384 Part V: Southeast Asia
Roman Emperor Vespasian prohibited the exportation of gold in 69 C.E., that
may have been a turning point, intensifying Indian trade with Southeast Asia.
Most likely Indian traders set up semipermanent trade establishments near
local chiefs, maintaining links with home, sending home for brides. They
brought Brahmans to their distant settlements to perform life cycle rites for
them, and these Brahmans brought the sacred works in the Sanskrit lan-
guage—the Vedas, the Dharmashastras, the Puranas, the Ramayana, the
Mahabharata—with them. These were the first books, and the first writing,
Southeast Asians saw. These Brahmans, in other words, were carriers of India’s
high culture.
But it is unlikely such persons could have “imposed” Indian culture on
Southeast Asian rulers. Southeast Asia was “Indianized,” as Stephen Lansing
(1983) argues, not by the arrival of Indians bearing civilization or by Southeast
Asians going to India (though both of those things surely happened), but by the
power of Indian ideas. These powerful ideas included a mathematical astron-
omy that made possible a calendrical system that located the human world in
the divine cosmos. The “vision of a vast and orderly cosmos” permitted both
the far-reaching metaphysics of Hindu and Buddhist thought and required inte-
gration of the human realm into an overall theory of cosmic order. That is, it
contained a theory of the state that was naturally attractive to rulers all over
Southeast Asia. It is easy to imagine the appeal of these ideas to a ruler who
had conquered his enemies; commanded the loyalty of troops and vassals, vil-
lages and persons; and could claim to control a vast territory—was this like
Indra in his Heaven? Was such a man a god-king? This new theory of the state
functioned to legitimate the state by converting military conquest and political
dominance into cosmically meaningful categories.
Although Indic ideas came to Southeast Asia with all their multiplicity of
gods, sects, epics, and in Hindu and Buddhist variants, the major regional naga-
ras tended to emphasize either Hindu or Buddhist strands. We would not want
to overstate this distinction, as the cosmological underpinnings were similar in
both cases. The monuments built by both Hindu and Buddhist monarchs
tended to feature a central raised structure, but for Hinduized monarchs such
as those at Angkor, it housed the lingam of Shiva (Shiva’s phallic icon), while
for Buddhist monarchs it was a stupa housing relics of the Buddha. In both
cases, these were centers of concentrated cosmological power where royal
authority fused with sheer divinity.
The major locations of these Indianized kingdoms with predominantly
Hindu cosmologies were Funan, Bali, and Angkor, while Buddhist themes pre-
dominated in Thailand.
Funan. The lower Mekong valley and delta was where the first Indian-
ized kingdom, known to the Chinese as Funan, emerged between the first and
sixth centuries C.E. Two Chinese diplomats, Kang Dai and Zhu Ying, visited
Funan from the southern Chinese state of Wu with orders to seek information
regarding trade with India. Kang Dai’s report, though lost, was quoted at