in the rest of South East Asia, with the exception of the Philippines and the remote highlands, the influence of Indian culture was readily apparent, though India never dominated the region politically nor occupied territories there. During the first millennium AD various kingdoms in the lowland areas of both mainland and island South East Asia adopted certain Hindu-Buddhist precepts and Indian court culture; it is clear that the ruling groups of already established South East Asian polities invited Indian Brahmins, knowledgeable in sacred lore, cosmology, ritual and legal and administrative procedures, to their courts as priests, advisers and astrologists. In particular, Indian cosmology and religion were used to legitimize and symbolize the position, status and rule of local mon archs, by presenting the latter as divine or at least as the mediators between the universe and the earthly world, in other words as a reincarnation of a Hindu deity or as a future Buddha (Heine-Geldern, 1963: 7-11). Again Osborne, in contrasting the Vietnamese political system with the Indianized polities, points out that in the latter the pattern of official relationships was in many ways much more complex, in part because it was a pattern lacking the clearly defined lines of authority that were so much part of the Vietnamese system' (1985: 40) Instead of a pyramid of authority, the Indianized systems were characterized by Osborne in terms of a series of concentric circles