Cambodia Report (Center for Advanced Study, Phnom Penh), V.II, No.2 (Mar-Apr 1996). pp. 8-13.

  "Buddhism as a Factor of Culture and Development in Cambodia"(1)

Peter Gyallay-Pap  

      Cambodian society is still hemorrhaging from the upheavals - wars, mass evacuations/murder, destruction of traditional culture, foreign occupation - of the 1970s and 1980s. The UN-sponsored peace plan in the early 1990s paved the way for reconstruction and opened possibilities for healing and reconciliation. But the international community's involvement in and desire to help Cambodia has not addressed the psychic dimension of the people's recovery needs. The vast amounts of aid money and the focus on material assistance and values, concentrated in but not confined to Phnom Penh, has contributed to a growing social climate of mindless consumerism, avarice, greed, and corruption. For those concerned with redressing this imbalance and finding a spiritual-material path more conducive to the needs of healing and reconciliation - the requisites, it seems, for social cohesion - it may be useful to review what we tentatively know about the social impact of Theravada Buddhism on the development of Khmer society and culture. A better understanding of this phenomenon may help to inform and promote local, or indigenous paths for the peaceful and just development of the country. I define culture here in the broad sense as the sum total of ways that human societies adapt to their natural and social environment.

The Local Cultural Context

        We know that the Khmer people have existed as an identifiable ethno-linguistic community for at least two thousand years if not longer. Rooted as other peoples in the region in an animistic folk religion, the Khmer adopted Indian customs, mores, and beliefs during the rich Gupta period of Indian history (3rd to 7th centuries C.E.) and were guided by a Brahman (Hindu) and to some extent Mahayana Buddhist belief system during most of the Angkor period (9th to 14th centuries). Chinese influence has been marginally present throughout Khmer history. Theravada Buddhism originating in Sri Lanka was also marginally present in Khmer society from the earliest times until it became the dominant belief system in the 14th century. Western influence began in the late 16th century with Spanish and Portuguese explorers and missionaries, became more pronounced during nearly a century of French colonial rule between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, and dominant in the thinking of the Khmer élites, now western educated, after World War II.

      Throughout their pre-modern history, the Khmer not only survived and were enriched by these foreign cultural invasions, but also retained their sense of identity as an ethno-linguistic community. The cultural historian R.W. Wolters (1982) developed a theory of  "localization" by showing how indigenous, or local, elements in the Southeast Asian culture area retained or even threw into sharper relief their particular identities when confronted with foreign elements. He demonstrated how the Brahmanic Indian materials, as they penetrated Khmer culture, retreated into local cultural statements, fitting one way or another into new contexts by the "'something else' in the local culture(s) responsible for the localizing process." The best known example of this transfer process, of foreign materials becoming local cultural statements, is Angkor Wat.

      In the mid-1950s, Robert Redfield, in his Peasant Society and Culture, sought to understand local social-political structures through the connecting tissue between rulers and the ruled by using concepts that he felicitously coined "the Great Tradition" and "the Little Tradition." The former represented urban court society, the latter the peasantry. Cultural historian Harry J. Benda (1969) applied this distinction to Southeast Asia with some telling results which I will use as a heuristic device to provoke discussion and further research in this country.

Great Tradition vs. Little Tradition in Cambodia

      The classical era of Southeast Asian history, covering the pre-Angkor and Angkor periods, was a "Great Tradition" era of the court-centered Brahmanic-Mahayana Buddhist civilizations. Both Brahmanism and the Mahayana Buddhism imported from India (i.e., not Chinese Mahayanism) were Sanskrit-based court religions with a priestly class in the service of the political ruler, the deva-raja, or god-king.  If with Benda we identify the Great Tradition with the political authority of the state and the Little Tradition with the people, or peasants, living in society, then it would be difficult to dispute that the Great Tradition dominated the Little Tradition. Benda described the negative impact of this "official" or state religion on the society in the following tentative terms:

       The peasantry was probably forced to participate in the religious rites centering on the god-kings, but such participation was very likely passive, and the state religion did not as such cater to the villagers through its teachings or - more important from a structural point of view - by providing a rural clergy for them. The peasantry, then, presumably continued to live in a spiritual, largely animistic, world of its own.

     The guardians of the Great Tradition, if we accept Benda's inference, thus did little to uplift or develop the people of the Little Tradition, whose numbers we can assume to have been 95 or more per cent of the population. Rather, the Great Tradition meant total or nearly total royal control over the agrarian economy, wherein the peasantry was mobilized, through a form of slave labor, to built and sustain the vast temples and irrigation projects surrounding the temples. A possible partial exception to this rule was the tantric Buddhism, a variant of Mahayana Buddhism believed to have been practiced in particular by Jayavarman VII (1181-1215), which Benda claims did here and there penetrate downward to the peasantry, in part perhaps through the medium of the hundreds of hospices and sanctuaries which Jayavarman built during his reign. Also, one can argue that the people benefited from the protection of the "state" and provision of services such as irrigated water.

       Benda suggests that a "revolutionary" change occurred in the Khmer society and polity with the spread of Theravada Buddhism in mainland Southeast Asia between the 11th and 14th centuries.  Together with Islam in the southern insular parts of Southeast Asia, this monastic Buddhism spread on the mainland as a popular movement among the people. Although Benda asserts that Theravada Buddhism forged a link between the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition, there is also much to suggest that this Buddhism was the religion of the Little Tradition. The Angkorian Great Tradition, and with it, Brahmanism and Mahayana Buddhism declined over a period of some three centuries and virtually disappeared by the 15th century. From the Chinese emissary Chou Ta-Kuan's report of 1296-97, we have evidence that Theravada Buddhism was the dominant religion of the people at that time. The passage from Sanskrit, the language of Hinduism, to Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism, is symbolized if not marked by the Kok Svay Cek stone inscription at Angkor which is dated 1309. It is not clear when the Khmer king and court embraced the new religion, but it occurred no later than the mid-14th century, that is, during Jayavarmadi Paramesvara's reign  (1327-1353).  We can thus visualize how the state-centered Great Tradition was challenged and gradually transplanted by the people-centered Little Tradition.

     Benda argues the change was revolutionary in its introduction of three innovations into Khmer social and political life, innovations which were first introduced into Buddhism by the Indian Buddhist king, Asoka, in the 3rd century B.C.E.(2)  The first was the creation of a quasi-egalitarian community of monks, or the sangha, which rulers themselves were expected to enter if only symbolically for short periods. This equalitarian principle in Buddhism is traceable to the heart of Sakyamuni's (Buddha's) protest against the caste system of Indian society in the 6th century B.C.E. The second was the restraint on monarchical power which the monks exercised through their teachings and example. Rulers were no longer considered as god-kings (deva-raja) but modeled themselves on Asoka as dhamma-rajas, or righteous rulers, who were also subject to the (Buddhist) law. The sangha conferred legitimacy on the ruler who, in turn, was obliged to be the patron, protector, and when necessary, the purifier of the sangha. The third innovation was the practice of otherworldly simplicity and frugality. Right livelihood, one of the paths in Buddhism's Eightfold Path to enlightenment, meant living a self-disciplined and frugal life, finding a middle way between deprivation and opulence.  

     If Theravada Buddhism forged a link as Benda suggests between the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition, how was this link forged? Social researchers know very little about pre-modern Cambodian or Southeast Asian society, or the everyday lives of the Khmer and villagers in neighboring societies. The chronicles and inscriptions that have been uncovered over the last century reveal much about the "high politics" of royal accomplishments, succession, and intrigue, little about the "low politics" structures of everyday  life. Lester (1973, 76) states that the post-14th century chronicles and inscriptions reveal the piety of the king and court and the developing relationship between the king and Sangha, the practice in both matters being quite in keeping with the ideal of Buddhist kingship. ...The frequent warfare between the Thai, Burmese, Khmer, and Lao from the fourteenth through the early nineteenth centuries appears to have had little negative effect on the common faith of all parties.

    While a close connection emerged between the upper ranks of the sangha and the royal court, it nonetheless remained that the mass of the Theravada monks were village-based and that ecclesiastical structures were decentralized. Some monks practiced meditation in isolated forest retreats and other monks adopted a life of wandering as part of their spiritual quest for truth. For the most part, monks stayed in wats, or temple-monasteries, in or adjacent to villages. The wat structures were built by the villagers in return for moral guidance and merit. Monks passively radiated or mediated the Buddha-power to the lay society by serving as "merit fields" through which the people could become virtuous by performing good actions and thus improving their individual kamma (Skrt: karma)  in this life and the next. These meritorious acts affected the village and larger economy in a positive way through the redistribution of wealth and services to the neediest members of society. They also sustained the monks, who were not allowed to possess money and goods.

What claim can we make that stands up to historical scrutiny if we apply Wolter's localization theory to the post-classical Theravada period? Buddhism, to be sure, consisted of a universal set of doctrines and symbols centered on the acceptance of the Triple Gem and Four Noble Truths and the practice of the Eightfold Path, irrespective of and transcending cultural considerations. Monks were obliged to uphold the 227 disciplinary rules of the Pattimokkha, which were recited every fortnight. Yet Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia developed with variations and differences defined by the local cultures it penetrated. Indeed, as in the case of Cambodia, the Theravada wats became the centers for preserving and transmitting the Khmer (i.e, vernacular) language and culture and remained so, formally at least, until 1975. Many wats housed libraries and were the only seats of scholarship and learning in the country, apart from the homes of some mandarins, until this century. Once established, a premiere activity of the wat was to open a primary school for all boys, irrespective of social origin or status. This became Cambodia's education system and represented an example of popular education centuries before the concept was adopted in the West. The system was supplanted by (co-educational) secular state schools only in the 1950s and 1960s. 

     Although the system and curriculum were by today's standards rudimentary and excluded girls (though this may not have been watertight), the education was morally-based and served to acculturate the young in their own society and culture. It also created a functionally literate population. The western explorers, merchants, and missionaries who set foot on Southeast Asia after the 16th century reported, no doubt with some amazement, that the adult male populations in Cambodia and the neighboring Theravada lands could read and write. Western historians (viz. Steinberg, 263) have confirmed that literacy rates in Southeast Asia exceeded those of Europe until as late as the second half of the 19th century - a time, paradoxically, that coincides with the European "civilizing mission" in the region.

      Apart from serving as moral-religious and education centers, the wats were also the foci for villagers' social and cultural activities. Wats were the symbolic centers for all community festivities and ceremonies. They were places for learning and performing such applied and fine arts as dance, music, shadow puppetry, carving, pottery, theatre, and poetry - all of which served important acculturation or non-formal education functions for girls as well as boys. The wats provided social services by housing male orphans and children from disadvantaged families as temple boys who received basic education in literacy and numeracy. They provided for the elderly, particularly women who chose to become lay devotee nuns (doun chee) in their declining years while serving the wat according to their capacities. The wats served as important health and counselling centers as well as informal courts of justice where disputes were conciliated and mediated. Wats were regarded as sacred spaces and gardens of peace (wataram) for concentration and meditation. More research is needed in order to more precisely document the nature and scope of these community development functions and activities of the Theravada wats.

     A strict interpretation of the monks' discipline (Vinaya) proscribed monks from assuming an active, direct role in social, economic, and political affairs. As moral guides, however, they had an obligation to instruct, inspire, and motivate people, including those in positions of authority, to follow the right, or Middle, path. Yet the line between direct involvement and non-involvement was not always clear. In this respect, it is interesting to note that throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, the Khmer sangha was the principal moral and institutional force resisting the Vietnamese and later French occupations of the country. A spontaneous uprising occurred in the early 1840s following the destruction of wats and Buddhist statuary by Annamese who had occupied Cambodia militarily  in the 1830s. To what extent were the monks involved in inciting or leading this revolt? During the 90 years of the French Protectorate (1864-1954), their role is more clear: monks succeeded in thwarting, mainly through passive resistance, French efforts to supplant the Buddhist-based educational system, where the language of instruction was always Khmer, with a French-based system using European materials. By contrast, the French in neighboring Vietnam succeeded in "reforming" the Confucian-based educational system at least in Cochinchina (southern Vietnam) just after the turn of the 20th century.

     The Khmer sangha was by no means impervious to western influence. The influence of European rationalism did serve to demystify the cosmological, mythopoeic character of much of Khmer Buddhism and orient the sangha in a more scriptural, scholarly direction. The great reformer of Khmer Buddhism in the 20th century, Ven. Chuon Nath, led this modernist movement. Pali studies and schools emerged in the first decades of the 20th century. Those wats who adopted some European teaching methods and curricula beginning in the mid-1920s were distinguished from the others as being "renovated" (pagodes renovées). In the 1930, the sangha embarked on a project conducted through the recently-established Buddhist Institute to translate the entire Tripitaka, the Pali canon, a project comprising 110 volumes (between 400-600 pages each) completed in 1969. Ven. Chuon Nath, who sponsored this project, also authored the first Khmer dictionary in 1934.  In the same year, a Commission on the Mores and Customs of Cambodia was established in the Buddhist Institute to research Khmer culture, which led in part to publication of an 8-volume collection of Khmer folktales and legends.

     How more precisely did Khmer Buddhism change in adapting to this penetration of European materials? In what way did this foreign influence reinforce, or throw into sharper relief, or, as the case may be, dilute pre-existing practices of Buddhism in Cambodia? To what extent does Wolters'  localization theory hold under the impact of the European cultural invasion beginning in the second half of the 19th century?

Toward a Buddhist Development?

     Modern Khmer history texts bemoan the decline of Angkor and the "dark age" which followed. From a high politics standpoint, they are not necessarily wrong, marked as the post-Angkor period was by internal weaknesses and frequent state-level conflicts with neighboring polities in which the Khmer invariably found themselves on the losing end. But no Khmer historical writings of which I am aware considered the low politics of Khmer history, that is, the Little Tradition which I have briefly evoked above. If development is now being redefined to mean human development that entails assisting people to improve the quality of their daily lives through principles of mutual aid and self-reliance, then the Theravada Buddhist-led Little Tradition appears to have been an era of engaged Buddhist development that is deserving of greater study. A need exists in Cambodia for disinterested social research to stand alongside the political "research" of a generation of largely partisan, nationalist writers, whether of the left or right, who, as the terms "left" and "right" suggest, were informed for the most part by European industrial/political symbols. This problem is particularly germane as Cambodia stands at the beginning of what by necessity will be a long-term rebuilding cum development process. The question which now looms is, what kind of development?

     If a new consensus is emerging among development theorists that development should be less state-centric and more people-centered by, in part, drawing on local knowledge, then the Theravada Buddhist experience in Cambodia and the neighboring countries has much to offer as a guide or model. But development among the national élites in this region is still viewed largely  through modern Great Tradition lenses, that is, oligarchic development rooted in this case not in an indigenous conceptual system but on western macroeconomic concepts.  The main weakness of this model is that it reduced development to purely economic criteria - through such measurement terms as "annual growth rate," "gross domestic product (GDP)",  and "per capita income" - that had and have little or no relevance to the lives of villagers in Cambodia (or elsewhere). The monopoly of this development discourse, which is rooted in the language of 19th century European industrial civilization, remains so entrenched among the westernized élites running most non-western countries that it seems inconceivable to think in any other terms. After all, who wants to be seen (in western terms) as "backward?" 

     But there are voices, Cambodian and other Asian voices, who have challenged this development orthodoxy. Professor Chheng Phon, former Cambodian minister of culture and president of the Institute (now Center) for Culture and Vipassana, advised students entering the University of Fine Arts, which he directed in the late 1960s, that "traditional is not backward, modern is not advanced" before sending them to villages for the first six months of their study. This creative formulation is interesting as it does not reject but merely assigns a different value to the terms "traditional" and "modern." At the same time, it reminded urban Khmer that theirs is a village-based society where villagers were the main bearers of Khmer and Buddhist cultural values.

     The spirit of such a formulation became the subject of a 1975 meeting in Bangkok of Asian social researchers - at a time when a millenarian communist development model was turning day into night in Cambodia.  Co-sponsored by the UN Asian Development Institute and UNESCO, the symposium on  "development aims and socio-cultural values in Asia" expressed a "loss of confidence in the models of development offered by conventional economics" and agreed that the "concept, theories and strategies of development borrowed from the west have not been appropriate for Asian conditions" (Asian Rethinking on Development, 1977).  S.C. Dube, director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, reflected the group's attempt to look beyond both the western and revolutionary left development paradigms in favor of  viable indigenous approaches. Dube held that the western development model was adopted with high hopes by non-western governments after World War II. The top-down, state-centric development strategy was based on the expectation that rapid growth would automatically accrue benefits (i.e., "trickle down") to the masses of people in the form of jobs and economic opportunities. This strategy failed largely because a substantial part of the development gains were accrued by a small group who controlled the means of production and by a new "parasitical class" that grew around it. Those in the core financial-industrial-governmental sector driving the new economic activity reaped the advantages, while the bulk of the people living in the periphery remained largely untouched. The people were at best nominal beneficiaries of the products of this development, having some notional share in the social services provided by the state. But the costs appear to have outweighed the benefits in: a widening gap between the rich and the poor, environmental degradation, and the transformation of meaningful social, cultural, and religious symbols into commercial or consumer culture values. Dube asked, rhetorically, "Must we disintegrate our personality for the promised economic gains?"

     Dube passed over the "revolutionary path" model in one descriptive if also tentative paragraph, preferring to move to the "third trend" in development thinking, which, in his words, was the evolution of "an institutional framework suited to the socio-cultural and political realities of the country." As a social researcher and democrat, he accepted the social reality of a people's traditional culture, in particular their religious belief system, whether Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist. Contrary to western secular opinion, he maintained that these religious cultures have over time successfully adapted to different environments and suggested that they can also adapt to the challenges of modernization. He advocated a course of action that suggests that the corruption rampant in Cambodian élite society is not unique to Cambodia but endemic to societies whose leading members have denied their society's spiritual and cultural moorings:

  Traditions respond to the challenges of the changing environment, but for this a favourable political and economic climate has to be created. The basic question before Asian countries today is not one of dismantling their tradition; it is one of dismantling the citadels of power and vested interests that are obstacles to their growth. ....The elite that promises modernization must first divest itself of the evils of greed and rapaciousness that have characterized it during the last three decades. The dilatory and corrupt bureaucracy has to be reformed. To bring in a truly egalitarian ethos it is essential to open up the structure of economic opportunity and follow it up by imaginative and dynamic programmes of citizenship education that raise the consciousness of the people. This needs political will and resolute action. To ensure food, clothing, shelter, curative and preventive medicine, education, and culture at an adequate level to the many, the privileged few will have to lower their abnormally high standards and switch from conspicuous consumption to conspicuous austerity. ...We must respond creatively to the challenges of our social reality.

      Between Dube's lines we again discern the pattern of a Great Tradition dominating the Little Tradition and of the Little Tradition struggling to become a force for the moral regeneration and just development of society. What remains open and uncertain is whether the Little Tradition can again succeed here in Southeast Asia as it appears to have done at the societal level during the decline of the Angkor Empire and in the post-Angkor period. For Cambodia, the requisites of political leadership and will need to be directed at restoring learning and scholarship on the one hand, which means in particular training Cambodian scholars (including monks) to analyze the contexts in which they live and work(3), and the standards of the sangha on the other hand, which means reviving the royal and public patronage and principles of mutual aid that helped Buddhism to flower and improve the quality of peoples lives in the past.(4)

     If such a process can unfold, both of these indigenous socio-cultural forces will be able to contribute to the real challenge of development as we approach the 21st century, namely, re-defining and restructuring development in terms of meeting people's needs and enhancing the quality of people's lives on their own (cultural) terms. This view has not only been embraced by theorists, but also practitioners such as Edgar Pisani, who as commissioner for cooperation and development of the European Communities in the 1980s concurred that "each country can and must, in its own way, re-invent development, its development, using its own methods" (quoted in Verhelst, 1987).  For Cambodia and the neighboring Theravada lands, can a renewed, engaged Buddhism again provide direction for a development that is socially just and culturally (and environmentally) sensitive?

Notes

(1) This article is a revised version of a paper delivered to the international seminar, "Peacebuilding Through Culture and Cooperation," organized by the Khmer Institute of Culture and Vipassana of the Preah Sihanouk Raj Academy March 25-26, 1994 at Prek Ho, Takhmao, Kingdom of Cambodia.

(2) King Asoka, whose conversion to Buddhism following a military carnage in Kalinga is compared in historical importance to Roman Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity some 500 years later, established the social and political validity of the Theravada tradition at the 3rd Buddhist Council held in his capital, Pataliputta, India, in 247 BCE.

(3) In discussing the achievements of the Symposium, Dube pointed to the "discovery and reinforcement of an Asian social science identity" as being the most important single achievement. Another participant stressed the need to create "an autonomous, indigenous social science tradition to emancipate the 'captive mind' in Asia." It was necessary to empirically study the "relevance of Asian values as incorporated in concrete social structures of Asian societies .. with reference to the concrete problems of Asian societies." In principle, each non-western country or culture area could strive for the same or similar ends without having to resort to anti-western rhetoric.

(4) In spite of the paroxysms of the 1970s, the Buddhist wat structure came back to life more quickly and efficiently than state structures after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge in January 1979. Throughout the 1980s, the wats, who enjoyed the peoples' loyalties, were in the forefront of the reconstruction process (in local public works, literacy, communication, health), while, as in previous times in Khmer history, it was the Khmer villagers who have been the main force behind the Buddhist revival (see Löschmann 1991).

References

Asian Rethinking on Development. A Symposium Jointly Organized by     UNESCO and UN Asian Development Institute, New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977.

Bechert, Heinz. Buddhismus, Staat und Gesellschaft in den Laendern des Theravada   Buddhismus. v.2. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1967.

Benda, Harry J. "The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations." in Man, State, and Society in Contemporary Southeast Asia, ed. Robert O. Tilman. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969.

"Culture, the Forgotten Dimension." in Development, Seeds of Change (Rome), N.3/4, 1981. Special issue of the journal of the Society for International Development.

Ebihara, May. "Interrelations between Buddhism and Social systems in Cambodian Peasant Culture," in Manning Nash, et.al., Anthropological Studies in Theravada Buddhism. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1966.

Gunatilleke, Godfrey, et.al. Ethical Dilemmas of Development in Asia. Lexington, Mass./USA: Lexington Books, 1983.

Khmer Buddhist Research Center. Buddhism and the Future of Cambodia. Rythisen (Site 2 camp), Thailand: Khmer Buddhist Association, 1986.

Lester, Robert C. Theravada Buddhism in Southeast Asia. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973.  

Ling, Trevor, ed. Buddhist Trends in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of   Southeast Asian Studiesw, 1995.

Löschmann, Heike. "Buddhismus und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung in Kambodscha seit der Niederschlagung des Pol-Pot-Regimes im Jahre 1979." Asien, No. 41 (Juli 1991).

Phra Debvedi (Prayudh Payutto). Buddhist Economics. tr. Dhammavijaya. Bangkok: Buddhadamma Foundation Publications, 1992.

Steinberg, David Joel, ed., et.al. In Search of Southeast Asia. A Modern History. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, (1971) 1987.

Verhelst, Thierry G. No Life Without Roots: Culture and Development. tr. B. Cumming. London: Zed Books, (1987) 1990.

Wolters, O.W. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, (1982) 1989.

Peter Gyallay-Pap received his Ph.D. in political science in 1990 from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He currently directs the Social and Cultural Development Program at the Center for Advanced Study and serves as an advisor to a Cambodian NGO, Samakithor (Dhammic Solidarity).