Devaraja
The concept was institutionalized and gained its elaborate manifestations in ancient Java and Cambodia, where monuments such as Prambanan and Angkor Wat were erected to celebrate the king's divine rule on earth.
The devaraja concept of divine right of kings was adopted by the Indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia through Indian Hindu Brahmins scholars deployed in the courts.
It enables the monarch to claim the divine authority which could be used on ensuring political legitimacy, managing social order, economic and religious aspects.
The Devaraja religious order also enabled the king to embark on large scale public works and grand projects, by mobilizing their people to create and maintain elaborate hydraulic irrigation systems to support large scale rice agriculture or to construct imposing grand monuments and temples in the king's honor.
Example of the Devaraja religious order — such as demonstrated by Jayavarman II — associate the king with the Hindu deity Sri Shiva, whose divine essence was physically embodied by the linga (or lingam), a phallic idol housed in a mountain temple.
[2] The king was deified in an elaborate and mystical ceremony, requiring a high priest, in which the divine essence of kingship was conferred on the ruler through the agency of the linga.
The safeguarding of the linga became bound up with the security of the kingdom, and the great temple architecture of the Khmer period attests to the importance attached to the belief.
[14] This may well have been continued till early medieval period in Tamilakam, as the famous Thiruvalangadu inscription states: "Having noticed by the marks (on his body) that Arulmozhi was the very Vishnu" in reference to the Emperor Raja Raja Chola I.Indianised Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms of Southeast Asia deployed the Indian Hindu and Buddhist traders, monks, priests as scholars in their courts.
The Khmer empire which ruled Cambodia and Vietnam and other parts of the nearby present day nations adopted it from the Javanese kings.
The concept of devaraja or God King was the ancient Cambodian state religion,[2] but it probably originated in Java where the Hindu influence first reached Southeast Asia.
Some archaeologists propose that the statue of Shiva in the garbhagriha of Prambanan's main temple was modelled after King Balitung, serving as a depiction of his posthumous deified self.
[21] A heavenly mandate that could be revoked and transferred by God, to explain the change of dynasty in Java during Demak, Mataram Sultanate era, well to the succession of the president of Indonesia.
The Cambodian the concept of the "god-king" is believed to be established early in the 9th century by Jayavarman II, founder of the Khmer empire of Angkor, with the Brahmana scholar Sivakaivalya as his first chief priest at Mahendraparvata.
[23] In the Sdok Kăk Thoṃ inscription, a member of a brahmana family claimed that his ancestors since the time of Jayavarman II (Khmer: ជ័យវរ្ម័នទី២), who established around 800 CE by marriage to the daughter of a local king in the Angkor region, a small realm which became at the end of the 9th century the famous Khmer Empire, were responsible for the concept of the Devarāja (kamrateṅ jagat ta rāja).
The Sdok Kăk Thoṃ inscription incised c. 250 years after the events (of which their historicity is doubtful) recounts that on the top of the Kulen Hills, Jayavarman II instructed a Brahmana priest named Hiraṇyadāman to conduct a religious ritual known as the concept of the devarāja (Khmer: ទេវរាជា) which placed him as a cakravartin, universal monarch, a title never heard of before in Cambodia.
The ritual of the Devaraja established by the Brahmana Hiranydama was based on four texts - Vinasikha, Nayottara, Sammoha, and Siraccheda...the four faces of Tumburu.
"[22]: 100–101 Khmer emperor Jayavarman II is widely regarded as the king that set the foundation of the Angkor period in Cambodian history, beginning with the grandiose consecration ritual conducted by Jayavarman II (reign 790–835) in 802 on sacred Mount Mahendraparvata, now known as Phnom Kulen, to celebrate the independence of Kambuja from Javanese dominion (presumably the "neighboring Chams", or chvea).
Ayutthaya historical documents show the official titles of the kings in great variation: Indra, Shiva and Vishnu, or Rama.
The exclamation is essentially similar to the European "Long live the King" or the Chinese wànsuì, and often accompanies pictures of the reigning monarch and his consort on banners during royal occasions.
