ABSTRACT
Internal documentary records describe 10th–13th century educational institutions in the Angkorian capital centered in state-sponsored religious hermitages (āśrama) and temple enclosures like Ta Prohm. By the 12th–13th centuries, religious training was supplemented with medical education in Buddhist monastic universities. This chapter reviews epigraphic and archaeological evidence for such institutions, focusing on changes that occurred with the shift in state religion to Mahayana Buddhism under Jayavarman VII. Where earlier hermitages accepted students from beyond the court elite, the later monasteries trained their sights on the society’s upper echelon in what might be considered a closed-circuit education system. Angkorian teachers and practitioners merged elements from indigenous healing systems, East Asian materia medica, and South Asian texts to instruct and to treat Angkor’s population. At its peak under Jayavarman VII, education and medicine became pedagogical, therapeutic, and political tools in the Angkorian world.
