Buddhas, especially Buddhas of healing, who were regarded as the patron saints of various towns and mountains; (c) similar local deities apparently of Cambojan origin and perhaps corresponding to the God of the City worshipped in every Chinese town; (d) deified kings and notables, who appear to have been represented in two forms, the human and divine, bearing slightly different names.  Thus one inscription speaks of Sri Mahendresvari who is the divine form (vrah rupa) of the lady Sri Mahendralakshmi.

The presiding deity of the Bayon was Siva, adored under the form of the linga.  The principal external ornaments of the building are forty towers each surmounted by four heads.  These were formerly thought to represent Brahma but there is little doubt that they are meant for lingas bearing four faces of Siva, since each head has three eyes.  Such lingas are occasionally seen in India[281] and many metal cases bearing faces and made to be fitted on lingas have been discovered in Champa.  These four-headed columns are found on the gates of Angkor Thom as well as in the Bayon and are singularly impressive.  The emblem adored in the central shrine of the Bayon was probably a linga but its title was Kamraten jagat ta raja or Devaraja, the king-god.  More explicitly still it is styled Kamraten jagat ta rajya, the god who is the kingdom.  It typified and contained the royal essence present in the living king of Camboja and in all her kings.  Several inscriptions make it clear that not only dead but living people could be represented by statue-portraits which identified them with a deity, and in one very remarkable record a general offers to the king the booty he has captured, asking him to present it “to your subtle ego who is Isvara dwelling in a golden linga."[282] Thus this subtle ego dwells in a linga, is identical with Siva, and manifests itself in the successive kings of the royal house.

The practices described have some analogies in India.  The custom of describing the god of a temple by the name of the founder was known there.[283] The veneration of ancestors is universal; there are some mausolea (for instance at Ahar near Udeypore) and the notion that in life the soul can reside elsewhere than in the body is an occasional popular superstition.  Still these ideas and practices are not conspicuous features of Hinduism and the Cambojans had probably come within the sphere of another influence.  In all eastern Asia the veneration of the dead is the fundamental and ubiquitous form of religion and in China we find fully developed such ideas as that the great should be buried in monumental tombs, that a spirit can be made to reside in a tablet or image, and that the human soul is compound so that portions of it can be in different places.  These beliefs combined with the Indian doctrine that the deity is manifested in incarnations, in the human soul and in images afford a good theoretical basis for the