Bayon: New Perspectives by Joyce Clark (ed.)

BOOK REVIEW; Befuddled by the Bayon
1361 words
1 September 2007
Bangkok Post
O3
English
(c) 2007

New research on later Angkor spreads both light and darkness

CHRIS BAKER

BAYON: New Perspectives, Edited by Joyce Clark, River Books (2007), 256pp, 2,245 baht, ISBN 978-9-74-986347-3 : For many visitors to Angkor, the Bayon is the most powerful and perplexing experience. The grandeur of Angkor Wat is easier to grasp and admire, but the sheer eccentricity of the Bayon's design is unnerving. The muddle of war scenes, religious images and homely vignettes of everyday life in the galleries is baffling. The site itself is a maze. And the faces redefine enigma.

Among scholars, the befuddlement is worse. Long after other Angkor monuments were rediscovered, the Bayon was still lost in the trees. Estimated dating of the monument shifted about once a decade. Attempts to interpret its meaning provoked bitter controversy.

With peace in Cambodia, scholars returned to Angkor after a long break, equipped with new theories, new technology and big research grants. The old monopoly of the French School no longer holds sway. This book is a first result of this new era. The title could have been Jayavarman VII Reassessed, or New Perspectives on Later Angkor, but the book focuses on the Bayon, perhaps because it is the most extraordinary "document" of its time. But how to read the damned thing?

The conventional story before the interlude in Khmer scholarship went like this. The Bayon was built by Jayavarman VII in the late twelfth century. Angkor at the time was engaged in constant conflict with the Cham, as attested by the war scenes in the Bayon galleries. Although initially interpreted as Hindu, the monument was revealed as Buddhist. The extraordinary faces, locally identified as "Phrom", probably represent Brahma, but the version incorporated into Buddhism rather than a Hindu original. After Jayavarman VII's death, there was a Hindu reaction in which much of the Bayon's statuary was defaced or destroyed. These conflicts of religion and ethnicity somehow contributed to the decline of Angkor, but nobody was quite sure how.

Claude Jacques and Anne-Valerie Schweyer repaint the picture of a simple Khmer vs Cham hostility. Jayavarman VII spent 15 years of his early manhood in the Cham country and maintained strong political connections there. The scenes in the galleries show mixed groups of Cham and Khmer fighting one another, rather than a simple ethnic divide. Jayavarman VII had ambitions to unite the Khmer and Cham, but this ambition seems to have crumbled amid complex factional quarrels.

Religious conflict is also less stark. Hiram Woodward and T. S. Maxwell dispose of the idea of a black-white rivalry between Hindu and Buddhist camps. When the Indian gods came to Southeast Asia they were given new meanings. Siva, Vishnu and Buddha tend to be pictured together rather than apart. Jayavarman VII certainly embraced Buddhism more warmly than his predecessors, but he did not exclude Siva and Vishnu. Moreover, Maxwell finds another fascinating process at work in the Bayon. The corridors and galleries were originally studded with images, installed by individuals and villages, perhaps to honour their ancestors. These images were given Sanskrit names, but these names cannot be found in religious texts. Probably they are translations of Khmer originals. Maxwell thinks the Bayon was an amazing site of the assimilation between Indic gods and local spirits which took place throughout Southeast Asia.

But who are the massive faces staring down from the great towers, and what do they mean? As no document has been found to answer this question, controversy has been provoked to run riot. Peter Sharrock stokes that controversy. He trawls through all the many candidates offered by previous scholars - Buddha, Lokesvara, Buddharaja, the king himself, a local guardian spirit, Brahma - and rejects all of them. He notes that the striking feature of these faces is the open eyes staring straight ahead. Previous images of the Buddha, Bodhisattvas or the king had eyes closed or lowered. The only analogous images of a Buddhist figure staring so powerfully in all directions, Sharrock claims, are in Nepal. Those originals may date to the same era as the Bayon - a time when Buddhism was being driven out of its Indian place-of-origin by Muslim invaders. In this crisis, Sharrock suggests, Buddhist kings in Nepal and Cambodia were drawn to an image of the Buddha which exuded the power of tantrism. Sharrock suggests the faces are Vajrasattva, a form emerging from tantric meditation. He points to other contemporary examples found at Angkor and Banteay Chamar.

In the longest and most intricate chapter in the book, Olivier Cunin traces the sequence of constructing the Bayon, complete with some extraordinary computer-generated simulations. He argues there were originally several other face-towers, including four on the corners of the outer wall. The monument was not built over a previous building but on a greenfield site. The central shrine on the upper level was constructed first, probably with the original Buddha image already inside. The inner terrace was also built early, within the reign of Jayavarman VII, scotching speculation that its Hindu bas-reliefs may be dated later. A magnetic technique shows that the stone came from seven different quarries, and allows Cunin to map a probable sequence of construction in some detail.

In another exhaustive chapter, Vittorio Roveda catalogues all the scenes carved in the inner gallery, outer gallery and the bases of the towers. He agrees with Groslier that the outer gallery is a personal biography of Jayavarman VII, but disagrees greatly on the detail. Most dramatically, Roveda suggests that the famous scene of a naval battle actually records a festival on the Tonle Sap. Why else would the scene by surrounded by homely vignettes of everyday life? In the inner gallery, he emphasizes the variety of Hindu religious imagery - classic versions of Siva and Vishnu and scenes from the Jataka, Ramayana and Mahabharata.

Claude Jacques trawls through the epigraphy, looking both backwards and forwards from Jayavarman VII's reign. The king's parentage was a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu. Jacques surmises that much of the Bayon was built after his reign.

These new research reports are fascinating but confusing. In an invaluable introduction, Michael Vickery helps to place them in perspective. He elegantly recapitulates the story of the Bayon's discovery and its vexed interpretation. He warns the reader that the contributors to this book are far from a team. On the one hand there are "idealists" who read the great religious texts and find an idea which they believe helps to explain the monument. On the other hand there are "materialists" who swarm over the stone blocks and try to conjure some meaning out of the physical object. Vickery quietly regrets there is nobody able to use the inscriptions and the physical evidence to impose some sense and some discipline on the use of text-based ideas.

This book is a huge stride away from the old simplicities about empire, ethnicity and religious conflict - ideas which fascinated the middle and late twentieth century. The Bayon era can no longer be pictured as the root of some cataclysmic downfall. Vickery and Jacques argue convincingly against the contention that Jayavarman VII's death led to an almost immediate Shaivite reaction and abandonment of the capital soon after. They suggest that Angkor remained occupied and important for another couple of centuries. There was certainly some religious conflict, carried out with rival chisels, but we are a long way from understanding it.

This book is a marvellous and stimulating collection of new scholarship which will fascinate anyone drawn to Angkor. But, like all pioneering scholarship, it raises more questions than it answers. What lies behind the extraordinary novelty and uniqueness of the Bayon? What prompted such an eccentric design? What is the meaning of the everyday scenes in the galleries - a question even more intriguing following Roveda's reinterpretation of the naval battle scene. What is the significance of the images which Maxwell suspects were placed by nobles and villagers throughout the maze of corridors? In short, do we understand anything more about Cambodian society and mentality in the Bayon era?