Place · Cham temple · Vietnam
Po Nagar, Nha Trang
A Cham brick temple on a hill above the Nha Trang river mouth, built between the eighth and eleventh centuries for a goddess the Sanskrit inscriptions call Bhagavati and the Cham call Po Inu Nagar — the mother of the country.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.265, 109.195
Worth knowing
The temple is still in worship by Cham and by Vietnamese, who identify the goddess with Thien Y A Na. It is the clearest case in Southeast Asia of an Indian goddess name attached to a local mother deity who was plainly there first, and who outlived the Sanskrit.
Connections (2)
- Origin of Pitha mythKaundinya–Kambuja tradition
The same marriage story — an arriving Brahmin and a local naga or earth goddess — underlies Funan's Kaundinya legend and the Cham cult of Po Inu Nagar, the mother of the country whom the Sanskrit inscriptions at Po Nagar call Bhagavati. In both the local half of the pair is female, indigenous and prior, and the Indian half is male, textual and arriving. It is a charter for how a Sanskritic kingship joined itself to an existing order.
- AnalogueChengannur Bhagavatī
Po Nagar at Nha Trang and the Kerala goddess temples are at opposite ends of the same phenomenon: an indigenous mother goddess given a Sanskrit name and a temple in an Indian idiom, who keeps her own local character underneath it. At Po Nagar the goddess is Bhagavati in the inscriptions and Po Inu Nagar to the Cham, and is now also worshipped by Vietnamese as Thien Y A Na — three religious systems, one deity, the oldest of them the local one.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Po Nagar”. George Coedès, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia; Hermann Kulke et al., Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa.
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