Jayavarman must have known that political chaos and incessant warfare had contributed to the region's weakness, and had brought about his own capture and exile to Java. At the same time, he might have been discouraged by the fact that many small principalities still lay unconquered to the north of the escarpment (that today marks the northern frontier of Cambodia). Unceasing warfare seemed still to surround him. We don't know who got the word first whether it was Jayavarman II or Sivakaivalya, or some other among the young king's ad visors. But some among them heard that there was some learned man away off in the extreme northeast. That man was called Hiranadama- literally, "Silver Arrow, but we might refer to him as "Silver Bullet," after the ordnance used to slay malevolent creatures. "Silver Bullet" was offering such magic at what price we do not know. He offered to teach Jayavarman ll's chaplain some secret magic incantations that would make the king superior to all other kings on earth, including even the rulers of Java. This would have amounted to a break. through, and Jayavarman could hardly resist. A meeting was arranged for the summit of Phnom Kulen, just north of the location of Angkor At the appointed time, Hiranadama arrived, probably alone from Janapada, far away in the northeast. As a later inscription explains, He brought in his head, but not in his hands, four texts, the contents of which he taught for the memorization of Sivakaivalya. We might imagine that he recited these aloud, line by line, until the chaplain had memorized their whole. We might imagine that, at the same time, Sivakaivalya consecrated a small, portable bronze image that was to be the repository of the chants' words. And we are later told that wherever the king and his successors went, there the image (and the chants) went also We are never told that, when all was finished, "Silver Bullet returned to Janapada. Nor are we told that ver received any gift or payment for his services. We are left to conclude that, when the ceremony was conclude "Silver Bullet" was killed. The manuscripts on which he had based his work disappeared, one of which was discovered by Teun Goudriaan only in the 1970s.
The significance of what "Silver Bullet" did is that he seems to have inaugurated the formalities which made a king into a devaraja. And the importance of the devaraja idea is that it augmented a widespread cultural pattern in Southeast Asia which exaggerated the concept of royalty, making it possible to have only one "king" per realm, just as a family could have only one head, and even twins could not be equals and one had to be senior to the other.