Jayasimhavarman (Phu Khiao)

Jayasimhavarman of Phu Khiao was a ruler known from the Phu Khiao Kao inscription (K.404), a Sanskrit inscription discovered at the ancient site of Phu Khiao Kao () in present-day Chaiyaphum province, northeastern Thailand. The text is engraved on a stone pillar in an early form of Old Khmer script. It is dated on palaeographic grounds to about the 7th or 8th century. It appears to be part of a royal eulogy (praśasti) praising a ruler called Śrī Jayasimhavarmanrāja. The identity and political affiliation of the ruler it names remain uncertain.

Discovery and identification

The inscription was discovered near Huai Ma-ue (; formerly known as Nong Hin Tang ) in the present-day Kaset Sombun district of Chaiyaphum province. Early reports counted about thirteen stone pillars scattered across the area, two of them inscribed. The site was first described in 1922 by the Danish antiquarian Erik Seidenfaden in the Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient. At the time the locality was recorded as being within the district of Pak Bang (also known as Phu Khiao).

The inscriptions were later studied by the French epigraphist George Cœdès, who published them in Inscriptions du Cambodge (vol. VII). Cœdès distinguished two separate inscriptions from the locality and assigned them catalogue numbers K.404 and K.512. The inscription containing the name Jayasimhavarman is K.404, often referred to as the Phu Khiao inscription. It consists of 11 lines of Sanskrit text engraved on a rectangular stone pillar. A second inscription from the same area, K.512, is much shorter and heavily eroded, containing only 4 lines of text.

Because both inscriptions were discovered at the same site, they have sometimes been confused in later references. The pillar bearing K.404 was later removed from the site and is now preserved at the National Museum in Phimai, Nakhon Ratchasima province.

Inscription

The Phu Khiao inscription is written in Sanskrit and carved in an early form of Khmer script. It appears to be a fragment of a praśasti, composed of a series of laudatory epithets praising the ruler. Sarah Talbot describes it instead as a Sanskrit inscription with Mon characteristics. Stephen Murphy counts the stone among the Dvaravati-period sema, the Buddhist boundary markers of the Khorat Plateau, whose inscriptions are few and usually votive, giving little beyond a donor's name and a formulaic dedication.

Within the surviving lines, the inscription refers to a king named Śrī Jayasimhavarmanrāja. The text also mentions a person named Cuḍāmaṇī, described as being born of a woman named Lakṣmī. Because the inscription is fragmentary and the surviving estampage is of poor quality, a complete translation has not yet been established. The database entry for the inscription takes Cuḍāmaṇī to have been a daughter of Harshavarman I. Cha-em Kaeokhlai read the passage in 1989 as praising Cuḍāmaṇī as a lady or queen of high rank, known for moral integrity and for wisdom filled with dharma. On that reading the inscription goes on to say that the power and glory of the king's realm rested on her support. Murphy rejects the basis of it, holding that nothing in the text supports even the proposal that Cuḍāmaṇī was the name of a person, still less one of high rank.

Local traditions recorded in the early 12th century attribute the stone pillars to a legendary episode involving the construction of a Buddhist caitya. According to the legend, builders from Vientiane and Phitsanulok transported materials to the site but arrived after the monument had already been completed, leaving behind the stone pillars that remain visible today. Similar groups of stone pillars have also been reported from other locations in the region, particularly in Ubon Ratchathani province.

Interpretation

Based on the palaeographic style of the script, scholars generally date the inscription to around the 7th–8th centuries. Cœdès noted that the name Jayasimhavarman corresponds to no known ruler in the epigraphy of Cambodia. Given the geographical context, he thought it unlikely to refer to the Cham king Jaya Simhavarman I, who ruled in the late 9th century. Instead, Cœdès suggested that the inscription may refer to a local ruler associated with an inland polity of mainland Southeast Asia, possibly connected with the political formations traditionally described in Chinese sources as Land Chenla or Wen Dan.

Hiram Woodward has read the term prajñā in the inscription as a Mahāyāna marker. Murphy holds that a community's religious affiliation cannot be read from one or two isolated terms, over a tradition covering a large area and more than four centuries. The identity and political affiliation of Jayasimhavarman remain uncertain, the inscription being fragmentary.