King jayavarman VII
Jayarvarman VII son of King Dharanindravarman II, was a king of the Khmer Empire in present day Seim Reap. He married a very religious princess named Jayarajadevi who had a significant influence on him, both before he gained the throne and during the early years of his reign. Following the death of Princess Jayarajadevi, King Jayarvarman VII married her younger sister.
During the reign of King Jayavarman, he continued his military activities. Bringing Champa, southern Laos, and portions of the Malay Peninsula and Burma under his control. But increasingly, he devoted his energies and organizational capacities to the kind of religious and religio-political construction projects that had been carried out by his royal predecessors.
King Jayarvarman VII built a large number of new temples. One such temple is the Bayon, a distinctively Mahāyāna Buddhist central pyramid Temple, which was designed to serve as the primary locus of the royal culture and also as his own personal mausoleum and funerary temple of the Mahāyāna type, which were dedicated to his mother and father. A series of provincial temples were also constructed, which housed reduced replicas of the Royal Buddha. Jayavarman represented, with the attributes of the Buddha, the original of which had been set up in the Bayon. He rebuilt the city of Angkor, now known as Angkor Thom and extended the system of highways which radiated outward from the Bayon and the royal palace, and reached far into the provinces. In addition, he constructed more than 100 rest houses along these roads and built more than 100 hospitals, which he dispersed throughout his kingdom and placed under the protection of Baiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabhā, the Great Buddha of Healing. |