reconstructing ancient cambodian buddhism.pdf

RECONSTRUCTING ‘ANCIENT’

CAMBODIAN BUDDHISM 1

John Marston

The article explores a distinction made in Cambodian Buddhism between ‘b˘ ran’

Buddhism (ancient or non-reformed) and ‘s ˆ m ˇ y’ Buddhism (modern or non-reformed).

This distinction had historical importance and was a major point of division in the

twentieth century prior to the Pol Pot period. The article explores the degree to which this

distinction has re-emerged in recent times and the different ways in which the concept

‘boran’ is used today, giving several examples. Sometimes it is used with reference to

what I would describe as new tendencies within Cambodian Buddhism.

The 1989 relaxation of socialist controls over religion in Cambodia altered quickly

the landscape of religious practice and, with it, a whole conﬁguration of

conceptual systems. A free revival of pre-1975 practices inevitably entailed new

constructions of the idea of an authentic past. It is in these terms that the

re-emergence of b˘ran as a category of Cambodian Buddhism is a signiﬁcant

development. B˘ ran translates as ‘ancient’; in a Cambodian context it sometimes

suggests great antiquity, such as that of Angkor, but is also sometimes used in a

way that translates merely as ‘traditional’. In the usage I am focusing on for this

paper, b˘ran stands in contrast to sˆ mˇ y, or ‘modern’ Buddhism, and in particular

the reform Buddhism that was introduced in the early twentieth century when

Venerable Chuon Nath, later the Mohanikay Supreme Patriarch, began to have

inﬂuence. While at this time sˆ mˇy Buddhism became the favored model of

religious administration authorities based in Phnom Penh, active resistance by

b˘ ran wats 2 continued well up into the time the country fell to the Khmer Rouge.

The tensions between b ˘ ran and s ˆ m ˇ y, symbolizing as they did the practical

expression of modernity and the rejection of it, were an important dynamic of

Cambodian Buddhism in the twentieth century. However, in the new social

context of post-1989 Cambodia, the reappearance of the concepts b ˘ ran and

s ˆ m ˇ y was bound to have new implications.

This resulted directly from constitutional reforms that in 1989 lifted controls

over religion and a general shift in attitudes, which, with political change, saw the

era as time of return to pre-socialist institutions. While I will argue that the

Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 9, No. 1, May 2008

ISSN 1463-9947 print/1476-7953 online/08/010099-121

q 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14639940802312725

100 JOHN MARSTON

re-emergence of b˘ran relates to a Cambodian style of ‘civil society’, it does not do

so in a simple, straightforward way, as a non-governmental organization (NGO) or

a clearly deﬁned movement within Cambodian Buddhism. B ˘ ran is best

considered a concept that relates to trends and small movements in speciﬁc

wats, which have followed from the shift away from socialism in Cambodia and

remains very much in the frame of personalized social formations. In three case

studies I will show how in different contexts the concept of b˘ ran can relate to: a

somewhat passive return to remembered traditions; an active and more self-

reﬂexive agenda of organizing a wat in relation to a national project; or an idea

associated with unprecedented religious movements supported by urban

followers that, while not their primary organizing principle, becomes part of the

attraction to followers.

Civil society and post-socialist Cambodia

Before talking about the historical background of the b˘ ran/s ˆ m ˇ y

distinction, it is useful to think about what it means to talk about an emergence

of civil society in Cambodia. The difﬁculty of relating b ˘ ran to the theory of civil

society is connected to the larger difﬁculty of placing Cambodia in relation to

theories of modernity. Just as by early, narrow deﬁnitions, which emphasized

industrialization and a well-developed state bureaucracy, Cambodia has never

been fully ‘modern’, so, following classical deﬁnitions, which conceived it in terms

of non-private non-state institutions, Cambodia has had very little ‘civil society’.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to discuss the history of Cambodia since colonialism

without recognizing the very real ideological role of modernity, and it is

impossible to discuss the changes that have taken place since socialism without

ﬁnding a way to describe the more ﬂexible ‘non-state’ social formations that have

emerged. A Habermasian concept of the bourgeois public sphere does not work

very well in the Cambodian context. This has to do not just with the fact that the

Cambodian bourgeoisie is so small, but with the fact that so much of the

organization of ‘public life’ continues to follow patterns of personal patronage,

and by the degree to which coercive power colors ‘public’ discourse in ways that

speciﬁcally contradict the Habermasian model. There has, since the 1991 Paris

Agreements, been a dramatic ﬂowering of local NGOs (Clarke 1998) that

academics and international NGO workers often describe as the emergence of civil

society (coming onto the scene approximately at the same time that the

b˘ran/sˆ mˇy distinction was re-emerging). Although this is an important

development, we should be very careful in interpreting it, since many local

NGOs are still dependent on international NGOs and international agencies for

funding and, sometimes, guidance. They are still far from ﬁscally sustainable and it

is not clear yet to what extent they will prove to have been in touch with

grassroots values. The points of articulation between international NGOs and

international agencies and the local NGOs they are funding may involve more

confusion of purpose than is generally acknowledged. How often is what an

RECONSTRUCTING ‘ANCIENT’ CAMBODIAN BUDDHISM 101

international funder views as a contribution to the autonomy of a local project

more likely to be perceived by Cambodian government ofﬁcials and other

observers (even people within the local NGO) in terms of traditional patronage?

We may ask ourselves how these Cambodian NGOs relate to social movements

(Morris-Suzuki 2000) and what, in terms of contemporary Cambodian social

formations, a social movement can mean. This paper looks at b˘ ran as a way of

considering what form social movement can take in Cambodia.

The Dhammayietra, a series of well-publicized annual peace marches

starting in 1991 (see Poethig 2004), is a good example of a Cambodian NGO that

did seem, at least temporarily, to be a religious social movement drawing on the

Cambodian grass roots—a very different one from the b˘ ran we are primarily

concerned with here. It had the formal structure of an NGO, was very much

transnational in origin, and yet also had a national character to the Cambodians

who participated. Very much in the model of civil society, it created a type of

public forum to address social issues; very much in the model of traditional

Cambodian society, although it was built around the charisma of a single ﬁgure—

and as the health of Venerable Maha Ghosananda deteriorated, the movement

diminished in scope and public visibility, seeming to lose its original signiﬁcance.

The conﬁguration of contemporary b˘ ran is even more intrinsically linked to the

traditional patronage of individual monks.

As a means of showing how religious practices deeply embedded in

personal patronage relate to the social transformations taking place in Cambodia,

I will deﬁne civil society very broadly, with citizenship, and hence civil society,

occurring wherever political agency occurs, which is in turn recognized as

extending into what is sometimes called the ‘private’ or of articulating directly

with state institutions, and which is recognized as taking place between players of

different degrees of power. It is in these terms that the contestation represented

by asserting b˘ ran as a category, and the fact that such contestation revives with

the fading of socialism, can relate to an idea of civil society.

Classical deﬁnitions of civil society in terms of spheres of activity that fall

between that of the family and the state (Colas 1995) logically suggest the

inclusion of religion; nevertheless, the concept of civil society has traditionally

been conceived in political and economic terms and, as Calhoun (1992) points out,

its relation to religion has often been ignored. Casanova (1994), drawing on

Luckmann, describes a process of modernization whereby, with the increasing

secularization of society, religion is more and more categorized in the realm of the

subjective. He then describes a process whereby the subjective world of religion

re-enters the world of the public to challenge its ‘objective’ systems. It is tricky to

describe Cambodia in these terms, primarily because the concepts of public and

private do not distinguish so clearly as they would in the societies Casanova

describes, and because there is less of a conceptual tradition of distinguishing

between the subjective and the objective.

Cambodian kingship, like that of other pre-modern Southeast Asian states,

was associated with the otherworldly, and the spiritual; and to the degree that

102 JOHN MARSTON

kingship was a common reference to the general population, public life was

imbued with the spiritual—although the religious life of the court may have been

very different from those of the common people. French colonialism was by its

nature secular, and although colonial policy actively involved itself in religion

(Edwards 1999, 2004; Hansen 2004), public life—in so far as it involved interaction

with the colonial authorities—was secular. While the bureaucratic traditions of the

French continued under Sihanouk in the early independence period, Sihanouk

explicitly identiﬁed himself as a Buddhist leader and would eventually call his state

project Buddhist socialism (Harris 2005; Sam 1987). Cambodia’s socialism did

involve a process of secularization—violently in the case of the 1975–79

Democratic Kampuchea period, more subtly in the socialism of the 1980s—and

secularization did change the social role of religion; however, it did not mean that

religion consequently developed primarily as a ‘private’ subjective sphere in quite

the way Casanova describes. In the 1980s, following a Leninist model (but

apparently different from the Poland described by Casanova), the Cambodian

state categorized organized religion as one of several mass organizations that

were expected to work toward the fulﬁllment of party and state goals, while

remaining structurally outside of them. One could argue about whether this

constituted ‘civil society’, but it did not make participation in religion ‘individual’ in

orientation, and it had more to do with public life than the private world of family

and personal relations. On the other hand, more in accordance with the process

Casanova describes, a remembered discourse that carried on the tradition of

distinguishing b˘ran from s ˆ m ˇ y would have been in every sense a very private

discourse, perhaps surviving only in informal discussion among individuals, along

the lines of what Scott (1990) calls hidden transcripts.

The transition away from socialism meant that major religious institutions

were released, to a degree, from their links to the state and the ideology that held

they should pursue party goals. While the institutions that emerged were more

openly enmeshed in systems of patronage and personal dependency than they

could have been during the socialist period, they were, like religions everywhere,

‘public’ forums drawing on the participation of the general population.

Remembered religious practices, such as b˘ ran, were released from the realm of

private discussion and could be proposed for more public religious institutions—

even when doing so implied a form of contestation of the modes of practice that

had continued from the 1980s. It is in this way that the end of socialism meant the

emergence of a kind of civil society.

B˘ ran/sˆmˇy historically

First and foremost, contemporary b ˘ ran represents the memory of b ˘ ran

Buddhism as it existed prior to 1975 and the idea of continuity with the traditional

practices of speciﬁc wats and spiritual leaders. In so far as this memory is partial

and shaped by the contemporary political and social landscape, the re-emergence

of b˘ ran is a new phenomenon. B˘ ran originally represented the resistance to

RECONSTRUCTING ‘ANCIENT’ CAMBODIAN BUDDHISM 103

early modernizing reforms that began in the early twentieth century and would

eventually be associated in particular with the Ven. Chuon Nath, who would

eventually become Mahanikay patriarch, and other monks closely associated with

him (Bizot 1976; Edwards 1999, 2004; Guthrie 1991; Hansen 2004; Huot Tat 1993;

Keyes 1994; San Sarin 1998) Ven. Chuon Nath now stands as something of an icon

of the reformed movement at this time. The historical tension between b ˘ ran and

sˆmˇ y in Cambodia has parallels in other Theravada countries (Keyes 1989;

Mendelson 1975; Tambiah 1976). The b˘ ran/sˆ mˇy distinction should not be

confused with the distinction between the Thammayut and Mahanikay sects in

Thailand and Cambodia, 3 even though the s ˆ m ˇ y reforms represented, as did the

Thammayut reforms when they originally appeared in Thailand, an attempt

to purify and systematize Buddhism, and sˆmˇ y reﬂects, in important ways, the

inﬂuence of the Thammayut (see Harris, 2005). But the division between b˘ran and

sˆmˇ y as I am using it exists within the Cambodian Mahanikay. 4

The original sˆ mˇ y movement ﬁts neatly in the category ‘religious

reformism’, which Bellah deﬁned in a well-known 1965 article: ‘ ... a movement

that reinterprets a particular religious tradition to show not only that it is

compatible with modernization but also that, when truly understood, the tradition

vigorously demands at least important aspects of modernity’ (Bellah 1965, 207).

The movement proposed that the religion’s ‘“essence,” when divested of historical

perversions, is to further social and cultural modernization’ (Bellah 1965, 201) We

are now more wary than Bellah would have been in 1965 of ‘modernizing’

movements, and their association with colonialism, which Bellah recognized,

looms even more in our mind today. It is not clear that sˆmˇ y was truly more

rationalized or truly facilitated development in Cambodia. But it is fair to say that

the sˆ mˇy movement followed patterns consistent with other ‘religious reformist’

movements taking place in the world at the same time and that in the popular

mind it symbolized modernizing tendencies in the country.

The reforms associated historically with Chuon Nath had to do with

pedagogy and the precise relation of religious practice to written language, with

the pronunciation of chants, with the ways monks expressed the different roles of

novices and bhikkhus, and with rules governing monkly practice of wearing robes

and eating, as well as with details of rituals. At the core they had to do with the

attempt to systematize Buddhism in accord with national standards and with what

sˆmˇ y claimed was the precise prescriptions of Buddhist scriptures. This stands in

contrast to more personalized traditions handed on from individual teacher to

individual student emphasized in b ˘ ran wats. B ˘ ran was associated with the use

of palm leaf manuscripts, to be read by rote and memorized, whereas in sˆ mˇ y

temples monks used printed books, systematically learned Pali grammar and

emphasized the translation of Pali into Khmer. The sˆ mˇ y tradition aimed to create

a Buddhism consonant with modern scientiﬁc rationalism. The b ˘ ran tradition

looked askance at the fact that monks in sˆ mˇy schools learned mathematics and

science as well as religious practice.

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