Sdok Kok Thom

Infobox Mandir


caption = Court's eastern gate, or gopura, exterior view. Note carved Naga heads at base of doorway. Holy image at left is from a later period. Photo circa 1980
creator = Udayadityavarman II
proper_name = Sdok Kok Thom
date_built = 11th Century
primary_deity = Shiva
architecture = Khmer
location = Aranyaprathet, Amphoe Khok Sung, Sa Kaeo Province, Thailand

Sdok Kok Thom ( _th. สด๊กก๊กธม, "Sa Dok Kok Tom") is an 11th Century Khmer temple in present-day Thailand, located about 34 kilometers northeast of the Thai border town of Aranyaprathet in Khok Sung district, Sa Kaeo Province. It was dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva. Constructed by a prominent priestly family, the temple is best known as the original site of one of the most illuminating inscriptions left behind by the Khmer Empire, which ruled much of Southeast Asia from 802 A.D. to 1431 A.D.

Built of red sandstone and laterite, Sdok Kok Thom is a prime example of a provincial seat of worship during the empire's golden age. It is small by the standards of the major monuments in Angkor, the empire's capital, but shares their basic design and religious symbolism. In its 11th Century heyday during the reign of King Udayadityavarman II, the temple would have been tended by its Brahman patrons and supported with food and labor by the people of surrounding rice-farming villages.

Scholars disagree as to the meaning of the name, which refers in old Khmer to the temple's setting. Translations include Great Reed Lake, Large Reservoir with Herons, and Abundant Reeds in a Large Swamp.

Architectural Features

At the center of the temple is a sandstone tower, which served as the main sanctuary, probably sheltering a linga, symbol of Shiva. The tower's door is on the east, approached by steps; the west side has a false door. A few meters to the northeast and southeast are two sandstone structures known as libraries, with large side windows and laterite bases. Enclosing the tower and libraries is a rectangular court measuring roughly 42 by 36 meters. On the court's eastern side is a gopura, or gate, reflecting the temple's orientation to the east.

In various places in the temple, there is extensive carving on stone, including floral decoration, Naga serpents and a figure that appears to be the reclining Hindu god Vishnu.

A moat, likely representing the Hindu Sea of Creation, lies beyond each of the court's four sides. An avenue leads east from the gopura. A laterite wall standing approximately 2.5 meters high and measuring 126 meters from east to west and 120 meters south to north provides additional enclosure to the entire complex. The midpoint of the eastern side of this wall has an elaborate gopura, standing on a laterite base. About 200 meters to the east of this gopura, along a paved avenue with free-standing stone posts on either side, is a baray, or holy reservoir, measuring roughly 200 by 370 meters.

Inscription

The inscription is a 340-line composition, in both Sanskrit and ancient Khmer, carved on a gray sandstone stele 1.51 meters high that stood in the northeast corner of the temple's court. Dating to 1052 A.D., it recounts two and a half centuries of service that members of the temple's founding family provided to the Khmer court, mainly as chief chaplains to kings. In laying out this long role, the text provides a remarkable and often poetically worded look at the faith, royal lineage, history and social structure of the times.

The Sanskrit text opens: "Praise be to Shiva! whose nature is proclaimed wordlessly yet thunderously by the subtle soul-life of the body -- which reaches everywhere and quickens the senses of all living beings." [Sak-Humphry, "The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription" p. 35.] The inscription is perhaps most useful to historians in providing an account of twelve Khmer kings who ruled over the course of the two and a half centuries. It recounts monarchs' spiritual and martial virtues and basic events of their reigns. “As a teacher exhorts his disciples, or a father his children, even so (with eyes fixed on duty), he strove tirelessly for the protection and prosperity of his people,” says the inscription of Udayadityavarman II. “In battle he bore a glaive red with the blood of enemy kings it had slain, which cast a dazzling light in all directions like a ravishing red lotus.” [Sak-Humphry, "The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription" p. 36.]

The earliest king mentioned is Jayavarman II, who historians generally consider, partly on the authority of this inscription, to have founded the Khmer empire in 802 A.D. The text includes the oft-cited detail that he came from Java. It goes on to say: “A Brahman named Hiranyadama, skilled in magic and science," was invited by the king "to perform a ceremony that would make it impossible for this country of the Kambuja to pay any allegiance to Java and that there should be, in this country, one sole sovereign.” [Briggs, "The Ancient Khmer Empire" p. 89, quoting inscription translations by George Coedes and Pierre Dupont.] Some scholars, such as Charles Higham, doubt that “Java” means the island in present-day Indonesia, which in the period the text recounts was ruled by the Hindu Sailendra dynasty. They believe it refers to some other foreign place which at the time had a similar-sounding name, perhaps the kingdom of Champa to the east.

The inscription documents nine generations of the temple's priestly family, starting with Sivakaivalya, Jayavarman II's chaplain. The advisors are praised in the same adulatory tone as is employed for the kings. The text gives a detailed account of how the family systematically expanded its holdings of land and other property over the course of its long relationship with the royal household. The final chaplain named in the text, Sadasiva, is recorded as leaving the holy orders and marrying a sister of the primary queen of Udayadityavarman II. The man was given a new name and placed in charge of construction projects. His career appears to have closed out the family's role in the royal inner circle; the family is never heard from again in inscriptions.

Scholars have paid special attention to the inscription’s account of the cult of the devaraja, a key part of the Khmer court’s religious ritual. “That great and surpassingly wise brahmana Hiranyadma, having come as a merciful Brahma, respectfully exhibited before this king [Jayavarman II] a magic power possessed by no other,” the text reads. The king was instructed in four holy treatises. “This brahmana, having distilled the essence of these treatises with understanding and experience in mysteries, established for the world’s prosperity the magic rites which bear the name of devaraja.” [Sak-Humphry, "The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription" p. 37.] But the description is sufficiently enigmatic that scholars cannot agree on the cult’s function. Some have taken devaraja to mean “god-king,” that the king himself was regarded as divine, an incarnation of a Hindu deity, and that this rite accomplished the transformation. But others view the term as meaning something closer to "king of the gods," in the sense that one god, generally Shiva, was recognized as higher than others in the Hindu pantheon and through his authority brought order to heaven. Court religious ritual, as described repeatedly in the inscription, focused on maintaining a linga, or holy shaft, in which Shiva’s essence was believed to reside.

The inscription is also key to understanding important events in Khmer history, such as the late 9th Century relocation of the capital from the area around the present-day village of Roluos. “When Sri Yasovardhana became king under the name Sri Yasovarman, the able Vamasiva continued as his guru,” the Sanskrit text states. “By the king’s order, he set up a linga on Sri Yasodharagiri, a mountain equal in beauty to the King of the Mountains.” [Sak-Humphry, "The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription" p. 38.] French scholars initially believed that Sri Yasodharagiri was the mountain-like Bayon temple. But it is now established that the Bayon was built almost three centuries later than the event described in the inscription and that the linga was in fact placed in the newly constructed Phnom Bakheng temple, which stands about two kilometers south of the Bayon atop a real hill.

The text also notes the relocation of the capital from Angkor to the site now known as Koh Ker under Jayavarman IV, and turmoil during the times of King Suryavarman I. He is described as having dispatched soldiers against people who had desecrated shrines in the area of Sdok Kok Thom. Historians generally believe that Suryavarman fought his way to power, eventually driving out of Angkor a king named Jayaviravarman (who significantly is not mentioned in the inscription).

Elsewhere, the text provides myriad details of everyday existence in the empire—the establishment of new settlements, the recovery of slaves who had fled a pillaged settlement, payments given for land, such as gold, lower garments, goats and water buffaloes.

The text describes the creation of Sdok Kok Thom itself. The family was gifted the land by Udayadityavarman II, it says. The final member of the line, now in his role as construction chief, "erected a stone temple with valabhi [spire] , dug a reservoir, built dikes and laid out fields and gardens." [Sak-Humphry, "The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription" p. 52.] The precise boundaries of its land and the size, duty schedules and male-female breakdown of local work teams that maintained the temple are listed.

Khmer inscriptions were created in part to glorify heaven and the earthly elite. For that reason, their value as factual records is often thrown into question. But many parts of this one are confirmed by other texts, and some of the places it describes have been reliably located. Moreover, many of its numbers and descriptions, particularly concerning land and its ownership, read as if they have the full accuracy and authority of modern courthouse documents. Overall, there is general consensus among scholars that the words chiseled out at Sdok Kok Thom are perhaps the most important written explanation that the Khmer empire provided of itself.

The inscription’s author or authors are not named. Many scholars conclude firmly that Sadasiva wrote it; Sak-Humphry believes the text was likely drafted in consultation with the Brahman, but was meant to represent declarations of his king, Udayadityavarman II.

Later History

Hinduism began to die out in the Khmer Empire starting in the 12th Century, giving way first to Mahayana Buddhism, then to the Theravada form of the faith that today predominates in Thailand and Cambodia. At an unknown time, Sdok Kok Thom became a place of Buddhist worship.

The inscription's existence was reported to the outside world in 1884 by the scholar Etienne Aymonier. In later writing, Aymonier gave a detailed physical description of the temple. At some point prior to 1944, the inscription stele was moved to the Thai capital Bangkok, where it entered the collection of the national museum. In 1958, it was severely damaged when a fire swept through the museum, but museum staff were later able to reconstitute much of it. In any case, rubbings had been made of the text prior to the fire, so the words were not lost.

Following the Vietnamese army's invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge government, the forested area around the temple became the site of a large camp of Cambodian refugees. The camp was controlled by anti-communist guerrillas known as Khmer Serei, who were opposed to the Vietnamese presence in Cambodia.

In 2002, with the Cambodian conflict long settled and the refugees gone, the Japan Alliance for Humanitarian Demining Support, the Thailand Mine Action Center and the General Chatichai Choonhavan Foundation began cooperating on a program to remove landmines and other unexploded ordnance from the area. [http://maic.jmu.edu/journal/8.1/notes/blagden/blagden.htm] Local villagers were recruited and trained for this work, which ended in 2004 after the removal of 76 mines and other pieces of ordnance. [http://www.th.emb-japan.go.jp/en/jis/2004/0403.htm]

Over the years, the temple had fallen into a grave state of disrepair. The Thai government’s Fine Arts Department has begun an extensive restoration of the temple (see photos at [http://angkor.main.jp/ruins/22thai_isan/50Sdokokthom/index.htm] and [http://www.sundial.thai-isan-lao.com/sdok-kok-thom.html] ). Workers have cleared brush and trees and excavated soil on the temple grounds down to its original level. Fallen stones have been catalogued and returned to what experts believe to be their original positions; masons have fashioned replacements for missing or severely damaged stones. This work is on-going and will take a considerable amount of time.

In modern times, Thailand and Cambodia have often disputed the precise location of their common border, most notably in a World Court case that in 1962 awarded Preah Vihear, another border-region temple of the Angkorian age, to Cambodia. In January 2003, the Thai government disclosed a new development concerning the border issue, a letter from the Cambodian government stating that it considers Sdok Kok Thom to be in Cambodian territory. Some Cambodians have pointed to statements by various Thai officials in the 1980s that the Khmer Serei-controlled refugee camp by the temple was on the Cambodian side of the unmarked frontier. Many diplomats, however, viewed those statements, which local Thai villagers contested at the time, as a temporary expedience intended to allow Thailand to maintain that it was not involved in the Cambodian conflict and was not hosting armed Cambodian guerrillas on its soil. Today Thailand argues that the temple is unmistakably on its territory and has built a number of roads in its vicinity. Thai authorities have continued to administer the temple site and spend large amounts of money on its restoration.

See Also

* 2008 Cambodian-Thai stand-off

Notes

References

*Sak-Humphry, Chhany. "The Sdok Kok Thom Inscription". The Edition of the Buddhist Institute 2005.
*Higham, Charles. "The Civilization of Angkor". University of California Press 2001
*Freeman, Charles. "A Guide to the Khmer Temples of Thailand and Laos". Weatherhill 1998
*Briggs, Lawrence Palmer. "The Ancient Khmer Empire". Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 1951.