Heritage site
Chapel of the Hospital
The Chapel of the Hospital is a small Buddhist sanctuary tower at Angkor, built for one of the hospitals of King Jayavarman VII.[1][2] Glaize's guide calls it the Hospital Chapel.[1]
Location
The tower stands on the right of the road after the Spean Thma bridge, where the road turns south at the 7 kilometer marker. Glaize compared it to the tower of Ta Prohm Kel in front of Angkor Wat.[1]
The hospital
A stele found at the site carries the text of Jayavarman VII's edict on hospitals. The find identified the tower as the chapel of one of the 102 hospitals the king founded, which are listed in the inscription of Ta Prohm.[1]
The temple
A ruined cross-shaped entrance gate of laterite and sandstone and a paved walk of about 20 meters lead to the tower. The tower is nearly whole, with four upper tiers. It has a cross-shaped plan with three false doors and opens to the east through a porch with two windows. The sanctuary inside is 2 meters square. In front of the door stands an unusual pedestal with vertical bands.[1]
Glaize judged the carving poor. The Buddha images on the pediments have been defaced. On one pediment, Victor Goloubew identified the bodhisattva Lokesvara with a sick man and an attendant who is about to massage his hand.[1]
A vajra pedestal at the hospital group
Sharrock writes that the only vajra-decorated pedestal at Angkor, carved with the thunderbolt emblem, stands before the eastern chapel of the hospital group near Ta Keo. Goloubew recorded a small headless image of the bodhisattva Vajrapani, also called Vajradhara, set on it; the image has since disappeared, and the pedestal remains.[2] Sharrock does not name Glaize's Hospital Chapel, so the two accounts may describe the same pedestal but are not joined in either source.[2][1] Sharrock reads such images, seated before hospital sanctuaries, as a sign that the hospitals were placed under Vajrapani rather than Lokesvara.[2]
History
Glaize dated the chapel to the late 12th century, in the reign of Jayavarman VII, and recorded its cult as Buddhist. Henri Marchal cleared the site in 1920.[1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Angkor Database, Maurice Glaize, The Monuments of the Angkor Group (1944; English translation of the fourth French edition)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Angkor Database, Peter D. Sharrock, Garuda, Vajrapani and Religious Change in Jayavarman VII's Angkor, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 40(1) (2009)