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165 Chapter 13 The Yoginīs of the Bayon Peter D. Sharrock Judging by the number of images of Hevajra found around Angkor and on various sites on the Khorat Plateau in Thailand…it would seem that a cult of this important tantric divinity was practised from the 11th century onwards. Since no relevant literature is available, not even a stray reference on a carved inscription, nothing of certainty can be said regarding this cult. (Snellgrove 2001: 57) Abstract This paper argues that Vajrayāna, Buddhism’s third vehicle, played a more important role in Cambodia than has been acknowledged, and that it was key to the state cultus under King Jayavarman VII at the formal opening of the great Bayon state temple probably early in the thirteenth century. I examine the so-called ‘apsaras’ or celestial dancers that cluster at the entrances to the temple and suggest they are Tantric—yoginīs or the projections of a Yoginī-Hevajra cult. This interpretation is based on analysing their iconography within the Khmer tradition and on the abundance of their numbers in prominent locations outside the Bayon. The dancers appear to share a close kinship with the yoginīs that whirl around the supreme Tantric deity Hevajra in late ‘Bayon style’ bronzes. This emphatic use of a motif of dancing goddesses on the Bayon is unprecedented in Khmer temple decoration, and yet it is what we might anticipate in a cult of the supreme Tantric deity Hevajra, who worked largely through the intercession of his ascetic goddesses. Moreover, large halls adorned with similar dancers were inserted late into the king’s other temples, in an update package that itself suggests a cultic shift. This, and further concurrent evidence, entitles us to infer a royal Hevajra cult, and therefore to propose a reevaluation of the creed of the Bayon and the deity in its enigmatic giant face towers. Tantric Buddhism in the ancient Khmer Empire is viewed as a minority cult. This paper argues that Buddhism’s third vehicle, the Tantric Vajrayāna, flowered in the state cult at the last high point of the empire in the early 1200s, less than a century before the country turned to the Pāli-language Theravāda monastic lineage and entered a long and slow decline into the modern era. With one exception, the few scholars who have studied this late efflorescence of the Khmer Vajrayāna have judged it a minor phenomenon incapable of elucidation in the absence of textual support, as in my epigraph.1 But I find threads of material evidence from Khmer religious art that entwine logically, as well as circumstantial evidence from the international medieval Buddhist scene, which tip the balance in favor of seeing that a tantric cult of Hevajra was made central to the state religion. The main material evidence is a large series of bronze statuettes of Hevajra, one of Tantric Buddhism’s supreme deities, which implies that the hevajra-tantra was a basic text for tantric rites in Cambodia in this period. These icons, along with Hevajra’s bronze libation conches, vajras and bells, and other Tantric ritual paraphernalia amount to incontrovertible evidence for the presence of a Tantric Buddhist cult. The question to settle is how far and how high up the royal agenda it went. And here, the status of thousands of vigorous, dancing goddesses carved into the portals of the Bayon state temple, and added to the king’s other temples, could be decisive. This paper focuses on this last thread of material evidence, which has been virtually ignored by scholars — the large entablature friezes and pillar engravings of wide-eyed dancers which monopolize the entrances to the Bayon (Figure 13.1). 13 ISEA.indd 165 6/6/08 10:14:22 AM 166 PETER D. SHARROCK Fig 13.1 Bayon outer gallery entablature with dancers. The Bayon was Cambodia’s first Buddhist state temple and was under construction and redesign for much of the reign of Jayavarman VII, ancient Cambodia’s greatest king. It has always been assumed that the dancers are apsaras or celestial nymphs who delineate the sacred spaces of the stone palaces of the gods on earth, but bear no special ritual meaning. But before the Bayon they never appeared with such insistence and in such numbers. Why, then, are all the approaches to the Bayon suddenly enwrapped in challenging, and sometimes almost fierce female deities in a way unprecedented in Khmer temple architecture? An abundance of...

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