The Buddhist deity of transcendent wisdom Prajnaparamita

The last great king of Angkor, Jayavarman VII, was a powerful religious and artistic visionary. Earlier kings of Angkor had built vast temple-mountains for the Hindu deities Shiva or Vishnu. In contrast, his state temple—with its unprecedented towers with huge faces—embodied a complicated, and still incompletely understood, form of Buddhism.

Jayavarman VII’s Buddhism centered on a triad made up of a supreme serpent-enthroned Buddha flanked by the male bodhisattva of compassion and the female goddess of transcendent wisdom. This goddess was thought of metaphorically as the mother of Buddhas. In this sculpture of her, all that would distinguish her from an ordinary woman is the seated Buddha in her hairdress.