For centuries, the two religions of Buddhism and Hinduism co-existed on the territory of the Khmer Empire. Among the ordinary Khmer people, Hinduism tended to predominate, mixed with local animist and shamanist beliefs. Up the social ladder, Buddhism mixed with Brahmanistic Hinduism in a bewildering array of patron gods and Bodhisattvas. As in other parts of the Buddhist world, the most popular Bodhisattva was Avalokiteśvara, the ‘Buddha of infinite compassion’. Avalokiteśvara is the principal attendant of the Amitabha Buddha, and supposedly contains the compassion of all the Buddhas. He has 108 avatars, some male and some female, of which the female Guanyin is the most popular. The origins of this figure are shrouded in mystery. Some Western scholars have suggested that Avalokiteśvara, like many other magical figures in Buddhism, originated in the Hindu tradition, in particular as Shiva or Vishnu, both of whom were important state deities for the Khmer. The cult of Avalokiteśvara was especially popular in Tibetan Buddhism, where the recitation of the Bodhisattva’s six-syllable mantra, oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ (‘praise to the jewel lotus’), is closely associated with personal devotion to Buddhist teachings.

Avalokiteśvara is especially associated with the Mahayana branch of Buddhism, which is evidenced in Khmer epigraphy from the Seventh Century AD. His prominence grew much later, however, under the Buddhist king Jayavarman VII (reigned AD 1181 – AD 1219). Jayavarman was one of the most productive and expansionist kings in the entire history of the Khmer Empire. When he came to prominence, in his early fifties, the Khmer had been defeated by their neighbours (and mortal enemies) the Cham; Jayavarman fought a successful campaign against the Cham, ousting them from the Kingdom. He then returned to the capital, Angkor (ancient Yasodharapura) to find numerous warring factions among the Khmer themselves. Jayavarman subdued these factions and asserted himself among them, being crowned king in AD 1181. As a devoted Mahayana Buddhist, his stated aim was to alleviate the suffering of his people, with one of the King’s inscriptions recording ‘he suffered from the illnesses of his subjects more than his own; the pain that affected men’s bodies was for him a spiritual pain, and therefore affected him more deeply’ (hospital foundation stele, Say Fong). He constructed hospitals and rest-houses throughout the Empire, and devoted a portion of the increased national wealth to the construction of temples throughout the Angkor region, especially at his new capital of Angkor Thom. His great temple at Bayon, whose name is given to the artistic style of this period, bears numerous huge faces of his ‘patron saint’ the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara.

This extraordinary, and very rare, figure is what is known as a ‘radiating’ Avalokiteśvara, a type which was popular at the fringes of the Khmer Empire. He is called ‘radiating’ not because of his eight arms, which seem to radiate from his body like a halo, but because of the numerous images of the Buddha which cover the sculpture and cause him to radiate with a holy energy. According to the Kāravdavyūva Sūtra, Bodhisattvas are described as having a microcosm of the entire universe in every pore of their body, and the numerous Buddhas which cover the ‘radiating’ Avalokiteśvara reflect this teaching. This figure follows an especially Thai style of Khmer art known as Lopburi, after a city some 150 km (93 miles) north of Bangkok, a centre of Khmer control in central Thailand. Unlike the slender and graceful figures produced in Angkor itself, the Lopburi style is more robust, with thick stocky legs. Nonetheless, the facial features – which are believed to reflect those of Jayavarman VII himself, in a process of assimilation between the god-king and the Bodhisattva – are extremely delicately formed. The sculptural quality is exceptional, with clear attention paid to the musculature of the legs and to the adornment of the figure. Avalokiteśvara is depicted as a youthful male, but with the stern and severe facial expression of the King. He wears the sampot seng, a short kilt tied with a fishtail sash, and, unusually for a Khmer sculpture, a shirt of chain mail, appropriate to a warrior-king on the borders of his territory. From his shoulders sprout eight arms, which serve as an abbreviation for the thousand arms, representing the myriad ways in which Avalokiteśvara can act in the benefit of sentient beings. Additionally, the thousand arms are supposed to represent the thousand chakravartins, the thousand earthly kings who achieved the feat of ‘turning the wheel of dharma’, or progressing mankind through their actions. It is possible that, in associating himself with a multi-armed version of Avalokiteśvara, Jayavarman hoped to stake his own claim to be the thousand-and-first chakravartin. Each of the hands holds a different attribute of Avalokiteśvara, including the roasary (japamala) used to count the various recitations (japa) of Buddhist mantras. His hair is arranged into the jatakamukuta, the crown of matted hair. On the front of the chignon is a seated figure of Amitabha Buddha. This figure, almost identical to those in the Musée Guimet (MG1838) and in the National Museum of Bangkok, must be one of the twenty-three stone images (mostly now lost) which Jayavarman sent to borders of his Kingdom in AD 1191, to celebrate the compassion the King attributed to his own father.

References: near-identical ‘radiating’ Avalokiteśvaras can be found in Paris (Musêe Guimet MG1838) and Bangkok (National Museum Bangkok, pictured in National Museum (ed.) (1987) Treasures from the National Museum, Bangkok. Bangkok. cat. no. 35).