5th week

Empire Mandalas (Á¦±¹¸¸´Ù¶ó) After the sixth century there emerged a number of larger and more powerful mandala states, principally in Cambodia (Chenla, Angkor), Myanmar (Pagan), Sumatra (Srivijaya), Java (Sailendara, Mataram, Kediri, Singhasari), and Vietnam (Dai Viet). Often designated empires, these states nevertheless functioned and were structured upon the same principles that governed their predecessors. In some respects unstable and prone to fluctuation due to shifting relations with outside powers and constant internal struggles for the position of overlordship, some of them were also remarkably durable. The cultural impact of their courts long outlasted their political grasp, and continued to inform their societies down to contemporary times. Srivijaya (½º¸®ºñÀÚ¾ß). Perhaps the oldest among the more durable of Indonesian empires was Srivijaya, the great trading empire with its capital at Palembang in southeast Sumatra, which dominated much of Southeast Asian commerce from about the seventh to the thirteenth century. The rise of Palembang was due most certainly to its strategic location. Located halfway between the two principal maritime passages, namely, the Straits of Melaka and Sunda, Srivijaya's Palembang port provided an excellent harbor sheltered from the fury of the northeast and southwest monsoons by the mountain ranges of Sumatra and Malay peninsula. According to O. W. Wolters, Srivijaya's prosperity was helped by the phenomenal rise in the revived Chinese maritime trade during the T'ang dynasty (seventh to the tenth centuries). Its rapid growth could also be attributed to sales of Indonesian, in particular north Sumatran, substitutes of pine resin and benjamin gum for frankincense and myrrh, whose supplies from Arabia and eastern Africa were not adequate to meet the increasing demand for these commodities in west Asia and China. Srivijaya attracted international shipping to its harbors by suppressing piracy in the Straits of Melaka and providing excellent anchorage, storage, and recreational facilities in Palembang. The well-known Chinese traveler-pilgrim I-Ching noted the arrival of as many as thirty-five ships from Persia alone during his six months' stay in Srivijaya in 671 C.E. According to such accounts, porcelains, jades and silks from China, camphor, sandalwood, spices and resins from the Maluku (the Moluccas), and textiles from India found eager buyers in the hustle and bustle of the Srivijayan ports of Melayu and Palembang. The Srivijayan empire at its apogee extended over all of Sumatra, Kedah, and western Java. Palembang was also an important center of Mahayana Buddhist learning. According to I-Ching, who was on his way to India for a ten-year period of study and who spent four years again in Srivijaya on his return trip, Palembang's monasteries had more than a thousand inmates. He recommended that his countrymen planning travel to India for higher studies in Buddhism spend one or two years in Srivijaya. Srivijaya does not appear to have been heavily urbanized or to have had a continuously occupied capital during its 700 years of existence, nor to have possessed boundaries and clearly delineated territories. Its armies with a powerful fleet, while they could be mustered and quickly dispatched overseas, were weapons of limited use. Instead Srivijaya maintained its authority in a shifting and extremely varied trading world largely by means of a shrewd brand of cultural and economic politics which involved, among other things, offering a protective and mutually beneficial trading environment to all comers, and offering a courtly culture from which the idiom of overlordship issued grandly and convincingly. Srivijaya was ruled by a formula supple enough to attract from all quarters and to exploit it at the same time. Angkor (¾Ó²¿¸£). Whatever the achievements of Srivijaya, the Khmers is widely regarded as the most impressive of the concentric ancient Southeast Asian states, due largely to its extensive agricultural remains, including the renowned Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. But in many respects the Angkorian imperial achievement was singular. Though informed by the mandala paradigm, the Khmers carried it further and shaped it more distinctively than other Southeast Asians before and since. Jayavarman II introduced the devaraja ("a god who is king") cult of Indian origin in an effort to legitimize and bolster his authority over the empire. At his capital, Mount Mahendra (modern Koulen in western Cambodia), he invited an Indian Brahman to perform an elaborate ritual, which allegedly infused into the royal person the divine essence of kingship, making him in effect a manifestation of Shiva. On top of the mountain stood numerous temples, the principal one being a pyramidal structure housing Shiva's phallic symbol, the linga (an image of the penis as a symbol of the generative power in nature). On the death of the king, the temple would serve as the funerary site, enabling the desceased to be one with Shiva himself. The mountain temple was regarded as the center of the universe. The king was styled chakravartin (ruler of the universe). His successors continued to extend the devaraja cult, constructing a number of new monuments. Yasovarman I (r.889-900) founded the first city of Angkor and erected numerous temple hermitages for devotees of Shiva, Vishnu, and Buddha. Suryavarman II (r.1113-1150) built the Angkor Wat which marked the high point of the Khmer civilization. But the greatest extension of the devaraja cult came with Jayavarman VII (r.1181-1219). He constructed a new capital city, Angkor Thom, with its famous Buddhist temple, the Bayon. The statue of the bodhissattva (Buddha in the becoming) Lokeswara in this temple resembles the king himself. The main temple is surrounded by numerous smaller edifices adorned with statues of Buddha, bodihissattvas, Vishnu, Shiva, and a host of Hindu gods and goddesses, which are actually portraits of members of the royal family and the lesser nobility. The economic basis of the Khmers must have been agriculture in the rich Tongle Sap Lake region, tribute from numerous vassal states, and participation in the East-West trade. It may be assumed that the Khmers shared with insular states the extensive, international trade once carried on their predecessor state, Funan. However, there is no conclusive evidence of this, although Khmer records have spotty references to Indian and Chinese texts and other imported products. Agriculture, therefore, must have been the most important pillar of the empire's prosperity. The Khmer kings uniquely transformed their physical environment to support their empire. They created what may be the ancient world's most intricate and capacious system of water cachement and dispersal. According to Bernard Philippe Groslier, it was designed "to solve the problem posed by too much and too heavy monsoon rain within too short a time." Immense storage tanks, or barays, were constructed, one of them with a capacity of 30 million cubic meters, equipped with an ingenious device for letting off the water according to the need. Some 12.5 million acres of land were covered, carefully divided into square paddy fields and capable of yielding two or even three crops of rice a year. Angkor at its zenith may have supported a population of one million in a very small area, with an elite apparatus and a population of bondsmen far greater than any of Cambodia's neighbors. A number of factors led to the decline of the Khmer empire. Among them were Jayavarman VII's punitive wars against Champa and recalcitrant vassal states; the progressive movement of southward of the Thai people, who carved out new states in the territory formerly ruled by the Khmers; the spread of Theravada Buddhism, a relatively egalitarian religion which did not permit belief in bodhissattvas or in the divine basis of kingship, in the empire. While all the external factors acted against the empire to a certain degree, the roots of its decline were intrinsic. While the Khmer kings were keenly concerned with the extension of the divine kingship and took pains to regulate the water supply through control of the elaborate hydraulic system, the empire surrendered the flexibility and balance critical to the mandala pattern and eventually fell victim to its own brittleness. Consequently, while other concentric states in early Southeast Asia rose and foundered and rose again, the Khmer empire proved unable to revive theirs. Pagan (¹ö°­). The Burmans or Tibeto-Burmans, whose descendants from the majority of Myanmar's population today, founded their state at Pagan around 849 C.E. In that year, according to Burmese chronicles, a leader brought a group of nineteen villages, each possessing its own nat (local spirit), into one state with a common spirit for all inhabitants. The derivation of divine royal authority from a sacred mountain was similar to the Funanese and Khmer beliefs. And just as the installation of the sacred linga on Mount Mahendra by the founder of the Angkor monarchy, Jayavarman II, had symbolized the union of the divided Khmer Peoples, so did Pagan and its monarch represent the unification of the Tibeto-Burman people. Despite the Indianization of Tibeto-Burmans and their later adoption of Theravada Buddhism as the state religion in the eleventh century, the nat cult continued its hold over the Burmese mind. The history of Pagan as a major polity began with the reign of Anawratha, dated from 1044 to 1077. He is famous for his conquests, the most important being Thaton, in 1057, which resulted in a massive infusion of Mon culture into Pagan. A Khmer invasion of Pegu led to the Thaton Mons' appeal for help from King Anawratha. His campaign had far-reaching consequences for the cultural history of Myanmar. Anawratha's readiness to help the Mons in repulsing the Khmer invaders was partly attributable to the hope of getting some of the rarest Buddhist sacred writings in Pali, which were then in Thaton. Refusing to comply with the Burman demand, the Thaton king found himself a Burman prisoner, transported to Pagan along with a priceless booty of 30 sets of the Buddhist canon (Tripitaka) and about 30,000 Mon monks and artisans. The most important consequence of Anawratha's conquest of the Mon state was the conversion of his people to Theravada Buddhism and the assimilation of the more refined Mon culture by the Burmans. Anawratha became a patron of the Theravada faith, which quickly spread throughout Myanmar and eventually to all of mainland Southeast Asia, with the exception of Vietnam. He also sent some artisans to Sri Lanka to assist in the restoration of some ancient Buddhist monuments. In return, the Sri Lanka's monarch sent to Anawratha a replica of Buddha's tooth, which was then enshrined in the newly built Shwezigon pagoda in Pagan. Of the two centuries of Pagan rule following Anawratha's death in 1077, the first century was culturally dominated by the Mons both at the court and in the countryside. The Mon monk-scholar Shin Arahan, who was to be the chief spiritual counsel to Anawratha, continued that function for Kyanzittha, Anawratha's son, who ascended the Pagan throne in 1084. Pagodas proliferated in Pagan during this period, mostly built and carved by Mon artisans and sculptors. The Mon script became the basis of Burmese script and the vehicle for the dissemination of the Indianized Mon culture, law, and literature. The large-scale assimilation of Mon culture by the Burmans must have helped to diminish some of the Mon hostility to a certain degree, overcoming their bitterness over the extinction of their independence. <Q & A> 1. µ¿³²¾Æ ÃÖÃÊÀÇ ÇØ»óÁ¦±¹À¸·Î¼­ ½º¸®ºñÀÚ¾ßÀÇ ¼º¸³¹è°æ°ú ¸¸´Ù¶óÀû Ư¡Àº? 2. ¾Ó²¿¸£Á¦±¹(Angkorian Empire)ÀÌ ¸ê¸ÁÇÏ°ÔµÈ °¡Àå ±Ùº»ÀûÀÎ ¿øÀÎÀ» ¸¸´Ù¶óÀû Ư¡°ú ¿¬°üÁö¾î ³íÇغ¸¸é? 3. ¹ö°­Á¦±¹(Pagan Empire)ÀÌ ÆØâ°úÁ¤¿¡¼­ º¸ÀÎ ¸¸´Ù¶óÀû Ư¡Àº?