dominated areas show similar concern with ancestor wor-
ship.
Indian influences. In those areas of mainland South-
east Asia where Indian influences first appeared in the early
centuries of the common era, individuals were rarely apothe-
osized for being apical ancestors in a line of descent. If, how-
ever, a man (but rarely a woman) succeeded in his lifetime
in demonstrating through effective action in ritual and in
warfare that he possessed some charismatic quality, this qual-
ity could continue to be influential after the individual’s
death by giving him a cosmic body to replace his worldly
one. The earliest monuments of indianized civilization in
Southeast Asia appeared in significant numbers between the
fourth and eighth century CE. Particular examples are S ́iva
lin:ga ̄ of the Cham in southern Vietnam, the Buddhist sema ̄
(Skt., s ̄ıma ̄) or boundary markers with scenes from the life
of the Buddha or from the Ja ̄takas in bas-relief found in
Dva ̄ravat ̄ı sites in northeastern Thailand, and the stupas at
Beikthano and S ́r ̄ıks:etra in central Burma, Thaton in lower
Burma, and Nakhon Pathom in central Thailand. These
monuments can best be interpreted as having been put up
to elevate a man of prowess to a divine form. Whereas an
older generation of historians often associated early historical
sites in mainland Southeast Asia with large kingdoms, most
historians now accept that there were many petty kingdoms
in the area whose power waxed and waned much as did that
of the chiefdoms that preceded them. The proliferation of
monuments, a pattern that climaxes in the classical civiliza-
tions of Angkor in Cambodia and Pagan in Burma, most
likely represents a continuing effort by new kings, their fami-
lies, and their rivals to establish their own claims to be identi-
fied with divine and cosmic power.
Influential mainland Southeast Asians who worked with
Indian texts made minimal use of the Indian idea that one’s
place within the world was fixed at birth by some cosmic
plan. The caste system did not survive the voyage across the
Bay of Bengal except in a very modified form, whereby kings
claimed to be ks:atriya; even then a man of quite lowly origins
could become a ks:atriya by successfully usurping the throne
and clothing himself in sacralized regalia.
The process of indianization in Southeast Asia included
identifying a power believed to be embodied in a local shrine
with divine or cosmic powers known in Indian texts. This
made possible the creation of larger polities, since peoples in
very different parts of a realm saw themselves as part of the
same cosmos and worshiped the same gods, often gods who
were also equated with the rulers. The polity was a man:d:ala,
the “circle of a king,” a domain in which a particular ruler
succeeded in being viewed as the link between the world and
the cosmos. The kings who founded Angkor near the Great
Lake in Cambodia in the ninth century were notably success-
ful in establishing a cult of the devara ̄ja, a god-king, whose
man:d:ala included at its height all of present-day Cambodia,
the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam, and central and
northeastern Thailand. The devara ̄ja cult centered on the as-
similation of the king to Siva, as represented by a lingam.
The capital was a place where, through erection of temples,
dedicated not only to S ́iva but also to Vis:n:u and other Hindu
gods and to bodhisattvas, each king could ensure that his
man:d:ala was a microcosm of the cosmos. While the Ang-
korean empire experienced a number of defeats by rulers of
other man:d:alas, it was not until the fifteenth century that it
finally ended; by this time, the religious orientations of the
populace had begun to change radically.
On the western side of mainland Southeast Asia, Bur-
mese kings also succeeded in establishing a man:d:ala, that of
Pagan, that between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries ri-
valed the splendor and power of Angkor. Although the Bur-
mese kings promoted cults that usually equated them with
the Buddha rather than with Hindu gods, the stupas and
temples they built were like the Hindu and Maha ̄ya ̄na tem-
ples at Angkor; they were both funerary monuments in
which the kings became immortalized, albeit in this case
in Buddhist terms, and recreations of the sacred cosmos. In
both Pagan and Angkor, Meru, the sacred mountain that lies
at the center of the universe and is also an axis mundi, was
represented in the temple or stupa erected by a king.
The man:d:ala organized around a shrine that served as
an axis mundi became the model for villages as well as capi-
tals. In nearly every village in Buddhist Southeast Asia, a
stupa has been erected. Those who contribute to its construc-
tion believe they gain merit that will ensure a better rebirth
and perhaps even rebirth at the time of the next Buddha,
Metteyya (Skt., Maitreya). The localized cults of the relics
of the Buddha link Southeast Asians not only with early Indi-
an Buddhism but also with the cosmographic practices of the
rulers of the classical indianized states and beyond that with
the cadastral cults of pre-indianized Southeast Asia.
The cult of the relics of the Buddha does not constitute
the whole of Buddhism as practiced in Southeast Asia. Be-
tween the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, missionary
monks established a Therava ̄da Buddhist orthodoxy among
the majority of peoples, both rural and urban, living in what
are today Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. In a sense,
orthodox Buddhism made sense to Southeast Asians because
of the pre-Buddhist idea that religious virtue is not a product
solely of descent from particular ancestors but also a conse-
quence of one’s own religiously effective actions. In Buddhist
terms, this idea was formulated so that people understood
that although they were born with a certain karmic legacy
of both merit and demerit they also continually acquire new
merit and demerit from morally significant acts.
Those who became adherents of Therava ̄da Buddhism
also retained pre-Buddhist beliefs in spirits and deities. These
beliefs were given new significance in the context of a Bud-
dhist worldview. Some of the supernatural beings were uni-
versalized and identified with Hindu deities also known to
Buddhism. More significantly, spirits and deities were ac-
corded a subordinate place within the Buddhist cosmic hier-
archy generated by the law of karman. Beliefs in pre-8644 SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: MAINLAND CULTURES