Angkor Wat’s very form discloses a carefully woven synthesis of Hindu and Buddhist vision. The temple-mountain structure, with its five towers rising in a quincunx, is conceived as Mount Meru, the cosmic axis of Hindu cosmology, yet this same sacred mountain is equally central in Buddhist understandings of the universe. The concentric enclosures and axial causeways trace a mandala-like pattern that can be read as both a Hindu map of the cosmos and a Buddhist diagram of the path toward the center of awakening. In this way, the architecture itself becomes a shared cosmogram, allowing different doctrinal lenses to converge upon the same stone geometry.

The surrounding moat and successive galleries further reinforce this dual symbolism. They evoke the Hindu image of Mount Meru encircled by the cosmic ocean and mountain ranges, while also resonating with Buddhist cosmological schemes that retain Meru at the center of a structured universe. The temple’s unusual westward orientation, originally linked to Vishnu and to Hindu funerary associations with the setting sun, later accommodates Buddhist devotional and memorial practices without altering the underlying spatial logic. Direction, enclosure, and elevation thus serve as a common symbolic language in which both traditions can recognize their own truths.

Within this cosmic framework, the sculptural and narrative programs reveal another layer of blending. The bas-reliefs famously recount Hindu epics such as the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Churning of the Ocean of Milk, filling the galleries with a distinctly Hindu mythic world. Over time, however, Buddhist imagery and Buddha statues were introduced into these same spaces, so that Buddhist figures came to inhabit a narrative shell still dominated by Hindu stories and deities. The thousands of apsaras and devatas, drawn from Hindu celestial imagery, continued to function as heavenly beings within a Buddhist sacral environment, illustrating how visual forms could be reinterpreted rather than erased.

The inner sanctuaries offer perhaps the most intimate testimony to this syncretism. The central shrine, once dedicated to Vishnu, was later rededicated to Buddhist worship, and subsidiary sanctuaries that had housed Hindu cult images were transformed into spaces for Buddha images and meditation. Yet the original hierarchy of space—innermost, highest, most sacred—remained intact, so that the architectural grammar of Hindu devotion came to serve Buddhist practice. Angkor Wat thus stands as a stone record of religious continuity and transformation, where a Hindu cosmic temple gradually became a Buddhist pilgrimage center without abandoning the forms through which it first spoke of the divine.