Abstract

Ancient Khmer religion was astonishingly open and tolerant of a wide pantheon of deities. The king who sent abroad for the texts of Buddhist Tantra built multiple monasteries around his lineage temple to Siva. When the largely Buddhist Mahidhara dynasty came to power, the king who was crowned by brahmins in Angkor, constructed a vast Esoteric Buddhist temple at home and send his Saiva guru to make donations to the Saiva shrines across the kingdom. In his family’s next generation, one king built the largest Vaisnava temple on earth and his younger brother, on succeeding him, built eight Esoteric Buddhist sanctuaries east of Angkor and addressed his major dedication inscription to the Adi-Buddha Vajrasattva. When Buddhism was finally made the religion of state it embraced the Mahayana pureland of Sukhavati and the cult of Hevajra, while conserving sanctuaries to Siva and Visnu in the state temple.