| Abstract: |
The predominant Buddhist icon of ancient Angkor was a Buddha seated on the coils of a giant multi-headed serpent with a raised cobra hood. This paper addresses the question of why this combination of serpents and Buddhas enjoyed such extraordinary success among the ancient Khmers. The icon is very widely taken to represent the naga Mucalinda sheltering the Buddha from a storm six weeks after his enlightenment. Several scholars have expressed puzzlement at why this minor episode in the Sakyamuni biography should have found such favor with the Mahayanist ancient but few have dismissed it as a wrong interpretation. I will endorse rejection and suggest that the Khmer naga and Mucalinda are doppelgängers with quite different meanings a conclusion reached after examining the Buddhist contexts of the Khamer icons naga-enthroned predecessors in Amaravati, Sri Lanka, Malay Peninsula and northeast Thailand. The Angkorian Buddha, I will claim, should be seen as the Khmer Vairocana or Sarvavid (Omniscient, named in one key inscription) of the tantric Vajrayana and unrelated to the minor Mucalinda biographical episode which later occasionally appears in the southern Buddhism of modern Thailand, Burma and Cambodia.
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