How to Behave : Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia 1860 - 1930

Excerpted from
HOW TO BEHAVE
Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia
1860 – 1930
By Anne Ruth Hansen


Introduction:
Pali scholar Ukña Suttantaprija Ind wrote, “What is Dhamma in these times?” He went on to consider the moral values most necessary for living elūv neh, “right now,” contrasting the “old” with the “new,” and examining the gatilok tmi dael koet man loen, “modern morality that has arisen.” It is necessary “in these present times,” he wrote, for “persons who are trying to be good and pure” to be able to clearly recognize “what is worldly {behavior} and what is Dhammic {behavior}.


Chapter 1: Defending the Jeweled Throne – Khmer Religious Imagination in the nineteenth century

The moral development of individuals was determined by action or kamma, and the benefit or harm it created.

Their new reinterpretations deemphasized the ubiquity of the Bodhisatta as moral exemplar, insisting instead on the need for all Buddhists – lay and monastic, ordinary and exemplary – to bring their everyday, individual behavior in line with the Dhamma-vinay, the teaching of the Buddha.

While powerful persons are understood in his literature to derive their power from merit, part of their merit lies in their recognition of the limitations of worldly power, which is always subordinate to spiritual power.

THE MORALLY CONSTRUCTED COSMOS.

Because of their inability to control their cravings and desires, human being are forced to organize their societies under a king, the best of whom are known as cakkavattin, kings who promulgate and uphold the Buddhist teachings.

The two major divisions are referred to in Khmer sources as the kapps of decline and prosperity. The kapp of decline, samvatta or kappavinas, is the “devolving” or diminishing kapp, in which the human life span grows increasingly shorter as the ten kinds of bad or non-beneficial actions (dasa akusalakammapatha) are introduced. These ten actions are theft, murder, lying, malicious speech, improper sexual behavior, harsh speech, frivolous speech, jealousy, malice, and wrong view. At the kapp’s end the world is destroyed by means of fire, water, and wind.


Chapter 2: Buddhist Responses to Social Change

The literary preoccupation with depicting meritorious persons, righteous kings, and the immutability of karmic law in the latter part of this volatile century, I have suggested, might be read as the reaction to the instability of chaotic times and a growing uneasiness about the viability of these conceptions as description of the world.

SOCIAL ORDER

Graphically referred to by one British diplomat of the time as the “dismembering of Kamboja,” much of the precariousness of Khmer life in the early 19th century was the legacy of its geographical situation between two rival powers of Siam and Vietnam. Political power during this period in Southeast Asia was centered in the courts of kings and their vassals, while royally appointed governors and ministers levied taxes and corvée labor at the local level. The wars of the period, fought with army raised by the provincial ministers and officials, caused massive destruction in many regions of Cambodia. Entire populations fled into the forests or were captured as prisoners of war and forcibly relocated with the conquering armies, the survivors destined for slavery.
A Khmer verse chronicle translated by David Chandler described a Siamese attack on Phnom Penh in 1833:
“The took everything away, and burned what had been people’s houses, until not one of them remained; they took off everyone’s possessions, masters’ and slaves’ alike, and they carried off all the people until not a man was left.”

The poem continues with the account of a Vietnamese attack several years later. Khmer families, including the patroness whose experience the poem chronicles, were forced to flee into the forest to escape the Vietnamese troops:
“Their misery was great. There was no food at all, no fish, no rice, nothing normal to stave off their hunger; instead, they dug for lizards, without pausing to think. …They hunted saom roots in the depths of the forest, and other roots as well to make into a kind of soup…They are like this until their hunger went away, but it was hard to swallow the food; they sat silently besides the road, intensely poor, and miserable[1]”

French and British sources, corroborated by Thai sources as well, indicate the high toll in human suffering that the relocations of such large populations engendered. In his 1821 – 1822 journal of diplomatic visits to Siam and Cochin-China, John Crawfurd writes of the Siamese,
“Their wars are conducted with odious ferocity. Prisoners of rank are decapitated, and those of the lower orders condemned to perpetual slavery, and labour in chains. The peasantry of an invaded country armed or unarmed, men, women, and children are indiscriminately carried off into captivity, and the seizure of these unfortunate persons appears to be the principal object of the periodical incursions which are made into an enemy’s territory.”
In 1834, a French priest named Father Regereau described the capture of Khmer prisoners by Siamese troops:
“The manner in which the Siamese make war is to seize all of the property that they encounter, to destroy and set fire to all of the places through which they pass, to take prisoners and slaves, ordinarily killing the men and seizing the women and children…If during the journey, they cannot march further, they strike them, they maltreat them, they kill them, insensitive to their weeping and moaning, without pity they massacre the little children in sight of their mothers.”

[1] The same kind of experience that myself and millions of Khmer experienced in 1975 and again in 1979. Could it be that history repeats itself?