With the development of religious worship, the
ancient Khmers modeled the overall vision of Braahmanism and Buddhism to their
own sensibilities, and replaced the major gods with their ancestors. There is
clear evidence of this shift in the statues of deities built under the reign of
Jayavarman VII, when they were designed to look like him or his wife, such as
the statues of the kneeling Prajnaparamita and those of the king himself.
Phimean Akas temple inscription K. 485, written by
Indradeví, provides further insight into this practice, ‘Jayarájadeví, an
intelligent women, erected everywhere statues of her mother, her father, her
brother, her friends, her forebears and relatives that she knew or had heard
of’ (stanza XCIII). There is mention of Indradeví herself in stanza XCVI, ‘[…]
Thus, while erecting numerous images of Srí Jayarájadeví along with images of
herself and the king, in every city, […]’.
However, it is difficult to maintain and to accept
that all the images of the Preah Neang Deví are simply the representations of
the wives of the kings, as no documentation to that effect has survived to this
day. In addition, some curators have moved statues from the temples to totally
unsuitable locations, a situation that has caused serious research issues.
Based on inscription K. 485, it is reasonable to
think that the kneeling Prájnaápáramitá is a likeness of Jayarájadeví. This tends
to prove that the ancient Khmers likened their ancestors but also their
contemporaries to the gods.
Thus, the role of the statue of the kneeling
Prajnápáramitá is twofold; it is considered to be an object for adoration, the
Prájnápáramitá, while at the same time it is also the person being worshipped,
Queen Jayarájadeví.
Individual worship indicates that at the time of the
empire, the Khmers relied on the two great religions to feed their own
sensibility, which meant paying their respects to the souls of their ancestors
who were Cambodia’s kings and queens in particular. This is the source of the
‘cult of bhakti’, or cult of fidelity to their ancestors in ancient Khmer
society.
