Angkor Wat shifts to Buddhist use under Jayavarman VII

1200

The great temple-city of Angkor, already old, saw its Hindu iconography overlaid with Mahayana Buddhist images under Jayavarman VII. Smiling stone faces of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara rose on the Bayon's towers, gazing impassively over a hundred miles of rice terraces. The transformation marked the last great building campaign of the Khmer empire before its slow decline into the jungle.