Tradition

Devaraja

ទេវរាជ

Devaraja (ទេវរាជ) is the Sanskrit name of a royal cult of Angkor, which an inscription of 1052 traces to a rite on Phnom Kulen in 802.[1][2][3] In the Khmer of the inscriptions it is called kamraten jagat ta raja.[1] The cult is often linked to the idea of the king of Angkor as a god-king, but what it was, and how far back it goes, are debated.[4][1]

The rite on Phnom Kulen

The story of the cult's founding comes from the inscription of Sdok Kak Thom, carved in 1052, about 250 years after the events it tells.[1][2] It says that Jayavarman II ruled from several cities, among them Hariharalaya, before he settled on Mount Mahendra, or Mahendraparvata, which is identified with Phnom Kulen.[2][5] The king then sent to a land called Jambudvipa for a Brahman named Hiranyadama, who was learned in magic. Hiranyadama performed a rite so that Kambujadesa, the country of the Kambuja, would have a chakravartin, a sovereign or universal monarch, and he set up the devaraja.[5][2] The rite took place in 802, the year usually taken as the start of the Angkorian period.[5][2] Charles Higham gives the same year for Jayavarman II's proclamation as chakravartin, ruler of the world.[6] Cambodia's entry for Phnom Kulen on the UNESCO tentative list states that the king declared independence from Java there and began the first devaraja cult.[7]

Glaize placed the first royal linga, a stone emblem held to embody the god Shiva, on Jayavarman II's pyramid of Rong Chen.[4] The temple, Prasat Aram Rong Chen, rises in five tiers from a high point of the plateau at 420 meters (1,380 feet), and it ranks among the first temple-mountains built by the Khmer. It is believed to have been the place of the first devaraja rites.[2] Karen Coates wrote in 2015 that it was on Phnom Kulen that Jayavarman II proclaimed himself the god-king (devaraja) of a united Khmer state.[8]

The priests of the cult

After the rite, Jayavarman II had Hiranyadama teach it to the royal chaplain, Sivakaivalya, who took an oath as its chief priest (purohita).[5] The office became hereditary in Sivakaivalya's family and passed through the female line,[5] from a man to the sons of his sisters.[9] A ritual servant of the devaraja from this family had the Sdok Kak Thom inscription made, and it traces the family's priests across more than two centuries.[9][4] The inscription also names a village called Kuti, on the site of the later Banteay Kdei, as land given to the priest's family.[10]

The cult in later reigns

Lawrence Palmer Briggs wrote in 1947 that every great king of Angkor who lived long enough built a new capital, with a central temple on a pyramid to house his devaraja. The temple was the shrine of the state cult during the reign and the king's funerary temple afterward.[5] In his account the devaraja was the lasting essence of the king, merged with the essence of the god. It was worshipped as a linga named with the first part of the king's name joined to -esvara, for Shiva, so the devaraja of 802 was called Jayesvara.[5]

Indravarman I built Bakong in 881 at the center of his capital, Hariharalaya, as a stone temple-mountain of three tiers for a devaraja linga named Indresvara.[11] On Phnom Bakheng, Yasovarman I raised the temple that housed the linga Yasodharesvara, the kingdom's chief sacred image.[4][5]

Jayavarman IV moved the court to Koh Ker, northeast of Angkor. Higham dates the move to 921,[6] and Chun Chanboth dates the king's accession there to 928.[3] He brought the devaraja linga with him, and around 931 he built a temple-mountain of seven tiers, 35 meters (115 feet) high, to hold the devaraja linga Tribhuvanesvara.[3] Michael Vickery wrote that this king gave the kamraten jagat ta raja a weight it has in no other record apart from the Sdok Kak Thom inscription.[1] When Rajendravarman II came to the throne in 944, he took the devaraja linga back to Angkor.[3]

In the 11th century, Udayadityavarman II built the Baphuon, a new temple-mountain at the heart of his city, and placed in it a devaraja linga of gold.[12] Briggs saw this as a return to the devaraja of Shiva.[5] He wrote that Suryavarman II, a follower of Vishnu, seems not to have joined Shiva in a devaraja and may have put a Vishnuraja in its place.[5] At the end of the 12th century, Jayavarman VII, a Buddhist king, dedicated the Bayon to the Buddha in his own likeness. Briggs called this a kind of Buddharaja that seems to replace the devaraja of Shiva.[5] Glaize read it as a way to keep the old royal cult alive in a Buddhist form, seen in a portrait statue of the king found broken in a well at the Bayon.[4]

Meaning

Glaize wrote in 1944 that the exact meaning of the cult was uncertain: some took devaraja to mean "god-king", and others "king of the gods".[4] In his own guide he called it the cult of the god-king, embodied in a linga of Shiva.[4] The Sanskrit word was also a title of Indra, king of the Vedic gods. The stele of Preah Khan uses it in that sense, likening Jayavarman VII at his birth to Indra, the devaraja.[13] The Cambodian historian Chun Chanboth wrote that the kings of Angkor built many of their temples both to honor the gods and to raise themselves to devaraja, at once king and god, which made their power legitimate after they had seized the throne.[3] For Piphal Heng and Paul Lavy, the devaraja was a royal cult of Shiva tied to the founding of Angkor and to holding the Khmer kingdom together.[2]

The Khmer name has been read in different ways. George Cœdès took kamraten jagat to mean "the god who is the royalty".[1] In his last article, published in 1970, Cœdès concluded that the family of Sdok Kak Thom had backdated the founding of the cult.[1] Hermann Kulke found in 1974 that the cult mattered less than had been thought and that the kamraten jagat were not the great royal lingas of each reign.[1] In 1983, Jacques went further: he held that the kamraten jagat were not forms of Shiva at all but a class of Khmer guardian gods, from the level of a family line up to the whole realm, and that in part of the 10th century at least two kamraten jagat ta raja existed at once. Jacques accepted the Sdok Kak Thom inscription as genuine.[1]

Michael Vickery noted that the Sanskrit word devaraja appears in no other inscription, and that the Khmer kamraten jagat ta raja is first named in records of its own time under Jayavarman IV, more than a century after 802. He saw the institution as part of old Khmer culture but held that the name kamraten jagat was not coined until the 10th century.[1] The Sdok Kak Thom family claimed a rank that no earlier record supports, he wrote, and if Cœdès was right, everything the inscription tells of the reign of Jayavarman II, including the rite for independence from Java, is open to doubt.[1]

Legacy

UNESCO holds that the Khmer-language inscriptions of the temples at Sambor Prei Kuk reflect the idea of the god-king, which legend traces to Vat Phou. In its account the idea grew during the Angkor period and was central to government in Cambodia and Thailand until the early 20th century.[14] The Cambodian historian Nhim Sotheavin wrote that the kings of Angkor, regarded as god-kings, could call on the loyalty of their subjects as a sacred duty, and that the arrival of Theravada Buddhism in the 14th century weakened that foundation over time.[15]

Anne Yvonne Guillou wrote in 2020 that the ritual servant (me smin) of Khleang Moeung, a royal guardian spirit of the land (neak ta) honored in Pursat, is a distant heir of the servants whom Angkorian kings appointed to their gods.[9]

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 Angkor Database, Michael Vickery, The Reign of Suryavarman I and Royal Factionalism at Angkor (undated)
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 Asian Civilisations Museum, Piphal Heng and Paul Lavy, Pre-Angkorian cities: Ishanapura and Mahendraparvata, in Angkor: Exploring Cambodia's Sacred City (2018)
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Radio Free Asia Khmer, Chun Chanboth, Wars over the throne among kings of the Angkor period, part 11 of a history series (April 9, 2014; in Khmer)
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Angkor Database, Maurice Glaize, The Monuments of the Angkor Group (1944; English translation of the fourth French edition)
  5. ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 The Far Eastern Quarterly, Lawrence Palmer Briggs, A Sketch of Cambodian History (August 1947)
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Proceedings of the British Academy, Charles F. W. Higham, The Origins of the Civilisation of Angkor (2003)
  7. ↑ UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Phnom Kulen: Archeological Site/Ancient Site of Mahendraparvata, tentative list entry (March 27, 2020)
  8. ↑ Archaeology, Karen Coates, Letter From Cambodia: Storied Landscape (January/February 2015)
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 HAL, Anne Yvonne Guillou, The present life of post-angkorian royal land tutelary spirits (2020)
  10. ↑ Angkor Database, Angkor Buddhist Treasures from Banteay Kdei (undated; a record of Yoshiaki Ishizawa's 2007 book)
  11. ↑ Radio Free Asia Khmer, Chun Chanboth, Kings of the Angkor period, part 10 of a history series (April 2, 2014; in Khmer)
  12. ↑ Radio Free Asia Khmer, Chun Chanboth, Two kings reigned at the same time in the middle of the 11th century, part 13 of a history series (May 14, 2014; in Khmer)
  13. ↑ Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies, Thomas S. Maxwell, The Stele Inscription of Preah Khan, Angkor: Text with Translation and Commentary (2007)
  14. ↑ UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Temple Zone of Sambor Prei Kuk, Archaeological Site of Ancient Ishanapura (undated)
  15. ↑ Angkor Database, Factors that Led to the Change of the Khmer Capitals from 15th to 17th Century, by Nhim Sotheavin (undated)
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This page was last edited on 12 October 2026, at 00:22.