Baphuon style, Cambodia
This graceful dancing figure represents a Yogini, a female yoga practitioner.
The present Yogini holds a Vajra in the right hand, identifying her as Dombini who appears in the Hevajra Mandala as the keeper of the northwest portal. The Yogini is dressed in a typical Khmer Sampot, and is adorned with lavish jewelry including a pectoral with back pendants.
The Yogini, beautiful, wildly fierce females frequently shown dancing on corpses, derive their iconography from obscure Vedic, village, and tantric sources, and should not be confused with charming celestial females known as apsara.
Trained as ‘yogic-sexual assistants,’ yogini were indispensable in the Hevajra cult, resulting in a need for a significant number of women able to perform the necessary Tantric temple-rituals.* The Chinese Superintendent of Maritime Trade in thirteenth-century Guangzhou, Zhao Rukuo, mentions the presence of foreign women in Khmer temples.
“In Chenla [Cambodia], the people are devout Buddhists. In the temples there are 300 foreign women; they dance and offer food to the Buddha. They are called a-nan…” Their description as a-nan (Bliss) suggests an erotic role in temple rituals.
Such a role attributed to yogini may not have resonated with Khmer women, resulting in the need for foreign women to fulfill the required Tantric temple-rituals. Zhao’s statement may explain this unusual little bronze dancing yogini who is not Khmer but Negrito, confirming Zhao’s statement concerning foreign women in Buddhist temples. Negritos are known to have inhabited parts of Peninsular Thailand and the Malay Peninsula.
The Negrito yogini wears a sampot chang kben that dips low in front, is adorned with a pectoral with pendants front and back, and displays an empty socket in back for a butterfly bow, all characteristics of the second half of the eleventh century.A third eye marking her forehead and her dance pose, in which the raised right foot touches the left thigh, are typical Tantric yogini characteristics. To date, this is a rare image of an obvious foreigner in Khmer art.
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