HTML clipboardTo gain a proper understanding of what a Khmer
temple was, it should first be recalled that it was not a meeting place for the
faithful but the palace of a god, who was enshrined there to allow him to bestow
his beneficence, in particular on the founder and his familiars. There was thus
the need to build the finest possible residence for him, to be sure, although as
he was there in the form of a statue there was little need for a large space.
One of the largest is the central shrine of Angkor Wat and its cella has
internal dimensions of 4.6 meters by 4.7; the pedestal of the statue being
approximately the width of the door, would have been 1.6 meters square. So a
great temple would not be a vast palace for a single god but a grouping of
multiple shrines with a main divinity at the centre. Preah Khan temple, for
example, was originally conceived to house more than 400 deities, and many
others were to be added subsequently. The shrines could be linked or surrounded
by galleries, which usually had doors and themselves housed certain divinities.
In any case they were in no way intended to provide passage for great
processions as has too often been asserted; such processions would have been
greatly impeded, or rendered impossible by the doors and their
disproportionately large thresholds. Some are not even accessible on foot, for
example Ta Keo where it seems there was not even provision for doorways. As the
residence of a god, or gods, the sacred territory in which the temple is sited
is an image of the universe, where the gods sit on Mount Meru, the centre of the
world, surrounded by the primordial ocean. This is the image which the sacred
compound of a state temple in the Khmer country offers us, in which the prasat,
the sanctuary tower, usually represents Mount Meru and can be flanked by four
further prasats; the various enclosures being the mountains surrounding it, and
the moat being the ocean.
This world image was to impose a rigorous order of construction on Khmer
architecture, from the simplest buildings to the most complex monumental groups.
The characteristic applies of course to the temple as originally conceived. In
reality, as might be expected as long as a temple remained an active place of
worship, the Khmers added smaller or greater numbers of extra shrines to the
original coherent group - especially from the reign of Jayavarman Vll onwards.
This is particularly evident at Preah Khan, and the practice can result in an
impression of chaos to the modern eye. It is not too difficult, however, to
ascertain the original layout.
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