ABSTRACT
The Vajrayāna, Buddhism’s third Tantric vehicle, played an important role in the state cultus under King Jayavarman VII of Cambodia early in the thirteenth century. This claim will be tested by analysis of the changes to temple decoration at the time the Bayon, Cambodia’s first Buddhist state temple, was built. A key discrimination concerns differences between the so-called apsaras or flying goddesses in temple reliefs and the celestial dancers that cluster in large numbers at the entrances to the Bayon and which dominate large, pillared halls inserted late into the king’s other temples. Flying apsaras in Khmer temples bear little special meaning beyond indicating that the edifices where they are found are stone constructions built to house the gods among men. But dancing yoginīs would indicate an esoteric Buddhist cult of the Vajrayāna. This paper argues that the sacred dancers function on an exoteric level in new sacred dance rituals allied to the bhakti devotional cults then sweeping India, while at the same time they function on an esoteric level and project a yoginī-Hevajra cult. The discrimination is based on the postures and attitudes of the Khmer temple dancers and on the abundance of their numbers in prominent temple locations. The dance postures of the Bayon dancers show kinship with those of the eight yoginīs that whirl around the supreme tantric deity Hevajra in late ‘Bayon-style’ maṇḍala bronzes. The 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 Hevajra, a fierce deity of the Vajrayāna who worked through the intercession of ascetic goddesses or yoginīs. Further, large halls adorned with similar dancers were inserted late into the king’s other temples, in an update package that suggests a cultic shift. This, and further concurrent evidence, entitles us to infer a royal Hevajra cult, and therefore to propose a revaluation of the creed of the Bayon temple and the deity in its enigmatic giant face towers.
