decorative reliefs, of floral
and vegetative designs, and perhaps the background of the narrative reliefs, would
be left for the younger artisans.
Religion
permeated Angkor society and thus its architecture. Aside from the walls, gates and
barays
(reservoirs), extant buildings are all religious. Angkor was viewed as a sacred mandala, laid
out as a replica of Mt. Meru, home of the gods.
Indian culture had already made a strong impact on the Khmer during the
pre-Angkor states of Funan, 3
rd to 6
th centuries, and
Chenla, 6
th to 8
th centuries. While they did not adopt the Indian caste system,
the Khmers took up the religion and Hindu gods became their own, replacing
whatever indigenous ones they had before.
To house these
deities they built temples on the Indian model of the Gupta Dynasty of northern
India , 4th to 6th centuries. The shikara style of a tower with a
tapering top, alone or flanked by a horizontal, columned temple was a popular
type. For the carved imagery, their
iconography came from the same source, with precise requirements for how the
gods looked, what animal they rode, what they held in their hands and so
on. The rules allowed for some
flexibility in the depiction of subsidiary figures, but not of the main image.
Indra, chief of
the gods and also the war deity, always rides a three-headed elephant, often
wielding a club. Shiva’s mount is a bull
and he is often accompanied by his wife Parvati. Vishnu rides the man-bird Garuda, but around
Angkor he is usually standing alone or with his two wives at his side (smaller
than him) or else as Sleeping Vishnu, on his back within the coils of a
protective python. In general, the gods’ images had to be bigger than those of any people in the carving. In Angkor that would also apply to its kings,
whose bodies had to be much bigger than anyone else.
Buddhism became
part of Angkor culture from the 8th century, around the time it was
all but wiped out in northern India.
Sinhalese missionary monks introduced the Theravada variant, which is
still the main religion of Cambodia today.
Certain kings, most notably Jayavarman VII in the 13th
century, promoted Mahayana Buddhism. He
also renovated Angkor Thom and built the entry gates in each direction with a
huge portrait of a calm and meditating face in the center of the tower. It might be his own face, but it could be a
depiction of a bodhisattva, with which he identified anyway.
Other
renditions of the Buddha followed the Gupta Era stipulations. Usually the Angkor Buddha is seated in
meditation, sometimes surrounded by, and ignoring, beautiful maidens sent by
the evil Mara to tempt and distract him.
Occasionally he is standing with his begging bowl or lying lengthwise as
the Reclining Buddha. The curled hair,
large ears and monk’s robes are always part of the depiction.
Sandstone was
the main building material for Angkor and its source was the Kulen Hills, about
30 km north. At quarries here laborers,
probably all slaves, cut huge blocks of sandstone, mounted them on wooden rollers
and conveyed them back to the city. Laterite
was an alternative stone in some cases, but that could be found in the
immediate area. Wood was also a common
material, especially in the satellite towns and rural areas, but mainly in the
late Classic and post-Classic periods.
Sculptures in
sandstone are more impressive. The work
was slow and meticulous, probably using only a bronze chisel and wooden
mallet. The sculptor began by making a
rough form of the projected work and gradually shaped the volumes and cut the
lines according to the traditional canon.
When the details were all in place the final steps were smoothing and
polishing, especially the faces and bodies.
Being a religious image of some kind, its installation was doubtless
accompanied by a ritual ceremony.
Most of the
carvings were low and high relief panels on the temple walls, towers, gates and
columns. Some were larger than life,
free-standing, three-dimensional statues, usually fixed on platforms or
pedestals. The most outstanding is the
eight-armed standing Vishnu in Angkor Wat, with its smooth, perfectly
proportioned limbs and torso. Another is
the seated “Leper King” in Angkor Thom, which got its name from its mottled
surface upon its discovery, leading to speculation this was the legendary Leper
King of Angkor’s past. But it turned out
lichen growth had caused the mottling and after the statue was cleaned up, an
inscription was discovered identifying the image as Yama, the Lord of
Death.
Besides deities,
temple imagery included a variety of mythological creatures. Some of these were guardian lions, others monsters
placed at the temple compound entrance; the lion-headed jawless kala
with bulging eyes, the hybrid makara and the naga, a big cobra
snake with seven or nine heads. Others
were divinities, like the dvarapalas, young men standing guard at the
entrance, the apsaras, heavenly dancing girls, and devatas,
female denizens of Indra’s paradise.
In creating the
sculptures of mythical animals the artist had to follow prescribed traditional
norms, just as with the gods. That was
true of representing the divinities as well, for the
apsaras wore tall
head-dresses and clothing that was probably the style of ladies in the Angkor Court,
while the
devatas were often backed by a flaming aureole. But since these had human forms, one suspects
the sculptors used real people around them as the models. The faces don’t closely resemble their Gupta
Era prototypes. They look more like
indigenous Khmer.
Besides stories
about the gods, Indian mythology included two great epics, the
Ramayana,
a tale of one of Vishnu’s avatars, and the
Mahabharata, a
semi-historical narrative of a great battle for control of ancient India. Both epics contain a wealth of battle scenes
to inspire Khmer sculptors making narrative reliefs. Besides the wars in the epics, Khmer artisans
also created narrative reliefs of their own battles with
Chăm armies
from states in what is now south central Vietnam. One can distinguish between the two armies by
the head-covering worn by the Chăm soldiers,
whereas the Khmer don’t wear any. The
king commanding the Angkor side sits on an elephant and both he and the animal
are disproportionately larger than other figures in the scene.
Wall reliefs
were not limited to scenes from Heaven and narratives of wars. Ordinary daily life was a subject, too. In fact, much of what we know about everyday
experience comes from relevant wall reliefs.
We see people using ox carts, preparing an animal for cooking, using a
mortar and pestle, drinking from cups, boiling water, tending animals and other
vignettes. Both the humans and the
animals—elephants, goats, birds, reptiles—are depicted realistically.
To supplement
our knowledge about life in old Angkor we can read the only surviving
contemporary account, of a visit made in 1296-97, when Angkor was still
thriving, was by far the largest urban center in Southeast Asia and bigger than
almost every Chinese city. Called
A
Record of Cambodia: the Land and its
People, the author was a Chinese envoy named Zhou Daguan, who was sent
there on a mission for the Yuan Dynasty government.
No original Yuan Dynasty editions of the book
exist. What we have today is obviously
incomplete, some aspects of Angkor society are ignored, some misinterpreted or
subject to the author’s Chinese prejudices, yet it contains many valuable
first-hand observations. He found it a
dazzling, well-organized and administered city and reported that its residents
felt the same way. He records their
agricultural practices, food products, sauces and spices, liquor, flora and
fauna, religion, festivals and political system.
He describes the
royal palace, which was built with wood and has not survived, and the
Phimeanakas next to it, the royal ancestral temple, still standing, with a
steep front staircase similar to Mayan sacrificial altars in Mexico. Supposedly the king went there every night to
sleep with a serpent goddess inside a gold chamber at the top. Gold plating on towers, bridges, windows and
other parts of the royal palace was quite profusely used and on clear days
Angkor was literally a shining city. The
big halls, high ceilings, gold furnishings and decorations of the palace were
designed to maximize the sense of majesty.
In this class
society people lived according to their rank.
Royal relatives and high officials had big houses, though not anywhere
as grand or lavishly furnished as the king’s. They could only have tiled roofs
over the bedroom and family ancestral altar, the other roofs thatched. The lower classes were not permitted tiled
roofs at all. Except for the palace,
interiors had little furniture. People
ate on the floor and slept there at night inside mosquito nets. And except for the jewelry, all classes dressed in the same wraparound or tubular skirts.
Unfortunately,
Zhou did not write much about the art of Angkor or anything at all about its
creators. We know how they lived, what
they ate, etc, but not about their work or their own attitude to it. Maybe during the ceremony with the
installation of the work they received at least some public acknowledgment of
their creations or even some kind of reward.
Certainly they must have felt some professional pride in their
accomplishments, something that would be recognized within their peer
group. Would they have taken friends to
see their latest sculpture to elicit comments, praise or a favorable
evaluation? Would they have introduced a
colleague as the one who carved those wonderful
apsaras over that gate? Who can say?
At the very
minimum, the art works of Angkor had one salutary effect upon the artists who
made them. They made the city an
aesthetically positive place to live in.
Art and beauty was everywhere. A
city designed to please the gods pleased the designers as well. And its artisans were surely conscious of the
role they played in making it beautiful.
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