Modern scholarship on the devaraja cult relies almost entirely on Khmer stone inscriptions, since no continuous native historical narrative from the Angkorian period survives, and historians have revised their understanding of the cult considerably as inscriptions have been reexamined: earlier twentieth century scholarship, following the French epigrapher George Coedes, generally described devaraja as identifying the living king's own body directly with the god, while more recent scholarship reads the evidence as pointing to a linga or cult image serving as the vessel of a protective royal divine essence associated with, rather than strictly identical to, the king's person, a more cautious reading of exactly what the ninth century Khmer texts claim.
Angkor's great temple complexes, including Angkor Wat itself, built under Suryavarman II in the twelfth century and originally dedicated to Vishnu, functioned as material expressions of this royal cosmology, each king's temple mountain intended in part as his own eventual mausoleum and continuing site of posthumous royal cult. The devaraja ideology weakened as Theravada Buddhism gradually displaced Hindu court religion in the Khmer world from around the thirteenth century onward, replaced over time by different, though still religiously grounded, models of Southeast Asian kingship.