5

RECONSTRUCTING THE
CAMBODIAN POLITY

Buddhism, kingship and the
quest for legitimacy

Peter Gyallay-Pap

Cambodians have since World War II endured an array of short-lived
regimes unmatched by any Asian country in number and intensity.1 The
most recent attempt to start anew, with the second post-war Kingdom of
Cambodia, was carried out with massive United Nations intervention in the
early 1990s as Cambodia became the only Asian party-state to shed its
communist mantle following similar reversals in Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union. Comparable political reconstruction challenges were
faced following the overthrow of the millenarian Khmer Rouge regime by
the Vietnamese army in early 1979 (People’s Republic of Kampuchea); the
fall of the pro-American republican regime in 1975 (Democratic Kampuchea);
a coup d’état followed by the deposition of the monarchy in 1970 (Khmer
Republic); an authoritarian monarchy (first post-war Kingdom of Cambodia
– revised version) two years after gaining independence from indirect French
rule in 1953; and an interregnum of French-sponsored parliamentarism after
1945 (first post-war Kingdom of Cambodia). One could go further and
mention the tumultuous changes during World War II that affected all of
Southeast Asia; the strains of Cambodia’s accommodation with colonial
France, preceded in turn by the interregnum of King Ang Duang’s rule in
1847–60, when Cambodia regained its sovereignty after centuries of unstable
rule marked by internecine struggles linked to territorial encroachments by
neighbouring Siam and Vietnam. Political stability has not been a hallmark
of Cambodian history, modern or pre-modern, but the post-World War II
attempts to establish a modern, or post-traditional, polity, as its victims
especially in the 1970s bear witness, have been especially tragic.

My main task in this essay is to explore why Cambodia has not evolved
into the modern, democratic nation-state that its new elites, including the
young King Sihanouk, aspired to after the war. What is it about Cambodia’s political culture that has impeded development towards a goal to which
post-war leaders, whether of the left or right, have given and continue to give
so much lip-service? For all these new regimes foundered, most on the chrys-
alis of political legitimacy. Delving into this seemingly elusive task, however,
begs the question of how political science can gain a grasp of Cambodian
political culture and its vicissitudes with the vocabulary and tools available to
it. How can political science begin to make sense of the heavy cultural and
historical baggage that shapes questions of politics in post-traditional
Cambodia? For all post-war regimes sought, willy-nilly, to justify their exist-
ence and authority to rule through appeals, or reactions, to the cultural and
political cloth of both Theravada Buddhism, here understood as a localized
articulation of a wider Indian-derived religion and civilizational culture, and
the people-centred kingship that has been tied to it.

An entry point we can readily identify are three constants that have run
through the flux of post-Angkorian Cambodian political history, namely, the
Buddhist monarchy, the Theravada Sangha (community of monks), and the
village-based society of ethnic lowland Khmer, who to this day comprise
between 80 and 85 per cent of Cambodia’s population. These three elements
are again embedded, after the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s, as the official
symbols – ‘Nation’, ‘Religion’, ‘King’ – of the modern Cambodian polity
that emerged after World War II. In this essay, I use a deconstructed read-
ing of this triune symbolism, first articulated in the mainland Theravada
countries by the Sandhurst-educated Thai King Wachirawut (1910–25),
where the modern western concept of nationalism was conjoined with the
older indigenous symbols of kingship and Sangha to create a civic religion of
loyalty to the nation. This nationalist discourse only entered the Cambodian
vocabulary in the 1930s through a small coterie of western-educated and
-influenced individuals who, in claiming to speak for the Khmer people,
assumed the reigns of political power after World War II (cf. infra, n. 32). The
point I wish to make here is that, for political scientists in particular, any
discussion of political legitimacy in Cambodia that neglects to factor in these
constituent elements, of which the village community/societal structure is
fundamental in terms of its dependence on the existence of the other two
(Kalab 1976: 155), risks being irrelevant.

Political science, legitimacy, and Cambodia

youtube.com/watch?v=GCzvqeMXU5s

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Cambodia Politics…

April 2006 Earlier this year it appeared Cambodia was sliding into an

The problem of the extreme volatility of post-war Cambodian politics has as
a phenomenon received scant attention among political scientists. The
remarkable paucity of political science studies on Cambodia (the sub-field of
international relations being a minor exception), given the social and polit-
ical catastrophes that have beset the country, is due only in small part to
Cambodia having been sealed for decades from independent scholarly
inquiry.2 A more cogent reason is intractability. Political scientists have as a scholarly community simply lagged behind cultural anthropologists, social
and cultural historians, students of religion, and other social science scholars
in developing approaches conducive to understanding non-western societies
and conceptual systems on their own terms.3 Various neo-positivist method-
ologies, while subject to recent challenges in several areas of social science
discourse, still largely prevail in a political science as yet incapable of
acknowledging them as products of the collective self-understanding and
language of a western industrial bourgeoisie.

In this essay, I draw as a corrective on work done in contemporary
political theory, understood here as an activity of experientially grounded
inquiry, or as Sheldon Wolin once felicitously put it, of critical ‘reflection
grounded in experience’. Political theory as a vocation in political science,
whose most radical exemplar may be Eric Voegelin (1901–1985), is not empty
conjecturing or opining about how human beings organize themselves in
society but is, rather, a hermeneutical or noetic ‘attempt at formulating the
meaning of (a society’s) existence by explicating the content of a definite
class of experiences (and whose) argument is not arbitrary but derives its
validity from the aggregate of experiences to which it must permanently refer
for empirical control’ (Voegelin 1952: 64). One attribute of such inquiry is
that it does not subordinate theoretical relevance to method, where discip-
lines are organized around certain a priori principles rather than the content-
area being investigated. While this doesn’t mean rejecting the systematic
results that studies based on a priori epistemologies produce, one must be
aware of their limitations. For political science, it means going beyond the
(neo-Kantian) ‘phenomenalist interpretation of politics in terms of calculative
reason, rational action, contract, and consent’ (Cooper 1999: 166). A more
inclusive theory of politics requires ‘an examination and analysis of the full
breath of the realms of being in which human beings participate’ (ibid.: 7).
For example, in place of a positivist theory of the state based on an aprioris-
tic concept stipulating juridical content, invariably in the form of western
constitutionalism, a more adequate theory of the state is one whose ‘system-
atic center is located . . . in the fundamental human experiences that give rise
to the phenomenon of the state’ (Voegelin 2001: 5).

As a counterpoint to phenomenalist rationality, critical political theory
entails exploring and analysing the natural conditions of the human being,
including experiences of non-rational modes of being and thought that are
responsible for human culture. It allows for a process of critically clarifying
modes of being as expressed symbolically in myth, ritual, stories, cultic
actions, sacred texts, language, and the like (Cooper 1999: 167). As an onto-
logical philosophical anthropology in the Schelerian sense (i.e. showing the
human person’s position in and towards the whole of being), it includes in its
ambit the religious or spiritual dimensions that had been separated out from
positivist social science. In this respect, concepts such a ‘motivating centre’,
‘ordering spirit’, or form or foundation are more critical to understanding political society than any isolated examination of doctrines such as sover-
eignty, contract theory, or, for that matter, legitimacy.4 Moreover, such a
philosophical anthropology integrates various modes of human experience
rather than splitting them into such familiar dichotomies as culture and
nature, mind and matter, heredity and environment, spiritual and secular,
religious and political, subjective and objective (Cooper 1999: 170).5 Central
for the validity of this approach is expanding the range of evidence beyond
the self-understanding of western society. Voegelin built on Weber in insist-
ing on the importance of mastering non-western sources and acquiring a
wider-ranging comparative knowledge. For how else can we appreciate
France’s projection of enlightened reason in the eighteenth-century context
into a legitimizing source for her mission civilisatrice in Indo-China as
amounting to the imposition of ‘reason’ on other people whether they were
convinced of its reasonableness or not (ibid.: 347)?

A starting point for most discussions on legitimacy in western political
discourse has been Weber’s classification of three alternative claims –
rational-legal authority, traditional authority, and charismatic authority –
where the former ineluctably trumps the other claims on grounds that the
conventionalization of social life, itself a product of the disenchantment of
the world, requires the impersonal and rational procedures of a bureaucratic,
territorial state (cf. Connelly 1984: 8f.). Political scientists and others have
accordingly charted the progress of charismatic authority becoming routin-
ized into traditional authority which, in turn, under the impact of western
science and secularism, gives way to rational-legal authority, implicitly
accepted as the most differentiated, advanced form of legitimacy (Schaar
1984: 104–105).6 In his New Science of Politics, a volume of lectures devoted
to the question of representation, Voegelin (1952) posits alternative classes
of differentiation where the question of representation may be linked to that
of legitimacy. He begins by distinguishing between elemental and existential
representation. The former refers to the internal organization or formal
structures of a political society, such as a written constitution, which corres-
ponds to Weber’s notion of rational-legal authority. The problem with elem-
ental representation is its confinement to an external description of the
representation of political society, avoiding if not ignoring the manifestation
of human being in political institutions. Existential representation addresses
this problem by dealing with the relation of the power-state to the com-
munity substance, or society. A human society here is not merely an external
observable fact to be studied and treated like natural phenomena but, rather,
a ‘cosmion of meaning’ that is illuminated from within by its own self-
interpretation through which it is able to articulate itself for action in history.
Such social articulations are the existentially overriding problem from which
an understanding can emerge of the conditions under which representative
institutions develop. We can arrive at an understanding of a society by
critically clarifying the symbols, which are independent of social or political science, through which a given society interprets the meaning of its existence.
A key criterion for legitimate political order is one where this social articula-
tion is embodied in the form of a state through its institutions, irrespective of
where a society may be on Weber’s developmental time-line.

Voegelin does not stop here but distinguishes another level of representa-
tion. His third level of differentiation raises the notion of political society as
also being a representative of something beyond itself, namely of a trans-
cendent or cosmological truth. Until the advent of the modern secular
nation-state, political societies, including those in Asia, were organized as
empires that understood themselves as representatives of such truths. Cos-
mological representation is the self-understanding of society as the represen-
tative of a cosmic order through the mediation of a ruler king. For Southeast
Asia, cultural anthropologists (e.g. Heine-Geldern, Tambiah) and historians
(e.g. Coedès, Mus) were independently confirming Voegelin’s more general
finding that ‘one uniformly finds the order of the empire interpreted as
representative of cosmic order in the medium of human society. The empire
is a cosmic analogue, a little world reflecting the order of (the cosmos)’
(ibid: 54).

This imperial symbolism is not confined to political societies representing
the truth of a transcendent or cosmic order. Voegelin points out that Marxist
states had a similar structure, merely replacing the truth of cosmic or trans-
cendent order with the truth of a self-willed, historically immanent order in
the form of an ideological second-reality construction where nature, society,
and politics are entirely de-divinized. Liberal-national symbolisms with their
inherent imperial ambitions (the primacy of the impersonal market and the
ethnic principle) are another if more attenuated example of an historically
imagined, immanent order (cf. Anderson 1983). I raise but leave open the
question of whether all immanentist political constructions lack legitimacy.
Marxist-Leninist regimes, whose power emanated from the people in name
only while rejecting a priori any authority beyond itself, certainly suffered in
this regard from a legitimacy problem. More importantly, my argument in
this essay is that the notion of a political society in the existential (including
in the differentiated cosmological truth) sense has in the case of Cambodia
not been superseded except in outward form by the elemental representation
of the modern western state model adopted after 1945. To help make this
case requires a digression for a political culture, the Cambodian, where the
past is a more of a foundation for the present than we may choose to think.

‘Allotropism’ as a condition of post-traditional
Cambodian politics

After some one hundred and fifty years of exposure to and, since World
War II, direct elite engagement with modernity, Cambodia, along with other
non-western societies in greater or lesser degrees, exists as a political society in what may be described as ‘allotropic’ form, that is, having a variety of new
features or physical properties though essentially unchanged in form or sub-
stance.7 Etymologically, ‘allotropic’ comes from the Greek allotropos, or
form in another manner, and allotropy, a term used in chemistry, denotes a
variation of physical properties without change of substance. I use the term
to describe a non-western political system whose leaders have knowingly,
unwittingly, or ineluctably appropriated western cultural materials as a
means of legitimizing its external existence as a modern nation-state while its
body politic remains more or less unchanged.

I choose the descriptor allotropic as an alternative to syncretistic, a term
often used to describe Southeast Asia’s belief system and social order. Syn-
cretism refers to mixing and blending various conceptual systems on a basis
of tenets that are considered common to all, an attempt at sinking differences
to effect union between such systems. But the term has not been helpful in
understanding Southeast Asian societies from a Southeast Asian point of
view and reveals little about the social realities of a particular culture or life-
world (Lebenswelt). A better tool for clarifying how indigenous, or local,
cultures in Southeast Asia responded to foreign cultural materials has been
Wolters’ (1982) localization concept.8 In adopting this conceptual tool for his
anthropological work in Southeast Asia, Mulder (1996: 18) describes how, in
the localization process, ‘foreign elements have to find a local root, a native
stem onto which they can be grafted. It is then through the infusion of native
sap that they can blossom and fruit. If they do not interact in this way, the
foreign ideas and influences may remain peripheral to the culture.’ While
Cambodia’s political system has in fits and starts, since World War II in
particular, assumed the trappings of an imported secular liberal democracy,
not to mention the immanentizations of communism (also western-derived)
in the 1970s and 1980s, these foreign elements, unlike the earlier Indic or even
Chinese materials, have arguably yet to find a local root for a successful graft.

How, then, can political science gain at least a tentative grasp on Cambodian
political culture in terms of a Cambodian self-understanding of its social
and political existence?

Specialists are familiar with formulations of Indic statecraft in the classical
states of Southeast Asia in general and the Angkorian empire in particular,
as well as the Theravada Buddhist polities that followed on the mainland.9
The classical political system was organized in a mandala form of concentric
circles around an axis mundi represented by Mount Meru, the cosmic moun-
tain around which sun, moon, and stars evolve, and which served as the
magic centre of the empire.10 As a rule, the royal palace occupying the centre
of the realm is identified with Mount Meru, where the king, court, and
government enact cosmic roles governing the four parts of the kingdom
corresponding to the four cardinal points.11 The Angkorian cosmic state was
intimately bound up with the idea of divine or (more precisely) semi-divine
kingship and in its dominant Brahmanic form, the so-called god-king (devara ̄ja) was considered an incarnation of a god, usually S ́iva, or a des-
cendant from a god or both.12 In the Mahayana Buddhist conception, it was
the Bodhisattva Lokes ́vara, or the ‘Lord of the Universe’, that inhabited
the central mountain from which the empire extended to the horizons of its
experience. The theory of divine incarnation or, more accurately, sanction
served to justify the legitimacy of the ruler king.

Compared to the work of more than three generations of (mainly French)
Indologists, less work has been done on the subsequent Theravada Buddhist
conceptions of power, authority, and political rule in mainland Southeast
Asia, which is of more direct interest to us. We know that much of Brahmanic
cosmology was carried over and absorbed into the new faith and that
Buddhist concepts were interpolated from Hindu concepts of kingship. But in
a formal sense, as Theravada Buddhism supplanted the Hindu-Mahayana
Buddhist belief system between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, it
rejected the Angkorian and pre-Angkorian theory of divine sanction as
justification for rule and replaced it with the doctrine of kamma and religious
merit. As a human being who through exemplary behaviour merited the right
to rule, the Theravada ruler king was seen as the best person to uphold the
Buddhist teachings and law through the practice of the ten royal virtues,
dasara ̄jadhamma, enumerated in the Pali canon. What is less sufficiently
recognized or explored in the literature is the soteriological aspect of the new
faith in terms of its social and political impact. If the Hindu-Mahayana
Buddhist symbolisms were court-centred and did not penetrate in palpable
ways to the village level, Theravada Buddhism as a religion of the people
extended the goals of the ‘state’ by providing for the redemption of human-
ity. It sought to transcend the inequality of an attenuated caste-based system
by evoking the concept of a quasi-egalitarian ‘community’ in the symbol of
the Sangha. It was in this sense revolutionary, arguably setting loose a social
transformation in mainland Southeast Asia that added a grassroots vigour
to the political structures it inherited, a vigour that, as Thion (1988: 3)
claims, has extended into our time (cf. Benda 1969; Bechert 1967: 223–4;
Leclère 1974 [1914]: ch. 9).13 In the Theravada Buddhist king, birth was
replaced by the virtue of the dhamma, the law of nature to which the ruler
was also subject. The post-Angkorian king was no longer a devara ̄ja, but
righteous ruler, or dhammara ̄ja, a moral human being who, ruling in a
personal way, was considered a father to his people, assuring their happiness
by respecting the Buddhist laws (Gour 1965: 23). In the eyes of the common
people to whom this new faith appeared to have a particular appeal, a king
who did not adhere to the dasara ̄jadhamma was considered unworthy to rule
and would lead his kingdom to ruin.

This political conception was not stripped of its older cosmological moor-
ings, but derived from the mythological Buddhist and possibly pre-Aryan
Indian cosmological theory of the cakkavattin, or the wheel-turning, world-
pacifying universal monarch. The dhamma, or law of nature, was a universal doctrine symbolized by the sacred wheel, or cakka. In Buddhist cosmology,
the cakkavattin, the legendary temporal ruler counterpart of the Buddha,
was a wheel-turning cosmocrator who created the just society based on and
by embodying the ten royal virtues. Pali canonical texts refer to the relation-
ship between the Buddha and cakkavattin as the ‘two wheels of the Dhamma’
(cf. Reynolds 1972). The Theravada tradition thus constructed ‘kingship in
the image of the Buddha and Buddhahood in the image of the king with
power as the key denominator’ (Swearer 1995: 92).

This source of political authority in Theravada societies derived not only
from the cakkvatti ideal, but also very likely from the Maha ̄sammata,
or ‘Great Elect’ principle prescribing election of a ruler king through a
consensus of people calling for order in an otherwise theft-ridden (lawless)
society. This principle, as put forward in the Aggañña Sutta, appears to
postulate a Buddhist social contract theory of the origins of kingship and
political society that is deserving further attention by social and political
researchers (Tambiah 1976: 483; cf. Collins S. 1998: 448–451). It is plausible
that the Theravada monks who came to inhabit the village-based cultures of
the Southeast Asian mainland between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries
adopted this contract theory in view of the importance Theravada Buddhism
places on assemblies and traditions of monks electing their own abbots.
These ecclesial structures may in turn have shaped political and social struc-
tures of pre-colonial Cambodia, which we know were highly decentralized
and where village headmen in Cambodia, Thailand, Laos and other possibly
Theravada lands were elected consensually by the people. Such elections were
as a rule effected through the medium of socially prominent villagers and
elders associated with the monastery (wat), mimicking, as it were, the elec-
tion from below (and/or horizontally) of abbots in Theravada wats.15 Until
the French reforms, the royal capital in pre-colonial Cambodia had little
more than a strong symbolic hold on the people, exercising administrative
control only over an area a few days’ walk from the royal palace. Although
the king as judge meted out punishment, including for capital offences, ‘his
judicial and legislative powers were henceforth [i.e post-Angkor] far from
being absolute’ (Gour 1965: 25). The quasi-autonomous royal princes govern-
ing the provinces exercised more direct control over village life, responsible in
most cases for collecting the ten per cent tithe of their harvests to the king and
exacting corvée labour, a practice exercised with more frequency the closer one
lived to the centre. While these mandarins, no more or less than the Theravada
kings themselves, at times abused their authority, villagers nonetheless
enjoyed relative autonomy in regulating their lives after fulfilling their obliga-
tions to their king, who, prior to France’s introduction of private property in
the first decades of the twentieth century, ‘owned’ the land they tilled.

After the fourteenth century, the new Theravada Buddhist kings modelled
themselves after the cakkavattin as well as its first historical exemplar,
Emperor Asoka, the third-century  Mauryan ruler in India who converted to Buddhism (Gombrich 1994: 9; Tambiah 1976: 482). Asoka, repulsed by
the military carnage in which he took part that led to his conversion, not
only approximated the ideal of the cakkavattin in his just policies and
benevolent rule, but also established the social and political validity of the
Theravada tradition at the Third Buddhist Council held in his capital,
Pataliputta, around 247 . He thus became the first historical ruler to found
a state on Buddhist principles. In Suvannaphumi, or ‘golden peninsula’
as Southeast Asia was then known, some sixteen centuries later, the Buddhist
Sangha served as the titular if not de jure legitimizer of political authority; in
return, the king, many of whom bore Asoka, dhammara ̄ja, or paramara ̄ja
(highest/perfected ruler) in their royal title or name,16 was the duty-bound
protector (varman), patron, and when necessary, purifier or reformer of the
Sangha. A symbiotic relationship of separated but conjoined powers was
thereby created between these two institutions, with which villagers’ lives
were intertwined. This religio-political dimension bonded the society into a
single Buddhist political community ‘in the sense that the consciousness of
being a political collectivity (was) tied up with the possession and guardian-
ship of the religion under the aegis of a dharma-practicing Buddhist king’
(Tambiah 1982: 132).

Misuse of these Buddhist principles of rule and humane behaviour were
not few or far between, due in part to weak succession laws (royal succession
in Cambodia was not heredity but determined through election by a crown
council) that were invitations to both royal rivals and usurpers. Equally, if not
more important, the exercise of royal power in an imperfect world frequently
obliged the ruler, as a warrior and judge, to commit acts of violence
incompatible with the model of virtuous and ascetic life imposed on mem-
bers of the sangha.17 Given the tension between these two realms, monks not
infrequently served as moral checks, direct or discrete, on abusive royal
power. The symbiosis between the political power of the monarchy and
spiritual power of the Sangha was attenuated by a not unhealthy tension
between the two (Collins, S. 1998: 35, 415, 496).

We have thus far looked at the question of religious ‘power’ and political
authority from the perspective of the higher, scripture-based religious tradi-
tions imported from India into the life-world of pre-modern Cambodia. We
can thus far agree in this context with Steven Collins (1998: 31) of the use-
fulness in seeing ‘both “politics” and “religion” . . . as complementary and
overlapping varieties of civilizational articulation, spread in the (largely)
unchanging prestige language of Pali, structuring the time-space continuum
in which human life was both lived materially and construed in authoritative
traditions of representation.’ Both the conception of the cosmic role of king-
ship in Southeast Asia and Voegelin’s more general view of cosmological
empires are also confined to historical civilizational structures tied to the
higher ‘book’ religions. To this must be included the ‘something else’ alluded
to by Wolters (cf. supra, n.8), namely the dimension of the indigenous folk base that not only represents a pre-existing example of cosmological struc-
tures of consciousness, but also the local stem, as it were, onto which foreign
materials cum civilizational structures are grafted. This realm, of both local
(indigenous) and localized (indigenized) supernaturalism, is the world of
magic forces and spirits which, while not connected with statecraft in the
imperial sense, are nonetheless expressions of sacred power that to a large
degree remain embedded in the consciousness of Khmer and neighboring
peoples to form an important part of what we call a society’s political cul-
ture. Mulder (1996: 21–24) describes the most fundamental religious practice
in Southeast Asia as a relationship with power that ‘is located in the
nature/supernature in which human life is embedded’ (p. 21). In its indigen-
ous form, it is concerned primarily with individual potency, protective bless-
ing, and protection from danger and misfortune. At the same time, localized
supernaturalism has been grafted to this indigenous tradition through
appropriation of ancient Brahmanic (Vedic) and Tantric cosmological
elements.18 Whether these cosmological structures of consciouness, local or
localized, are concentrated or manifested in (Brahamanic) deities, saints,
guardian spirits, the recently deceased, or potent objects, they remain a part
of the human situation and everyday life that constitutes ‘religion’ in
Cambodia and the neighbouring Theravada lands. How this manifests itself
politically has been expressed in what Mulder, focusing on Thailand (Siam),
ascribes to the ‘Thai-ification’ of religion and the ‘Thai-ification’ of Indic
thinking about statecraft. He states that the tension between Theravada
Buddhism and the so-called animistic practices in Thailand

was resolved by appropriating those elements of the Buddhist doc-
trine that are compatible with animistic thinking and basic human
experience. As a result, the institutional and ritual expression of
Thai religion appear to be very Buddhistic indeed, but its character-
istic mentality is not so much interest in their Theravada message of
moral self-reliance as in auspiciousness, worldly continuity, and the
manipulation of saksit (supernatural ‘sacred’) power.

(ibid.: 5)

As a consequence, Buddha images become seats of such power and the
practice of merit-making becomes what Charles Taylor (2004: 56) calls acts
of ‘human flourishing’, the invoking or placating of divinities and powers for
prosperity, health, long life, and fertility, or, inversely, protection from dis-
ease, dearth, sterility, and premature death – not to mention the invoking of
propitiatory spirits to help deflect anger, hostility, or jealousy. May Ebihara
(1966: 190), the first American to conduct anthropological fieldwork in
Cambodia (in 1959–60), drew a similar distinction in stating that ‘while
Buddhism (could) explain the more transcendental questions such as one’s
general existence in this life and the next, the folk religion (gave) reasons for and means of coping with or warding off the more immediate and inci-
dental, yet nonetheless pressing, problems and fortunes of one’s present
existence.’ If the highly demanding life of the ascetic virtuosu as the para-
digmatic Buddhist life was a calling for the few, respect for and/or fear of
spirit world entities was ‘virtually universal among the villagers . . .’ (ibid.).

The political significance of what modern political scientists and commen-
tators (not to mention Buddhist literalists) have described and often dismissed
or ignored as local ‘superstitions’ is a field that remains open for further
study and interpretation. Mulder (1996: 20), for one, claims that the powerful
indigenous saksit represents the core element, or cosmic energy, that fuses
and articulates ‘the great traditions of Theravada Buddhism and Indic the-
ory of state with the ordinary practice of life and the mentality that animates
it’. He points to this powerful yet morally exemplary core as physically repre-
sented in the royal palace cum temple complex in Bangkok. In a similar vein,
Tambiah (1976: 484–85) argues that Buddhist concepts such as merit and
kamma and magical concepts of power do not exist as separate, discrete
entities, but, rather, ‘comprise a set or domain related according to mutuality,
hierarchy, and tension. . . . . Thus instruments such as amulets and verbal
formulas . . . are not necessarily seen as working in defiance of the laws of
merit-demerit and of karma but within their limits and “with the grain” of
merit . . .’ This integration of collective cosmic rituals produced a ‘theatre’
state where the king was a focal point in ‘the building of conspicuous public
works whose utility lay at least partially in their being architectural embodi-
ments of the collective aspirations and fantasies of heavenly grandeur . . .
(thereby) providing the masses with an awe-inspiring vision of cosmic mani-
festation on earth as well as providing the rulers with an ideal paradigm to
follow in their actions’ (ibid.: 487).

What we may draw from the above is that moral-cosmological ordering
principles, made transparent through an array of beliefs, myths, and symbols
through which the people ritually participated, were the in-forming signa-
tures, or ‘spiritual form’, of pre-modern Cambodian political society. This
home-grown conception not only did not abruptly end in 1945 but, if chal-
lenged and transformed, is still with us as a major factor in the equation of
what constitutes Cambodian political culture. As things go, recent scholar-
ship has only begun the task of an empathetic clarification of the practice of
Theravada Buddhism as a complex moral-cosmological conceptual system,
where a close fit exists between political rule, the (cosmological) structure of
being, and the ethical norms that shape and govern behaviour (Hobart and
Taylor 1986: Introduction, cf. Becker and Yenogoyan 1979: Foreword).

Representation and legitimacy in modern Cambodia

This integrated, socially embedded political universe began to fray under the
weight of the ninety-year French protectorate, during which time the cultural seeds for a modern nation-state were planted by a handful of Khmers
equipped with western secular educations (Népote 1979; cf. Edwards 1999,
2004a). But France’s colonial presence in Cambodia as well as Laos caused,
in the end, only light structural damage on the traditional culture compared
to Vietnam, Cochin-China in particular, where modernizing measures were
introduced with more vigor.20 For the first forty years of the protectorate,
until the end of King Norodom’s reign in 1904, French reforms remained
largely on paper, passively resisted by the monarchy, Sangha, and villagers.
The separateness of existence between ruler and ruled, a feature common to
traditional Southeast Asia, nonetheless belied the totality, or ‘single, unified
world’ (Osborne 1997: 52) inhabited alike by kings, courtiers, monks, mer-
chants, peasants, fishermen, and petty traders. The relative calm in Cambodia
was interrupted only by a two-year open rebellion against centralization
measures in the mid-1880s led by the provincial governor-princes. The clash
of ontological versus deontological (viz., immanentist) political cultures, as
described in a recent Southeast Asian social history text (Steinberg 1987:
217), which may well apply to King Norodom’s reign, appeared unbridgeable
inasmuch as: the main function of the [Theravada] ruler was to be, symbolizing in
his person an agreed-on social order, a cultural ideal, and a state of
harmony with the cosmos. The new colonial . . . governments existed
primarily to do, providing themselves with a permanently crowded
agenda of specific tasks to accomplish. They felt, by older Southeast
Asian standards, a peculiar need [moral obligation] to tidy up casual
and irregular old customs, to bring uniformity to the numerous
small, local societies in their jurisdictions, to clear paths for economic
‘progress,’ to organize, reform, and control.

The French accomplished more with Norodom’s successors, kings Sisowath
(1904–1927) and Monivong (1927–41), but not merely because they were
more pliant. After World War I, having recognized the deceptive strength and
relative unmalleability of the political culture, France opted to de-emphasize
her assimilationist policies in favor of working more with and through the
indigenous institutions representing the traditional culture. She sought in
fact to strengthen these institutions as a means through which to effect
reform, thus opening a fissure to allotropism. Major French reforms included
the privatization of land and the establishment of a new administrative unit
in the khum (sub-district) that expanded the colonial state’s taxing authority
and administrative reach to the grassroots level.22 Among more culturally
sensitive reforms was the upgrading, rather than the supplanting, of Cam-
bodia’s wat-based primary education system.23 During the period, political
society as represented by the two wheels of the dhamma, while subjected
to bureaucratic-rationalization pressures, remained largely intact as most Khmer elites evinced little interest in entering this new world. The French
were obliged through World War II to depend mainly on Vietnamese to
staff the middle and lower echelons ostate administration. Nonetheless,
under the separate influences of the École française d’Extrême Orient and
the Thommayut reform sect of Theravada Buddhism from Siam initiated by
King Mongkut IV, the Sangha hierarchy bifurcated into modernist (samay)
and traditionalist (boran) wings. The former, small though influential, grad-
ually assumed authority with French support in urban centers (principally
Phnom Penh) and became committed to purging Buddhism of its mytho-
poeic ‘accretions’ in the name of a purer, more rational and scripturally
based Buddhism while also centralizing monastic administration (cf. Harris
2005: ch. 5).

The making of an allotropic political system also began to emerge with the
appearance of a small liberal-nationalist movement in which some monks
educated in the Higher School of Pali Studies, founded in 1922, played a
not insignificant role. The main leader of this movement, Son Ngoc Thanh,
was a French-trained lawyer who in the mid-1930s began to appropriate
Buddhism for a budding nationalist agenda through the agency of the Bud-
dhist Institute. The Institute was established on French initiative in 1930 as
an instrument designed in part to advance a more rational, print-based form
of Buddhism and in part to seal off Thai cultural-political influence in order
to strengthen loyalty to French Indo-China. When Thanh was implicated in
a monk-led nationalist demonstration against French rule in July 1942, his
main organ, the Nagaravatta newspaper, was suppressed and the Institute’s
program curtailed. Pro-Japanese during the war, Thanh fled to Tokyo from
where he helped form, with King Sihanouk, a Tokyo-backed royal govern-
ment in March 1945 that sought to end French colonial rule. By August,
while serving as foreign, then prime minister of this short-lived regime, he
had become a republican and was again implicated, this time in an abortive
insurrection against King Sihanouk. Captured and imprisoned in Saigon
by the British as the French were returning to re-impose their rule in
Indo-China, Thanh was to bob up and down in right-wing Cambodian polit-
ics through 1975.

If Siam’s modernizing elites, more copious and prudent, were able to
usher in western reforms over a period stretching several generations, Cam-
bodia’s shift from a traditional to allotropic polity was relatively abrupt and,
given the turmoil that has accompanied the process, remains unsettled. Since
the political upheavals of the World War II years, Cambodia remains in
search of an existentially representative political system capable of mediat-
ing, if not reconciling, a problematic power structure with a conservative
political society. The remainder of this essay focuses on contrasting two
post-war regimes that provided at least a semblance of extended stability and
peace: the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community) between
1955 and 1970, and the post-communist regime functioning under a restored constitutional monarchy from 1993 to the present. My main interest here
lies in: a) how these allotropic polities sought (or are seeking) to strike a
‘compromise between old and new conceptions’ (Heine-Geldern 1956: 16),
while b) addressing the underlying tension between existential representation
and political authority.

Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community)

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Cambodia Sangkum Reastr Niyum of Sihanouk 1955 to 1969 - Khmer History PART 01…

While Thanh languished in a Saigon prison (until 1951), his followers were
among the first of a new bourgeois elite of intellectuals who, following the
restoration of French rule in 1945, embarked under French tutelage to estab-
lish a multiparty democracy in Cambodia. In a political culture that had not
previously known political parties, they joined forces with the newly formed
Democrat Party established by other Cambodian returnees from France led
initially by Prince Sisowath Yuthevong, a returnee from more than ten years
of study in France. The party’s base of support consisted of younger Khmer
intelligentsia assuming control of the state apparatus, the reform (samay)
wing of the main Mohanikay Buddhist sect, and supporters of the militant
nationalist Issarak movement. Its emblem was an elephant’s head with three
lotus flowers representing the monarchy, Buddhism, and the people, the
latter now re-imagined as embodying the values of a modern nation-state.
With French assistance and the endorsement of the young, equally reform-
minded King Sihanouk, this new elite initiated a reform process that quickly
tipped the Cambodian political balance in favor of a French-modeled par-
liamentary regime governed by a majority party or coalition. Following the
1946 election for a constituent Assembly, the victorious Democrat Party-led
government drafted a constitution the following year that, if closely modeled
on the 1946 constitution of the Fourth French Republic, attempted to blend
the new and the old by preserving elements of customary law and the mon-
archy. The constitution was anchored in the individual rights doctrine of
France’s Declaration of 1789, with law itself now defined as an expression of
the national will (Article 17). At the same time, Buddhism was proclaimed
the religion of the State (Article and Article 21 declared that ‘all powers
emanated from the King’, a departure even from the popular sovereignty
principle of the new constitutions of Laos (1947), Thailand (1949) and other
Southeast Asian states. The same article stipulated, however, that the king’s
powers were to be ‘exercised in the manner established by the present con-
stitution’, creating an ambiguous separation between essential power as
embodied in the king and the exercise of those powers. The constitution,
which was effectively a pact negotiated between the twenty-three-year-old
king and cautiously republican-minded representatives of the Democrat
Party, had the legislature become the defining power organ of the new regime
(Gour 1955: 49).

The equivocal nature of the new constitutional monarchy led, ineluctably, to a political standoff between a government run by an artificial political
grouping endowed with formal power but little or no legitimacy and a legit-
imate king vested with powers that were highly circumscribed. Parliamentary
government ran into an impasse when a workable association between the
republican-minded dominant party and a monarch who remained the pre-
ponderant personality in the political life of the country could not be
achieved (Preschez 1961: 129). The peasant electorate came to perceive the
urban-based parties as factions breaking up the unity of a political culture
and system where even the concept of a legitimate opposition, central to
the functioning of a parliamentary system, was absent. A former colonial
official cum political scientist who witnessed the unfolding tragicomedy
described the new political climate as ‘a proliferation of parties, factionalism,
usury among the elites, the paralysis of power (that) led everywhere, or
nearly so, to political disorder; social, ethnic, or linguistic conflicts; and
economic impotence or stagnation’ (Philippe Devilliers in his preface to
Preschez 1961: vii). The necessarily messy nature of democracy notwith-
standing, there was, to state the obvious, little ‘in Cambodia’s previous
experience to prepare it for the sudden introduction of an alien political
system’ (Osborne 1973: 45).

By 1955, the king, who was reaching his political maturity and seeking to
distance himself from French tutelage after having successfully negotiated
Cambodia’s formal independence, applied a systemic corrective. Spurred in
part by delegations of villagers petitioning him to assume direct rule and in
part by his undisputed popularity for having single-handedly ended colonial
rule, he exercised the royal mandate by supplanting the parliamentary sys-
tem. He created a form of semi-direct rule through a ‘community of national
union’, a supra-party royalist movement to which he appended the modern
word symbols ‘People’s Socialist Community’ (Sangkum Reastr Niyum).
Arguing the time had come for him to turn his attention from the independ-
ence struggle to the development of the country, and in view of the elections
mandated by the 1954 Geneva Accords, Sihanouk abruptly abdicated in
favour of his father in order to be able to carry out this mission. In entering the
political fray, he declared the time had come ‘to put an end to a situation in
which the powers of government were concentrated in the hands of a small
group of privileged, who one could in no way say represented the true inter-
ests of the people who they in fact exploited’ (quoted in Preschez 1961: 58).
Inured by the prevailing rhetoric of democracy, his goal was to transfer
power such that the people themselves could exercise it more directly. Candi-
dates to the national assembly would henceforth only be individuals from the
countryside with at least three years of unbroken residence in a sub-district
(khum), a requirement that proved difficult to realize. In practice, Sihanouk’s
rule was authoritarian (I use this term in a traditional, not pejorative sense)
and highly personalized, using his new-found freedom of action to establish,
unlike former monarchs, direct contacts with the people, whether in the provinces inaugurating schools and development projects or in the bi-annual
direct democracy national congresses held on the sacred Men Ground
adjacent to the royal palace.

The organization and goals of the Community as spelled out in its
statutes reveal how Sihanouk sought to re-create a traditional polity now
re-mythologized by conflating it with the language of national unity, pro-
gress, the fatherland, democratic socialism, and popular sovereignty. He was
able to adapt these new language symbols into restatements of the older
symbiotic relationship between the people, the Sangha, and the personal rule
of the monarch as the pinnacle of power:

Article 3:
[The Sangkum’s] organization is devoted to the formation of a
cadre of volunteers constituted for common action, disinter-
ested and with solidarity, in order to realize the Union of the
children of the Khmer Fatherland (Patrie), a union comprom-
ised by the proliferation of Political Parties, as well as of the
birth in Cambodia of a true egalitarian and Socialist Democracy,
and, finally, of the return of the Fatherland to its past grandeur.
The Community will seek to assure this return by giving a true
sense to the Trinity: Nation-Religion-King, this Trinity (being)
unable to survive and render service to the Fatherland without
its state institutions returning to search for its inspiration next
to the mass of the Little People and functioning under the real
control, direct and permanent, of the latter, and for the purpose
of their real and permanent interests. . . .

Article 4:

Our Community is the symbol of the aspirations of the Little
People, who are the Real People of Cambodia, our much-loved
Fatherland. . . .

Our Community defends the National Unity through the return
to the good traditions that shaped the grandeur of the Country
in its glorious past. These traditions are the Communion of the
People with their two natural Protectors: Religion and the
Throne.

Our Community means to promote the Reastr Niyum Regime
that must give to the True People – to the large mass of the
Little People that symbolizes the Khmer Nation – the Sover-
eignty, the National Powers to enable the direct, and simul-
taneous, exercise at the Khum, Khèt (provincial) and Pratés
(national) levels in conformity with the spirit of the Constitution
and the arrangements foreseen by the Project of Reforms bestowed and conceived for the People by Preah Bat Samdech
NORODOM SIHANOUK.

(Sihanouk 1955: 2–3; my translation from the French)

In a metaphor used on more than one occasion, Prince Sihanouk, who
acquired the unique royal title of Preah Upayuvareach (lord prince as former
king), evoked the twin pillars of the Buddhist monarchy and Sangha to sustain
and accord legitimacy to a new progressive regime that was simultaneously
an affirmation of a traditional polity:

Cambodia may be compared to a cart supported by two wheels, one
of which is the state and the other Buddhism. The former symbolizes
power and the latter religious morality. The two wheels must turn at
the same speed in order for the cart, i.e., Cambodia, to advance
smoothly on the path of peace and progress. . . .

(quoted in Zago 1975: 111)

The legitimizing principle, or glue, for the new national regime was a thinly
constructed ‘Buddhist socialism’. The term, socialism, was, clearly, conceived
not in Marxist, social democratic, or even Maoist terms, but according to the
egalitarian and democratic principles of Theravada Buddhism (Yang Sam
1987: 13f.; Bechert 1966: 183–84 and 1967: 250–58). Although both Premier
U Nu in Burma and President Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka were also propa-
gating ideas of Buddhist socialism from the mid-1950s, Sihanouk appeared
to be less influenced by these latter-day dhammara ̄jas than by pragmatic pol-
itics. The legitimizing role of the Sangha, which remained an autonomous, if
weakened, institution during the Sangkum (Bektimirova 2003),26 was
indispensable to achieving his goals. Conjoining political and religious
motives was both traditional and useful. He drew his principal rationale
for Buddhist socialism from the social welfare concerns of the heralded
Mahayana Buddhist King Jayavarman VII (1181–1220) and of Asoka, models
both of good conduct and national development. Through much of the
1960s, Buddhist socialism served both internal and external ends, the former
as a model for bringing about a just, prosperous, and peaceful society, the
later as a justification for his policy of neutrality, peaceful coexistence, and
the independence and territorial integrity of the country (Zago 1975: 111–12;
Harris 2005: 144f.).

It would be remiss to interpret Sihanouk’s appeals to tradition ‘as a purely
artificial device, . . . since the very frequency with which the appeals (were)
made suggests a view of history in which the realty of the past is perhaps
more apparent that is the case in contemporary western society’ (Osborne
1966: 6). That Sihanouk’s appeals to tradition were not purely instrumental-
ist in the machiavellian sense is suggested by his acts of piety and patronage
of Buddhism. Unlike his three predecessors, he ordained as a monk for short periods in 1947 and 1963. Although no King Ang Duang in terms of closely
working with and relying on the advice of the Sangha or an U Nu in terms of
conviction, he, among other acts of patronage, founded the first Buddhist
high school (lycée) for monks, named after his father King Suramarit, as well
as the Preah Sihanouk Raj Buddhist University, which was established in
1954 before the formal opening of any secular universities. He also revived
non-Buddhist rituals such as the ancient royal practice, enacted on the Men
Ground, of the ‘ploughing of the sacred furrow’, a fertility rite symbolizing
the defloration of virgin soil prior to the rainy season.

Prince Sihanouk succeeded through much of the Sangkum period in
absorbing and outmaneuvering the political parties, including through elec-
tions.28 His efforts at building a traditional consensus while simultaneously
embracing modernity, including and especially economic development,
brought about more than a decade of peace, relative political stability, and
economic growth. But these successes in fashioning one of the most original
allotropic polities in perhaps all of Asia began, after the mid-1960s, to be
overtaken by events in the region as well as events of Sihanouk’s own undo-
ing. Harem politics and dealing with political opponents in unseemly ways,
while contradicting Buddhist teachings, were, however, no exceptions to the
concubines and uses of violence that historically accompanied the rule of
warrior-class Southeast Asian Buddhist monarchs.29 The escalating Indo-
China war emboldened both the left- and right-wing Khmer nationalists who,
with their foreign backers, compromised Cambodia’s neutrality and drew the
country into the maelstrom of war and social upheaval.

Second Royal Government of Cambodia (1993 – present)

Within a week of his overthrow in March 1970, Prince Sihanouk appealed
through broadcasts from Beijing for the Khmer people to rise up against
the American-backed putchists by joining forces under a royal resistance
movement with the Khmer Rouge, who at the time numbered approximately
2,000 cadres and fighters.30 The coup and ensuing civil war, marked by a
North Vietnamese invasion countered by South Vietnamese and, for a spell,
American troops as the fledging republican regime itself began massive
mobilization,31 led to enormous confusion, anger, and unrest in the largely
apolitical and a-nationalistic peasant society.32 For the peasants, the absence
of a sovereign ruler meant ‘lack of effective communication between the
celestial powers and the world of men; without him you have complete
chaos’ (Ponchaud 1989: 176) and many of them, in the eastern half of the
country in particular, actively heeded their sovereign’s call. The Khmer
Rouge leaders, disguised mandarins manipulating royal symbolisms while
playing into the peasants’ pre-existing distrust of central government, ‘were
to ride the wave of this powerful rural opposition’ and mould the peasantry
into a fighting force that led to the ‘most savage onslaught ever launched against a peasantry’, in this case by the republican Lon Nol forces and its
sponsors (Thion 1993: 43).33 The scenario – a) of a ‘naïve’ peasantry loyal to
a sovereign who was protector of their faith and the legitimate upholder of a
social order in tune with cosmic order, b) manipulated by a band of French
educated millenarian ideologues, c) pitted against a mechanized army of
putative city dwellers (many them wearing amulets and talismans) who were
d) armed, trained, and manipulated by a naïvely ignorant western power –
could not be a more graphic metaphor of a political system that had lost its
existential bearings. In severing all ties with kingship, the republican regime
also ‘lost its chance, not only to unify the country, but to gain legitimacy,
even among the mass of urban dwellers’ (ibid.: 125).

The Khmer Rouge period epitomized, homologically, what Camus
expressed in his L’Homme revolté: that for totalitarian regimes, in their moral
nihilism, mass murder became the only sign or manifestation of the sacred
possible in a de-divined nature, society, and polity. In seeking to create a new
world that signified a moral inversion of Buddhism, Khmer Rouge cadres
claimed in their puritanism to have even surpassed the discipline of monks,
who, as members of a ‘parasitical’ class and the greatest single obstacle to
building their utopian society, were eliminated through forced disrobing
and/or death by execution, starvation, and disease.

Following Vietnam’s overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime in January
1979, wat, not state much less party, structures spontaneously re-emerged
to spearhead the recovery process. Wat committees led by surviving elders
worked informally to assume primary responsibility for the country’s rehabi-
litation and reconstruction efforts well through the 1980s (Löschmann 1991;
Yang Sam 1987: 86–87; personal communication from Yi Thon, who travelled
with PRK authorities to many provinces in 1979–80). As the Vietnamese-
installed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) in Phnom Penh gained
control of the countryside, its representatives joined and began to direct the
work, and resources, of the wat committees. The practice of Buddhism
remained tightly controlled by the party-state until the late 1980s, when the
PRK, obliged to address the legitimacy problem, began to court Buddhism.
Initially, the regime created holocaust monuments and sponsored Buddhist
rites at killing fields to evoke a cult of the dead associated with the restor-
ation of Buddhism. It also allowed and at times assisted local communities
with materials to rebuild their razed or damaged vihears (sacred sanctuaries)
(Keyes 1994: 66, cf. Yang Sam 1987: 79–82; Harris 2005: 190–200).

When the Vietnamese troops withdrew in 1989, triggering a peace process
sponsored by the international community, the legitimacy issue became a
more paramount concern. The PRK, renamed the interim State of Cambodia
(SOC), was faced with the need to placate the peasantry. In de-collectivization
measures short of giving up ownership of the land, the regime granted usu-
fruct rights to people cultivating land and transformed the collective labor
production solidarity groups (krom samaki) into more traditional mutual aid solidarity groups (Frings 1994: 51–52). Buddhism was restored as the state
religion; restrictions were lifted on both monk ordinations under the age of
fifty and the previously set limit of four monks per wat; and a detested wat
tax was rescinded. Accompanying these legal changes, the ruling party,
renamed the Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP) in anticipation of internation-
ally supervised elections, engaged in increasingly numerous ceremonial pub-
lic displays of courting Buddhism. Setting the pace in January 1989, Premier
Hun Sen, in an unprecedented gesture, prostrated himself before the head
monk at his native wat in Kampot province and used the occasion to apologize
for his government’s past “mistakes towards religion” (Hiebert 1989: 36).35
A month after the signing of the Paris peace accords in October 1991, the
CPP skilfully orchestrated Prince Sihanouk’s (viz., the ‘King’s’) triumphal
return to Cambodia, symbolizing the end of a second civil war between a
Sihanouk-led resistance coalition government backed by the West (and which
held Cambodia’s United Nations seat) and the Soviet and Vietnamese
backed PRK/SOC regime.

In spite of a sustained campaign of pre-election intimidation and violence
by supporters and agents of the SOC regime, the UN-sponsored 1993 elections
resulted in a surprisingly clear-cut CPP loss to the royalist party. Some
24,000 UN troops, police, and personnel (whose presence had its own set of
positive and negative social consequences) and an adroit UN radio campaign
assuring voters of a secret ballot helped guarantee the freest and fairest
election that Cambodia has known before or since. The UN Transitional
Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), ‘which committed itself to taking com-
plete control of a foreign state in order to create, ex nihilo, what amounted to
a new social contract for its citizens’ (Lizée 2000: 10), contented itself with
the illusion of a successful exercise in multi-party liberal democracy as called
for in the Paris agreements. What is perhaps closer to the truth, all but
a small fraction of the voters cast ballots not for any of the two dozen
contending parties than with their feet for a) peace and, not unrelated to this,
b) the return to power of their savior-king. The royalist FUNCINPEC36
party won the election not by dint being a political party preferred over
others based on rational voter calculations than by virtue of a poster and
ballot containing an image of the King’s son, party leader Prince Norodom
Ranariddh, which bore a striking resemblance to Sihanouk in his younger
Sangkum days.

During the peace negotiations and subsequent UNTAC election period,
neither the international community, represented by the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council, nor the four Cambodian political
factions (PRK/SOC regime on the one side and an uneasy resistance coali-
tion of royalists, Khmer Rouge, and the Khmer People’s National Liberation
Front led by former a prime minister, Son Sann, on the other)38 who signed
the Paris agreements envisaged a restored monarchy much less one that
would return Sihanouk to the throne. Sihanouk himself thought in terms of becoming a non-royal head of state unaffiliated with a party. In the election
aftermath, as if needing a reminder, a rare consensus materialized between
the Cambodian players, with Son Sann as president of the constituent
assembly playing a pivotal role, that ‘the constitution should provide for a
king’ (Brown and Zasloff 1999: 199). The ensuing Constitution of thirteen
chapters and 139 articles again prescribed a liberal democratic and pluralist
system with a sharper separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers
(Preamble, Article 1, Article 51) and, in a departure from earlier constitu-
tions, a strong emphasis on human rights (Chapter VI) drafted in western
legalese. It bore a resemblance to both the 1947 constitution and the views of
the Cambodian drafters’ American (and one French) advisors (cf. Brown
and Zasloff 1999: ch. 6). The powers and authority of the monarch were
diminished from the 1947 constitution, with power no longer emanating
from the king but the western popular sovereignty principle (Article 51); the
monarch’s principal role as head of state was to serve as ‘a symbol of unity’
and the continuity of the nation (Article .

The constitution notwithstanding, a pseudo-Sangkum authoritarian regime
has emerged since 1993 whose center of power lies with a self-perpetuating
PRK/SOC/CPP elite that at best tolerates political parties at the margins.
If the former East European and even Soviet communist parties were able
to relinquish control and become one among several contending political
parties, in the case of the Cambodia, the former communist party never
considered relinquishing control of the state apparatus as an option. When
the CPP balked at the 1993 elections results, Sihanouk brokered a face-saving
coalition government run by two prime ministers, Prince Ranariddh and
Hun Sen, which co-existed uneasily until 1997, when the latter ousted the
former in a violent coup. The CPP has used subsequent elections to gradually
seal (legitimize) its monopoly of power under the eyes of a Cambodia-
fatigued international community acquiescing to strongman rule as the price
of stability. This form of allotropism as an outcome should come as no
surprise for a political society that abhors the insecurity of a vacuum provoked
by factional politics, which is how partisanship continues to be perceived in
Cambodia. The problem, however, is that in spite of external recognition/
legitimacy accorded by a weary international community, the CPP-led gov-
ernment is beset with a lack of internal legitimacy that renders its authority
to rule synthetic at best. It commands a thin veneer of elemental and, more
importantly, only such existential representation as it is able to mine in
instrumentalist ways from the monarchy, Sangha, and people.

Wary nonetheless of its legitimacy problem, the regime has since 1998,
following elections whose campaign and immediate aftermath were protested
in the media and streets, resumed a policy of courting, appropriating, and
manipulating Buddhist and royal symbolisms while attempting to cut a
populist image.40 The official patronage of Buddhism, once a principal royal
prerogative, is a widespread practice of not only the CPP, which has tended to favor wats claiming cosmo-magical powers, but also other parties and
politicians. For example, Premier Hun Sen and his family have through
donations rebuilt virtually the entire complex of Wat Weang Chas (old
palace wat), a wat permeated with magical powers that was once part of
the royal palace complex in the ancient capital of Oudong. Located some
35 kilometres northwest of Phnom Penh, it has since the 1990s has become a
favoured pilgrimage site for Cambodians and foreign tourists. ‘By taking
over the old royal palace at Oudong, Hun Sen is defining himself as the
legitimate successor of the old Khmer kings of Oudong’ (Guthrie 2002: 68).
His patronage of the wat, which includes an associated Pali school, links him
to the last king to occupy Oudong, the revered Ang Duong, who initiated a
notable Buddhist revival from Oudong in the mid-nineteenth century. The
apparent thriving of the wat lends visible proof of Hun Sen’s good karma,
personal power, and merit.41 The power he and other politicians seek to
access through, in particular, wats with cosmo-magical histories is boramei
(Pali: pa ̄ram ̄ı), which as a Buddhist technical term means ‘mastery’, ‘suprem-
acy’, ‘highest’, or ‘perfection’, as in the formal royal titles adopted by
many Khmer and other Theravada kings (paramara ̄ja) (cf. supra, p. 79). The
indigenous meaning of the term, however, as Guthrie (2002: 70) points out,
also means ‘sacred force’, ‘magical power’, or ‘energy’, identical or akin to
the supernatural saksit in Siam/Thailand (and Laos) cited above.

The return of symbolic rituals associated with cosmo-magical conscious-
ness is not confined to modern politicians seeking to appropriate royal pre-
rogatives. Ritual aspects of the Khmer court, together with their officiants,
the Brahman court priests (baku), were restored with the monarchy in 1993
(de Bernon 1997). Among these include popular festivals associated with
ploughing of the sacred furrow rite, revived after twenty-four years in May
1994, and the annual pirogue regatta during a water festival held in November,
when current of the Tonlé Sap river reverses its flow, ‘thereby symbolically
liberating the waters of the Tonlé Sap and the nagas (serpents) whose benevo-
lence assures the proper irrigation of the rice fields’ (ibid. p. 52).42 The Hun Sen
regime, a majority of whose senior members reached their political maturity
during the 1970s and 1980s, has been obliged to sustain the monarchy in
return for the king’s bestowal of ‘neo-traditional legitimacy to the (ruling)
Cambodian People’s Party’ (Kershaw 2001: 98). The manner in which the
CPP has successfully courted and co-opted the royalist FUNCINPEC party
since the 1998 election has solidified its image as the sole purveyor of legit-
imate power in a kingdom that does not lightly suffer political division. King
Sihanouk, not known among his faults for having forsaken his sense of
independence and unpredictability as a royal personality, nonetheless
remained a thorn for an entrenched ruling élite preferring a monarch that
would reign at its pleasure. In October 2004, citing health reasons, Sihanouk
cleverly played his cards in forcing the government’s hand by again dramat-
ically abdicating, this time in favour of his son, Sihamoni. This manoeuvre preserved, at least in principle, the independence and symbolic power of the
monarchy as an (existentially representative) institution that serves, in effect,
as a people-oriented counterbalance to a discordant political class.

As for the relation of the people to Buddhism, we can note that its
revival, begun cautiously during the PRK regime, was a largely spontaneous
village-based and -driven phenomenon through much of the 1990s. Villagers
accorded priority to repairing or rebuilding their wats and, after 1988 in
particular, ordaining their sons.44 Not unlike instances after the early 1990s
of micro-credit recipients donating their loans to their wats (to the exasper-
ation of international donor agencies), recovery of their sacred integrative
ground, coupled with the practice of merit making, was considered more
important by villagers than material reconstruction and development needs.
In spite of and in response to the upheavals of the previous decades, trad-
itional patterns of social and religious interaction, if manifested in new ways
or forms, have gradually re-emerged in post-conflict Cambodia (Aschmoneit
1996; Ledgerwood 1996; Collins, W. 1998; Ebihara 2002; Marston and
Guthrie 2004).45 These patterns have since 1989 included reconstructions of
the cosmo-magical dimension of the Khmer understanding of the structure
of reality. It has, for example, rekindled the debate begun in the first decades
of the twentieth century between the modern (samay) challenge to the ancient
cosmological (boran) tradition within Cambodian Buddhism. This has gen-
erated a tendency especially among the governing elites to seek anointment,
or boramei power, from the boran tradition, however opaquely practised and
understood (Marston 2002; Harris 2005: 221–224).

The revival of Buddhism has not come without unexpected costs, of which
the most notable has been the politicization of the Sangha. The weakness
and subservience of the Sangha hierarchy to the power structure since 1979
period has been noted. If village-based Buddhism benefited from a relatively
free rein between 1989 and 1997, there is evidence since of the regime seeking
to restrain the relative autonomy of Buddhism at the village level. By the
mid-1990s, the traditional practice of head monks elected by the monks in
individual wats re-emerged,46 and the Sangha had begun to play an increas-
ingly ‘decisive role’ in the society (Bektimirova 2003: 3). But the years since
the 1997 coup have seen pressures on the wats to tow the political line, which
has led to tensions and splits within and among wats. The UN’s uninformed
insistence in 1993 on the right of monks to vote, in spite of muted opposition
voiced within the Sangha at the time (Harris 2005: 2004), invited a climate of
partisanship cum factionalism among monks within a wat or, in the presence
of strong head monks, between wats aligned with any of the two or three
largest parties. Given the large majority of monks favoring the opposition
parties (which since 1998 has increasingly become a moot point), the CPP,
whose velvet glove control of society through the state apparatus extends to
the village level, has exerted pressure directed not only at reigning in monks
but also, and more importantly, delivering villagers’ votes at election time.

Tactics have included informing villagers that a vote for an opposition party
is a vote against the Buddha or, in another thinly veiled threat, that an
omniscient Buddha knows for whom one’s ballot is cast. Another reported form
of intimidation disseminated through the wats were casual warnings that the
country would again revert to civil war if the CPP lost the election.47 Since
1998, the CPP has dexterously worked the electoral politics machine to its
advantage, winning all elections by increasingly wide margins. It has lost
only in the country’s one major urban centre, Phnom Penh, representing 8
or 9 per cent of the population, where a secret ballot seemed assured by a
greater sense of voter anonymity, voter sophistication, and the watchful
presence of the international community and media.

Some concluding thoughts

Analysing the relationship between Cambodian society and its governing
structure through the medium of the country’s political culture raises old
questions in a new, or different, light. Among them are: Who is to govern?;
What is representative government?; and What constitutes political authority?
In reviewing Clifford Geertz’s Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Cen-
tury Bali, political theorist Quentin Skinner noted that the western ‘inherited
tradition of political analysis may now be serving to inhibit rather than
clarify our understanding not merely of alien cultures but also of our own’
(quoted in Wolter 1982: 97). It is outside the scope of this essay to digress on
this issue beyond, briefly, picking up a thread in my introduction and making
reference to the phrase ‘structures of consciousness’ used above. In the last
mature decades of his work, Voegelin developed a theory of human con-
sciousness wherein so-called structures of consciousness, ‘concrete con-
sciousness of concrete persons’, are seen as integral parts of the structure of
reality, including political reality. In his meditative essay on ‘What is Political
Reality?’, Voegelin (2002: 341–412) maintained that concrete human beings
order their existence in accordance with their consciousness, where that which
is ordered is not merely their consciousness, but their entire existence in the
world. ‘Consciousness is the experience of participation, namely, of man’s
participation in the ground of being’ (ibid.: 373). A corollary of this reality
of participatory knowledge for a theory of politics requires addressing the
problem of political organization on the basis of the entire existence of
human beings in society (ibid: 398f.). The formal systems approach of mod-
ern political analysis denies in its reductionism the reality of what Victor
Turner and other students of ritual have demonstrated, namely, that the
sacrality of social life is what renders that life intelligible. As the mounting
evidence of anthropologists, archeologists, students of comparative religion,
and others enters the public domain, political analysts are invited to become
familiar with aspects of culture that have been invisible to them because of
their theoretical blinkers. Moreover, as things have turned out in the century since Weber, myth and religion, rendered meaningful or intelligible through
participatory ritual, are not, with the exception of parts of the West (Europe
in particular), dying epiphenomena of a coming secular age where political
legitimacy is tied to an impersonal, rational-bureaucratic state.

Already in the early 1950s, as Cambodia was achieving its independence
and embarking, with other post-colonial states whose elites were trained in
the metropoles, on the path of becoming a modern nation-state, Voegelin
cautioned a West and the international institutions through which it acted
in the world as unintentionally generating disorder ‘through its sincere but
naïve endeavor of curing the evils of the world by spreading representative
institutions in the elemental sense to areas where the existential conditions
for their functioning were not given’ (Voegelin 1952: 51).49 He stated that
such ‘provincialism, persistent in the face of its consequences, is in itself an
interesting problem for the scientist’ in so far as the ‘odd policies of western
democratic powers (are) symptomatic of a massive resistance to face reality,
deeply rooted in the sentiments and opinion of the broad masses of our
contemporary Western societies’ (ibid.). In the context of an anthropological
study on the problem of communication across diversity, Becker (1979: 1)
questioned why western science approached other conceptual systems as lack-
ing ‘some essential ingredient of our own’, seldom if ever using non-western
conceptual systems as ‘models of the way the world really is, as versions of
wisdom. Or as correctives of pathologies in our own system’. Comaroff (1994:
301) confirms that religion and ritual remain crucial in the life of so-called
modern nation-states in communities in Asia and elsewhere. ‘They urge us’,
she states, ‘to distrust disenchantment, to rethink the telos of development
that still informs the models of much mainstream social science.’

If as I have sought to demonstrate above the western liberal paradigm
continues to elude Cambodian culture and politics, it is not unreasonable to
ask at this juncture whether it is only a question of time, patience, and
persistence before a country like Cambodia can be brought, with the encour-
agement and assistance of an international community that continues to run
on European time, reason, and logic to accept the reasonableness of this
model of political organization.50 Is there no alternative but for so-called
traditional and post-traditional societies to pass through the ‘fiery brook’ of
modernity and embrace its dominant political form, liberal democracy? If
the answer remains no, we are left with the pleonast asking whether ‘it is
possible to establish the conditions for legitimate and sustainable national
governance through a period of benevolent foreign autocracy’ (Chesterman
2005: 1), whether by a single power or the international community. Henry
Kamm, who pessimistically concluded that Cambodia ‘is past helping itself’
(1998: 251), is not alone in advocating such an unimaginative western-centric
view.

If there is an alternative, one has to ask if it is possible for Cambodians to
construct a modern, or post-modern, polity that does justice to its political culture, where the institutions of governance have legitimacy with the people.
Heine-Geldern (1956: 16) rhetorically asked the impossible in the mid-1950s:
whether there was any possibility of indigenous moral-cosmological concep-
tions ‘becoming the basis of future constructive developments’. Practically,
he called for a better ‘compromise between old and new conceptions (where)
the outward expressions of the old ideas could easily be kept in tact and
gradually filled with new meaning without in the least impairing educational
and material progress’ (ibid.). Are there any international precedents?
Among the Eastern European countries since the collapse of communism,
only in Poland can we point to a Catholic communitas that is to a degree
represented in the governing structure; as such, the country has become a
thorn in a secular-liberal European Union in search of a moral compass
capable of listening to its grassroots. In North America, we find a stronger
example in the experience since the 1970s of tribes and first peoples rebuild-
ing institutions of their own design, frequently bypassing the conventional
treaty process established by the US government and Canada. While this
exercise in genuine nation-building and indigenous governance has a com-
mon key in a return to culture and tradition, and is not as a rule accom-
panied by a written constitution (but reliance on the institution of a council
of elders), individual native nations have been creatively dealing with the
process in ways unique to them.51 In Africa, we have the largely (non-
fundamentalist) Muslim country of Mali, which divested itself of a vaguely
Marxist-Leninist dictator in 1990. She has since developed a fledgling dem-
ocracy whose most striking feature, apart from discretely bypassing French
tutelage, ‘is its success in drawing [an unchauvinistic] intellectual and spirit-
ual sustenance from an epic past, and actively incorporating homegrown
elements, such as decentralization’ (Pringle 2006: 39).

These cursory examples suggest successful adaptations of the concept
of allotropism I have invoked to describe the constancy of indigenous cul-
tural underpinnings, or structures of consciousness, uneasily coexisting in
more or less artificial modern state structures. In the case of Cambodia,
Népote (1979: 784f.) held that a ‘harmonious complementarity’ between the
‘indigenous-traditional’ and ‘foreign-modern’ developed in the first half of
the twentieth century under, ironically, French protection. This ostensibly
healthy allotropism was broken in mid-century, he argues, as political society
bifurcated into modernizing national elites entrusted with power and a
powerless conservative populace buffeted and manipulated by, and ineffect-
ually resisting, change.52 The process that led to the two forms of post-war
allotropism discussed in the essay – the Sangkum (1955–1970) and CPP
(1993-present) periods – hints at a pattern. From 1) tumult (World War II/the
anti-colonial struggle and the Khmer Rouge period) to peace in the form of
2) liberal democracy directly or indirectly imposed by an outside power,
which is followed by 3) an authoritarian self-correction. The elemental
representation of 2, bereft of existential representation, was bound to fail and lead to 3. In both instances, the self-corrections were motivated by the
disintegrative effects of a perceived Cambodian factionalism masquerading
as a multiparty system unequipped to govern based on power-sharing
arrangements, including implied acceptance of the concept of legitimate
opposition, while also cut off or alienated in palpable ways from the basic
symbols of Cambodia’s political culture.

One difference from the immediate post-war period is that while multi-
party democracy had a chance to unfold in the late 1940s and early 1950s
before its replacement by the personal rule of the (abdicated) monarch, the
same process was stopped in its tracks when the CPP balked at the 1993
elections results and refused to cede power, regaining undisputed control
after the 1997 coup. A more critical difference is that in place of a perceived
legitimate monarch filling the political void in 1955, a reorganized post-
communist power elite lacking legitimate authority filled the same void in
1997. The legerdemain of the monarch in creating a quasi-traditional polity
wrapped in modern language symbols was replaced by the legerdemain of an
ex-communist strongman wrapping himself in legitimizing royal and religious
symbols to create, in this case, a new type of allotropic polity: a Sangkum
shorn of legitimacy wherein the monarchy, Sangha, and people have been
used less to buttress national ideology or development goals than power and
its perquisites for their own sake.

While criticized by his political opponents on the left and right and by
western observers for having quashed liberal democracy through the person-
alization of power, Prince Sihanouk’s version of Cambodian allotropism
nonetheless passed the test of existential representation more than the
marred parliamentary system it replaced and the regimes that have followed.
As such, the Sangkum as a model is deserving of further study by a political
science capable of coming to grips with the ‘severe disadvantages of a political
system that used western forms without the support of any political traditions
that could easily accommodate themselves to the practices and institutions
of the West’ (Osborne 1973: 114). Such an avenue of research could map
out, as in Kershaw’s (2001: 6) study of monarchy in Southeast Asia, the
dimensions of ‘synthetic institutional asset’ and ‘authentic traditional values’
where the latter is seen, as in this essay, both in terms of an ‘authentic
reality’ experienced by the people and a ‘doctrine’ manipulated by modern
elites for legitimizing purposes. I have tried to demostrate that allotropism as
a conceptual tool in the context of a political theory where symbols in theory
correspond to symbols of reality may be one framework through which the
problem of social and political order in Cambodia can be re-examined. Such
a project is likely to reveal that for an allotropism to be workable, a political
regime and its institutions be authentically invested with that quality of
‘givenness’ that Geertz associated with primordiality (in Keyes et al. 1994: 5).
In this context, the cultural gestalt of a so-called traditional polity may also
be explored, heuristically or otherwise, by a political science concerned with the problem of western (and westernizing) societies bereft of community in
the ontological sense, that is, of people participating in a system of meaning
informed by principles of order whose source lies outside intramundane
time. For individuals and communities will invariably continue to strive, pace
Max Weber, to enter that magic garden where the relation between the world
as it is culturally experienced and politically conceived actually coincides.

Notes

1. 1  In revising this essay, I wish to thank Ian Harris, Peter J. Optiz, and Frank E.
   Reynolds for their obliging and helpful comments.
   

2. 2  In a volume on ‘political legitimacy in Southeast Asia’ (Alagappa 1995), there was
   apparently no-one qualified or interested in covering Cambodia.
   

3. 3  For an excellent, culturally sensitive compendium of articles on social aspects of
   Buddhism and religion in Cambodia, written by humanities scholars who began
   specializing on Cambodia in the 1990s, see Marston and Guthrie 2004.
   

4. 4  In a similar vein, Geertz (2000: xii), as a critical cultural anthropologist, acknow-
   ledged a debt to Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘ “forms of life” ’ as ‘the complex of
   natural and cultural circumstances which are presupposed in . . . any particular
   understanding of the world . . .’
   

5. 5  Kapferer (1988) provides related insights on the usefulness of an ontological
   approach in his understanding of the cosmic logic of Sinhalese Buddhist myths,
   legends, and rites as an ontology explicating ‘the fundamental principles of a
   being in the world and the orientation of such a being toward the horizons of its
   experience’ (p. 79). Ontology here defined is not a ‘property of the psyche
   independent of history’, but a dynamic process ‘of the constitution of form or
   being-in-existence’ in time and space, a conception and approach that is neither
   essentialist or psychologistic (p. xix). I thank George Schöpflin for bringing this
   source to my attention, and Barry Cooper for having read the first two sections of
   this paper.
   

6. 6  Schaar (1984: 106) maintains that contemporary social science has even ‘failed to
   appreciate the precariousness of legitimate authority in the modern states because
   it is largely a product of the same phenomena it seeks to describe and therefore
   suffers the blindness of the eye examining itself’.
   

7. 7  I define ‘modernity’ in generally sceptical terms, with Taylor (2004: 1), as ‘that
   historically unprecedented amalgam of new practices and institutions (science,
   technology, industrial production, urbanization), of new ways of living (indi-
   vidualism, secularization, instrumental rationality); and new forms of malaise
   (alienation, meaninglessness, a sense of impending social dissolution).’
   

8. 8  He demonstrated, referring to the Angkorian and pre-Angkorian eras, how the
   influx of Indic culture (Brahmanism, Buddhism, Indian mores and customs)
   retreated into local cultural statements, fitting one way or another into new
   contexts by the ‘something else’ in the local cultures responsible for the localizing
   process. In architecture, the classic example of how Indic foreign materials were
   absorbed and retreated into local cultural statements are, of course, the striking
   temples of Angkor Wat.
   

9. 9  Those specialists are invited to skip this section of the paper (to p. 79) or correct
   shortcomings of my condensed interpretation.
   

10. 10  Although the cosmic city in its Angkorian architectural manifestation assumed
    the square form, the idea of the circular form of the Hindu and Buddhist
    cosmologies nonetheless holds (Heine-Geldern 1956: 4, n.3).

11. 11  In classical Cambodia, Heine-Geldern (1956: 10) points out that the temple and
    not royal place formed the centre of the capital, and thus the Mount Meru of city
    and empire. In Theravada Cambodia, the royal palace assumed this function
    (Népote 1990: 100–107).
    

12. 12  Both Kulke (1978), an Indologist relying on epigraphic evidence, and Pou (1998), a
    Khmerologist using a socio-linguistic approach to epigraphy, question earlier held
    assumptions by Coedès (1968) and others about the divine nature of Angkorian
    kings. They have demonstrated that the god (S ́iva) was lord of the universe/
    cosmos, sovereign over the king, who was lord of the earth, ‘each one responsible
    for the sphere he managed, in a perfect macro-microcosmic system, thus standing
    as the main pillars of a [Hindic] dharma-ruled world’ (Pou 1998: 2).
    

13. 13  Harris (2005: 26–28) urges caution in characterizing Theravada Buddhism as a
    grassroots movement ‘spread through a previously neglected rural environment’.
    

14. 14  Collins, S. (1998: 474), while not questioning the symbiosis between the monarchy
    and Sangha implied here, questions whether the wheels of the Buddha and cakka-
    vattin are parallel in that it ‘misses much of the tension and competition’ between
    the ‘ideological (sic) power’ of the monastic order and the ‘political-military
    power’ of the kings, whose rule was not infrequently accompanied by the use of
    force.
    

15. 15  For a mid-1950s description of such an informal village headman election in
    Cambodia, see Zadrozny (1955: 310–311). For the cakkavattin and Maha ̄sammata
    as sources of ‘mimetic empowerment’, see Swearer (1995: 72–91).
    

16. 16  See, passim, the Chroniques Royales du Cambodge, 3 vols, redacted and translaed
    by Mak Phoeun (1981 and 1984) and Khin Sok (1988) published by the École
    Française d’Extrême-Orient (Paris).
    

17. 17  For the moral ambiguity of a Buddhist ruler, enjoined to ‘renounce the world’, to
    either embrace an ethic of absolute values or adopt an ethics of reciprocity,
    ‘in which the assessment of violence is context-dependent and negotiable’, see
    Collins, S. (1998: 419–23) and passim, ch.6.
    

18. 18  cf. Bizot (1976: Introduction). The sources of healing power, for example, of
    traditional Khmer healers (kruu), who inhabit all villages and whose power lies
    outside the Buddhist wat, are drawn on the one hand from orthodox Buddhist
    doctrine and cosmology and, on the other, from older Brahmanic, Vedic (includ-
    ing Ayurvedic healing rituals) and Tantric influences merged into local folk
    customs (Eisenbruch 1992: 290, 309). Unlike western medical practice, traditional
    healers are not concerned solely with the patient or the patient’s ailment in
    isolation, but with the ritual space of the community and, by extension, the three
    worlds of humans, deities (above), and demons (below) that constitute the cosmo-
    logical structure of being: ‘The kruu makes no distinction between what has to do
    with the patient and the what has to do with the society. The ritual work of the
    kruu aims at restoring the relative order and harmony of these two axes’ (ibid.:
    312, cf. 289–90).
    

19. 19  In an earlier work, Tambiah (1970: 263) described the relationship of spirit cults to
    Buddhism as ‘not simple but complex, involving opposition, complementarity,
    linkage, and hierarchy.’ For a royal reconstruction of Buddhist, Brahmanic, and
    local supernatural rituals in the Khmer lunar calendar devised by the ‘renaissance’
    King Ang Duong (1847–60), see Yang (1990: 75–81); cp. Chandler (1983).
    

20. 20  Ironically, while republican France chose to retain the institutions of the
    monarchy and Sangha in Cambodia and Laos, the British imperial monarchy
    dealt fatal blows to the Buddhist kingships, while simultaneously endeavouring to
    disestablish Buddhism, in Burma and Sri Lanka.
    

21. 21  The sense of quiescence suggested here is belied by what Népote (1984: 89–91)
    refers to as administrative and other reforms undertaken taken by Khmer rulers from the late eighteenth century, with King Ang Eng, through the reign of King
    Monivong, principally in reaction to the Siamese and Vietnamese intrusions and
    the French occupation. These initiatives, which drew on a long pattern of earlier
    cultural exchanges within the region, were tantamount to a localized ‘modern
    redefinition of Cambodian society’ that served to prepare the country to deal with
    the modern (in the western sense) world. These dynastic reforms, including and
    especially those of King Ang Duang from 1847 to 1860 as well as King Norodom
    in the last twenty years of his reign, were enacted in the context of the old symbol-
    isms. Mention of King Norodom’s four requirements of traditional learning,
    Buddhist and non-Buddhist, for service in the court, as uttered upon rejecting a
    job applicant in 1895, is cited in Osborne (1969: 242, 345 n.1). Leclère’s lengthy
    turn-of-the-century account of Buddhism in Cambodia (1899a), based on informal
    field observations and interviews among learned Buddhist informants, is couched
    in Buddhist and non-Buddhist cosmological, including cosmogonic, language.
    Regarding Khmer cosmogony, see Bizot (1980) for an explication of a Buddhist
    origin myth and initiation rite. For the Brahmanic influence on Khmer administra-
    tive law, see Leclère 1899b. For a lucid commentary of Indic law and its animating
    idea, dharma, as diffused in Southeast Asia, see Geertz (1973: 195–207).
    

22. 22  Unlike in Vietnam (and post-1993 Cambodia), the introduction of private prop-
    erty into Cambodia did not lead to the creation of a rich landholding class
    (cf. Delvert: 1961: 488f.). Similarly, the introduction of the purely administrative
    khum did not become a frame of reference among the people that the more myth-
    ically-laden terms phum (village) and srok (country, district) retain to this day.
    

23. 23  By contrast, the French succeeded in eliminating Vietnam’s Confucian-based edu-
    cation system, especially in the southern provinces of Cochin-China, by the first
    decade of the twentieth century.
    

24. 24  Gour (1965: 65) states that ‘the political parties . . . did not represent more than a
    surface agitation, having no rapport whatsoever with the public opinion of the
    masses (who were very sensitive to insecurity). They did not reflect in anything the
    profound desires of the Khmer people with whom they were not in direct contact.’
    The savvy 1946 election strategy employed, in an instrumentalist sense, by the
    Democrat Party in the provinces was to recruit achars, influential lay elders presid-
    ing over the practical affairs of Buddhist wats, ‘whose election represented, on the
    part of the electors, more a traditional social and religious reaction than a real
    political choice consciously favoring the program of the Democrats’ (ibid.: n.2).
    

25. 25  The term men is a Khmer vernacular variant of ‘Meru’. The peoples’ congresses
    held on the Ground, which was also ritually used as the royal cremation site and
    for ploughing the sacred furrow (cf. infra, n. 27), were a ‘theatre’ of democratic
    political participation.
    

26. 26  In his pragmatic openness if not zeal to modernize, Sihanouk, perhaps also pres-
    sured by the new governing elite sensitive to international expectations, gradually
    stripped the Sangha of its control over primary education.
    

27. 27  Through the power of his royal anointing (apisek) of the Ground, where he places
    the earth in relation with the cosmos, the king derives legitimacy in the Khmer
    mentality from his power to give fertility to the soil (written communication by
    François Ponchaud).
    

28. 28  Heder (2002) claims that no election in Cambodia since 1947 had been lost by the
    party or power in control of the state apparatus. He states that the French, who
    still held the reins of administration in 1947 Cambodia, facilitated the Democrat
    Party’s victory (p. 2). That said, there was no need for Sihanouk to rig elections
    held during the Sangkum years.
    

29. 29  For accounts highlighting nefarious aspects of Sihanouk’s character and rule,
    cf. Chandler (1991) and Osborne (1994).
    

30. 30  Sihanouk maintains the relatively insignificant Khmer Rouge joined his royalist
    liberation movement, not vice-versa, before gaining the strength to co-opt it.
    

31. 31  The ousted monarchy had left a force of 34,000 marginally combat ready and
    equipped men, about one-half the number of registered monks and novices in
    1969. By mid-1972, there were 200,000 men in arms.
    

32. 32  Broad-based appeals to nationalism were ineffective as this new credo did not
    extend beyond the small intellectual urban class. ‘Chauvinistic appeals to the
    preservation of Khmer “race” or “blood”’, while launched by Sihanouk and fully
    exploited in the 1970s by coup leader Lon Nol and the Khmer Rouge leadership,
    ‘failed to transcend the educated class. The related manipulation of the image of
    the “hereditary foe,” the Vietnamese, also failed to produce spontaneous action or
    commitment’ (Thion 1993: 127).
    

33. 33  Serge Thion, a secondary school teacher in Cambodia in the late 1960s, was a
    Le Monde correspondent ‘embedded’ with the Khmer Rouge in 1972, the only
    western observer to have visited a Khmer Rouge zone and survived before their
    victory in 1975.
    

34. 34  For more on the Khmer Rouge ‘tendency to reconfigure and reemploy Buddhist
    symbolism and modes of thought’ (Harris 2005: 184), cf. ibid.: 181–89.
    

35. 35  Since 1989, the number of officially registered monks increased from some
    6,000–8,000 to more than 60,000 today. There were 65,000 monks and novices
    residing in 3,369 registered wats in 1969, when the population of Cambodia was
    approximately seven million. The current number of monks reside in just over
    4,000 wats in a country whose population has surpassed 14 million. Although the
    number of monks today represents a decline relative to the population, it
    attests, given the circumstances, to the ongoing vibrancy of Buddhism as a force in
    Cambodian society.
    

36. 36  A French acronym for Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendent,
    Neutre, Pacifique et Coopératif.
    

37. 37  On election day in Battambang’s Maung Russey district, I witnessed inside a large,
    earthen floor schoolroom serving as the polling place a portly yay (grandmother)
    squinting her eyes while turning a confusing election ballot paper, utter in a clear,
    disarmingly perplexed voice for all to hear, ‘Samdech niw ay nah?’ (where is the
    Lord Prince, that is, ‘King’ Sihanouk). That, for most Khmers, seemed to capture
    the election moment.
    

38. 38  The Khmer Rouge withdrew from the Paris peace process in 1992 to resume its
    struggle until running out of steam, including and especially through defections of
    leaders to the government, by 1998, the year Pol Pot died.
    

39. 39  Lao Mong (2002), taking issue with Sihanouk’s lame responses to pleas over the
    years to be a more active monarch, gives the prerogatives and powers of the king
    in the constitution a more muscular interpretation.
    

40. 40  For an account of post-election mass demonstrations, confined for the most
    part to Phnom Penh, led by monks and students that turned violent in August-
    September 1998, see Harris (2005: 216–19). Hun Sen the populist has been a
    regular feature in the Khmer media criticizing or haranguing the government
    and its corrupt ways (one source has described the regime as an ‘authoritarian
    kleptocracy’) in language that may not be entirely duplicitous.
    

41. 41  In 1971, a youthful Hun Sen joined the Khmer Rouge in response to America’s
    saturation bombing campaign, rising to the level of commander until his defection
    to Vietnam in 1977 and return behind Vietnamese forces in January 1979 (Kiernan
    1996: 370–71). He has ruled Cambodia since the early 1980s.
    

42. 42  On October 4, 2003, while watching the national television channel over steamed
    chicken and rice in a restaurant a few blocks from the royal palace, I witnessed in
    real time the king’s swearing in after a long political standoff of the new national assembly members. In a ritual known as bhı.k t.ık sampath (drinking the water
    of the oath), traceable to the reign of Su ̄ryavarman I (1002 to 1050 AD), all
    leading politicians including the premier, Hun Sen, attired in chaang kben ́ , a white
    jacket over a royal red silk kilt passed back between the legs and tied in the small
    of the back, one by one prostrated themselves before the king and then the two
    Buddhist supreme patriarchs before drinking a vial of lustral water sacralized and
    administered by the baku priests. Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong administered the
    loyalty oath (to the ‘nation’), which the responding parliamentarians chanted in
    unison. (Re the water oath, cf. Hansen 2004: 45–46)
    

43. 43  For years prior to this surprise move, the CPP had impeded Sihanouk’s proposal
    for enabling legislation governing the role of the Crown Council, the organ consti-
    tutionally responsible for electing a new king within seven days of the death of
    the king. The CPP, it was commonly known, held a majority of the votes on
    the Council, including the Buddhist Mohanikay order’s Supreme Patriarch
    (sanghareach), Tep Vong.
    

44. 44  Bektimirova (2003) reports that while the official number of monks in the mid-
    1980s was set at 6,000, there were nearly twice as many non-registered, or illegal,
    monks – approximately 11,000 – most presumably males under the legal age limit
    of fifty for ordination.
    

45. 45  William Collins, a cultural anthropologist who conducted field work with a team
    of Khmer researchers in Battambang and Siemreap provinces in 1996–97,
    reported on the distinction made by informants, principally those with ‘high
    levels of Buddhist learning’, between aanaa’cak (or roat amnaac), referring to
    ‘government power’, and putthea’cak, or ‘Buddha power’. The distinction is not
    equivalent to the western dichotomies of church and state or even sacred and
    profane, but expresses, rather, a tension between ‘an external force that tries to
    organize action and to enforce obedience to rules on the one hand, and an internal
    force that gives rise to conduct and promotes adherence to principles on the other
    hand’ (1998: 19–20).
    

46. 46  Personal communication from Ven. Yos Hut (2003).
    

47. 47  Apart from my limited footnotes there are no documented studies beyond patchy press and oral accounts of these practices; as such, the scope and intensity of
    systematic political intimidation of villagers through the wat structure since 1997
    remains plausible conjecture. While working with a dozen wat communities in
    two districts of Battambang province during 1992–93, in the run-up to the UN-
    sponsored elections, I saw no evidence of the government party or any political
    party setting up shop in a wat. By contrast, two days before the national commune
    elections in February 2002, I by chance encountered at Kandal province’s Tbeng
    commune, some forty kilometres southeast of Phnom Penh, a not inconspicuous
    CPP pre-election meeting in a wat. Officials had assembled at least twelve local
    authorities (along with four district policemen, one armed) in a building marked
    with a large CPP banner within a wat compound festooned with CPP banners,
    bunting, and other festive decorations. Except for a small number of children, no
    villagers or monks were within sight.
    

48. 48  If the myth of the modern state, a universal Idea that Hegel reified in end-of-
    history terms as the last word in political organization, has since the mid-twentieth
    century waned in the western consciousness, the corollary myth of a commercially
    grounded liberal pluralism, and its exportability, has not. In the wake of Ameri-
    ca’s recent Cold War victory, history, in the otherwise thoughtful neo-Hegelian
    terms of Fukuyama (1992), appeared to be reaching its final synthesis, and the
    Idea was ‘post-historical’ liberal democracy, the pluralist paradigm for state
    building.
    

49. 49  Referring to Southeast Asia, Heine-Geldern (1956: 16) stated that a) for the ‘vast mass of the common people, grown up in the old traditions, . . . the modern ideas
    of democracy and [elemental] representative institutions mean little or nothing,’
    and b), in what is now a prophetic statement for Cambodia, that ‘a sudden complete
    break of cultural traditions has almost always proved disastrous to national and
    individual ethics and to the whole spirit of the peoples affected.’
    

50. 50  Ponchaud (1990), a Catholic missionary in Cambodia since the 1960s equipped
    with a keen understanding of Khmer culture, offers an example of the below-the-
    radar durability, if recently shaken, of Cambodian culture. In a culture where
    locals ascribe to the axiom that ‘to be Khmer is to be Buddhist’, he is good
    naturedly non-plussed by the fact that, after 450 years of evangelization, the
    Buddhist Khmers have with very few exceptions not taken to Christianity – unlike
    larger or smaller segments among the Vietnamese, Malaysians, and Koreans and,
    much earlier and as a special case, the Tagalogs. (The jury is still out on a massive
    campaign since the mid-1990s by American Protestant evangelicals to Christianize
    the Khmers.)
    

51. 51  Sovereignty, or genuine participatory self-rule, has been the starting point.
    According to Cornell and Kalt (1998: 205), ‘[t]he trick is to invent governments that
    are capable of operating effectively in the contemporary world, but that also
    match people’s ideas – traditional or not – about what is appropriate and fair.’
    

52. 52  It deserves to be noted, as Népote (1979: 777) does, that the calamities that
    beset Cambodia since mid-century did not ‘emanate from social classes that were
    the most disfavored and/or remained closest to the traditional models (small
    farmers, the religious elders, holders of traditional knowledge, etc . . .), but rather
    those classes that were the most “evolved” . . .’
    

53. 53  As part of the rapid post-World War II modernization, the modern secular educa-
    tion system introduced in the 1950s and 1960s led to what Népote (1979: 784)
    called ‘the creation of an increasingly important nucleus of “detribalized” young
    people who no longer recognized themselves in their cultural context, their hier-
    archy, and their political symbolism.’ These disoriented, disenchanted, and for the
    most part unemployed neak cheh-dung (‘capable-informed ones’) became what he
    called the ‘social detonators’ of Cambodian society and politics as, together with
    their younger teachers and mentors (many of them French gauchists doing alter-
    native military service as teachers), they attached themselves with fervour, in many
    cases successively, to the rebellions that overthrew the monarchy in 1970 and the
    republican regime in 1975 (Osborne 1973: 72, 92; Delvert 1979: 747). Those who
    came of age at that time and survived are today in their political maturity, many as
    leaders of the regime or the thirty-eight other parties that ran in the 2003 election.
    

6

THE CAMBODIAN HOSPITAL
FOR MONKS

John Marston 

It is not unusual to find academic reference to the Christian roots of such
modern Western conceptions as individuality or rights, or the Weberian
thesis that the historical roots of capitalism lie in the Protestant ethic. Never-
theless, one rarely finds references to links between religion and the institu-
tions of Western modernity in actual practice. This is related to the fact,
explored by Casanova (1994), that in many Western countries modernization
entailed the development of a secular sphere, with religion increasingly
defined as a “private” issue. Civil society, by this logic, is by its very nature
secular, as is the modern nation-state. To this we may contrast Chatterjee’s
description (1986) of societies responding to colonialism, where there is
often a pattern of finding in spirituality a source of identity which allowed
them, while recognizing the power of Western science and technology,
to validate their own cultures as equal to that of the colonizers. In this
context the revitalization of religion, sometimes entailing its own “modern”
transformation, can be very much part of a modernizing process, however
ambiguous that modernization may be.

My essay here examines the project of the building of a hospital for
monks in Cambodia at the moment of the country’s independence. My
interest in this topic, which grows out of more general research on Cambodian
religious building projects, is the seeming incongruity of the combination of
“traditional” and “modern” elements. It is my hope that in this juncture of
the traditional and the modern we can find something significant about the
post-colonial project in Cambodia.

The monks’ hospital was the brainchild of a jurist named Khuon Nay,
who in late 1949 established what was called in French the “Societé d’Assist-
ance Médicale aux Religieux Bouddhique”, whose main goal was the cre-
ation of the hospital. Khuon Nay had in 1946 been one of the founding
members of the Democratic Party,2 one of Cambodia’s first political parties
and an important political force in the years immediately prior to independ-
ence; the Party was a strong advocate of nationalism and independence, and attracted key progressive members of the French-educated Cambodia’s elite
of the time. Cambodia had been encouraged by the Japanese to declare its
independence in March 1945; although within months Japan was defeated
and the French had officially returned as a colonial authority, its position
could never be quite the same. A new constitution called for a national
assembly and the creation of political parties, thus authorizing the existence
of the new Democratic Party. Its slogan, “Use the Elite to Serve the King
and the People” (Chandler 1991: 30) perhaps captures some of the spirit that
motivated the building of the hospital. It is also significant that the Party had
strong links to the leadership of the Buddhist Sangha and actively drew on
networks of lay Buddhist leaders. Khuon Nay played a prominent role in
Cambodian politics precisely in the period of the Democratic Party’s efflor-
escence, serving as the President of the High Council from 1948 to 1950 and
president of the National Assembly from 1951 until it was dissolved by King
Sihanouk in January 1953. During this period he also, at different times,
headed various ministries.

As a prominent Democrat, Khuon Nay would have been close to Suramarit,
the king’s father and an advisor to the party. His links to the royal family
were also underlined by his marriage to Princess Sisowath Soveth, the older
half-sister of Sisowath Kossamak, Suramarit’s wife and the king’s mother.

The association in support of a monks’ hospital was created precisely at
the time that Khuon Nay was conspicuously a public person, while Cambodia
was still a colony of France and Sihanouk was still king, a time of a flurry of
political activity anticipating independence. Actual construction began in
February 1953, soon after Sihanouk had dissolved parliament, and during
the month Sihanouk left for France to lobby for independence. By the time the
hospital was completed, in 1956, the country was independent and Sihanouk
had abdicated the throne to play a more active political role, setting up a
movement called the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, which quickly overshadowed
and replaced all other parties, including the Democrats. Sihanouk’s father
Suramarit became king and the hospital was named after his queen, Preah
Kossamak Hospital. Khuon Nay, by this time 65 years old, kept heading
the organization that raised funds for and administered the hospital, and was
still living nineteen years later, when the country fell to the Khmer Rouge.3

Why was the hospital built? In the text of a speech dated 25 January 1950,
Khuon Nay gives three reasons. The first is the most poignant. He states that
he began thinking about the hospital:

because I have been struck with great sorrow, the sorrow of being
separated from younger associates4 and friends who I loved greatly
with all my heart. Illness and death came to rob me of them, causing
me to grieve and feel great anguish. I would like to be free from the
whole cycle of lifetimes full of suffering.

(Khuon 1950)

These are ideas basic to Buddhist philosophy and ground the hospital and
Khuon Nay’s personal involvement in it in a deeply Buddhist perspective on
life. Those hearing the speech would surely have been reminded that only
eleven days earlier Ieu Koeuss, a prominent Democrat and the President of
the National Assembly, had been assassinated – a death that echoed the
death, in 1947, of Prince Sisowath Yuthewong, the founder of the Party,
both of a generation younger than Khuon Nay. As a Cambodian political
figure, Khuon Nay already had reason to be reminded of the transience
of human endeavour.

The other reasons stated were also based on Buddhist teachings. He spoke
of the great merit to be gained by the gift of medicine, citing the case of the
arahant Ba ̄kula Thera living at the time of the Buddha who, because of
distributing medicine in a previous lifetime, lived 160 years completely with-
out illness; the speech was, after all, designed to remind contributors that
their donations would generate great merit for themselves, and an expression
of Khuon Nay’s own aspirations to merit.6 Finally, Khuon Nay stated his
fear that monks and novices receiving health care in hospitals for the general
public, where they were under a single roof with women, were in violation of
the disciplinary rules of the Patimokkha.

It should be noted that it is far from clear that a monk staying in a hospital
for the general public would always be in violation of the Patimokkha; never-
theless, a hospital exclusively for monks would have facilitated the mainten-
ance of monkly routine and discipline during periods of hospitalization. One
of the advantages of the hospital was that it included a small preah vihear
(the central ritual building of a Cambodian monastery or wat) consecrated
with ritual boundary stones (s ̄ıma ̄). This meant that the hospital and its
grounds could function officially as a wat, and that monks could legitimately
stay there the length of a rainy season retreat. It also meant that it could
legitimately be the destination of a kathin ceremony, the annual ceremony
whereby monks’ robes and other donations are brought in procession to a wat.

Khuon Nay’s 1950 speech, emphasizing Buddhist principles, did not bring
out the aspects of the hospital which were innovative: 1) the fact that, like
any modern hospital, it entailed systematization of health care on a large
scale, with the assumption that this kind of systematization could and
should be extended to the monkhood; 2) similarly, the fact that the hospital
project implicitly affirmed that the tradition of the monkhood could and
should interface with modern technologies of medicine; 3) finally, the fact
that the hospital project was consciously national in scale. The hospital
did not fall under the purview of either of the two monastic orders, the
Mohanikay or the Thommayut, but involved the cooperation of both under
an administrative committee with the symbolic patronage of the king. From
the beginning, the project was conceived as connected to the king and the
royal family, while, to the extent that it relied on contributions by the mass of
the Cambodian population, it also had a populist dimension.

The very creation of a formal organization is significant in a society that
had only recently begun generating social groupings which fell in the middle
ground between those of the royal government and the type of local organ-
ization which served a wat or a village. (Although a Buddhist Association
and various secular organizations were formed in the late 1930s, Cambodia
never developed anything remotely comparable to the YMBA in Burma
[Edwards 1999, 2004].) Khuon Nay’s association was to this extent part of a
movement in the direction of “civil society” – although it is significant that
the organization existed “under the high patronage of the king”, as well as
the fact that its goals and principal activities could be compared to the more
ad hoc community-level groups that are formed to organize kathin cere-
monies.7 The Societé d’Assistance Médicale aux Religieux Bouddhique was
officially registered, with its rules and regulations published in both Khmer
and French.

At the inauguration of the hospital, Khuon Nay stated that its cost had
totalled 12 million riel. Of this 3.5 million had come from “the Cambodian
people”, 6.5 million had come from the government, and 2 million from
foreign aid (Kambuja ̄ Suriya ̄ 1956a: 390). Foreign aid included, from France,
the donation of some equipment and the supply of medical personnel, but
consisted in large part of the donation of medical equipment by the United
States, eager to bring the newly independent country into its sphere of
influence (Agence Khmer Presse 1956).

One of the earliest fundraising activities took place in October 1952, when
two relics from India, one of the Buddha and one of the arahant Mogallana,
were brought to Cambodia, paraded through Phnom Penh with great pomp
and ceremony, and displayed for one week at the preah vihear on the grounds
of the Royal Palace. At this time, “tens and hundreds of thousands” viewed
the relic, and monks, ministers of the government, and the general Buddhist
public made offerings totalling 1,667,300 riel. Of this, 900,000 were to go
towards the monks’ hospital and 200,000 were to go towards the construc-
tion of a stupa in front of the railway station designed to contain a Buddha
relic (sakyamunichediy) (Ja ̄ Ga ̄n and Un’ Sou 2000; Institute Bouddhique
2001: x, xi).

Whatever else the building of the hospital may have been, it was a very
public event, if only because Khuon Nay had sufficient public profile to
make it so. Early on the campaign to build the hospital was endorsed by the
National Assembly. Its fundraising campaigns, the beginning of construc-
tion, and the inauguration of the hospital are recorded in Khmer and
French-language newspapers and news service reports, and the latter in
articles in the most prestigious journal of Cambodian culture of the time,
Kambuja ̄ Suriya ̄.

As such, it coincides with a handful of other events that focused public
attention on the role of Buddhism at the moment of independence: the estab-
lishment of a Buddhist University in 1954 (Sam 1987: 26); the publication of a fifty-volume Khmer translation of the Buddhist scriptures (the culmination
of a project begun in 1930) (Institut Bouddhique 2001: 218), and the building
of the Sakyamunichedi in front of the railway station to house a Buddha relic.

The latter two events, in particular, occurred in 1957, which in Cambodia
was the year 2500 of the Buddhist calendar. Since Buddhist scriptures are
popularly interpreted to say that the Buddha of the future, or the Maitreya,
will arrive 5,000 years after Gautama Buddha entered nirvana, the year 2500,
as the half-way mark, known as the Buddha Jayanti, was considered espe-
cially auspicious. This auspiciousness was accentuated by the fact that four
Theravada Buddhist countries, including Cambodia, had recently achieved
independence. Probably the momentum of the occasion initially generated
the Sixth Buddhist Council in Rangoon, a two-year event which was timed to
end on the occasion of the Buddha Jayanti as celebrated in Burma, in 1956.
Both Sihanouk and Chuon Nath, Cambodia’s most senior monk, visited
Burma at the time of the Council.

There was a sense of the dawn of a new Buddhist era. One of the key
books published on the occasion of the celebrations in India stated, “It is
believed that this anniversary will bring about a great revival of Buddhism
and universal peace throughout the world” (Bapat 1956: 53–54). Sarkisyanz
quotes a prominent Burmese editor telling him, in 1952, that, “. . . there is
some belief even here that the 2500th anniversary of the Mahaparinibbana
of the Buddha will mark a great Revival of Buddhism and there is some
feeling that the ‘Golden Age’ for which all men long, may dawn with this”
(1965: 207). This new era was symbolized, among other things, by the fact
that relics of the Buddha that had been in British possession were being
returned to Buddhist countries, such as the one designated for the new
Sakyamunichedi. The introduction to a book published by the Cambodian
Buddhist Institute on the occasion of the 2500  celebrations even suggested
that Sihanouk fulfilled the role of the prophesied Preah Pat Dhammik
(Institut Bouddhique 2001: v).

In each of the four newly independent Theravada countries, the coincidence
of independence and a new Buddhist era meant the emergence of move-
ments to involve Buddhism in social agendas (Gombrich 1988; Sarkisyanz
1965; Stuart-Fox and Bucknell 1982). This was also true in India, where
Dr Ambedkar used the occasion of 2500  (celebrated in India in 1956) to
organize the ritual conversion to Buddhism of thousands of members of the
untouchable caste. Celebrations in Thailand included the release of political
prisoners; Reynolds notes that “the occasion also gave progressive activists
and writers an opportunity to celebrate May Day 1957 and nudge history
forward” (Reynolds 1987: 34). Earlier in the year a leftist party had also been
founded in Burma, named after the future Buddha Maitreya (Sarkisyanz
1965: 207).

The 2500  celebrations in Cambodia, focused especially on the installa-
tion of the Buddha relic in the new Sakyamunichedi, were organized on a grand scale, bringing together thousands of monks and lay people and deeply
capturing the imagination of the public. Unlike other relics in Cambodia,
this was not associated with a specific wat, but a central public place in the
capital of the new nation.9 The festivities were doubtless the most massive
celebration to that date of what was being defined as the spirit of the new
country, at this moment dramatically celebrated as a Buddhist country.10 It is
not surprising that, on the agenda for visiting Buddhist dignitaries were tours
of the one-year-old monks’ hospital.

The preface to a book published by the Buddhist Institute on the occasion
of the 2500  celebrations starts with a reference to the Buddha which
emphasizes his healing characteristics:

The Buddha is a vecchea kru (a doctor/teacher over doctors) in the
world. He has provided remedy: the moral philosophy which chris-
tened the humans of the world, suffering from disease of the heart
and soul (khang pleu chitt), the defilement of desire (tanha) – and
provided cure, in accordance with his vocation, before entering nir-
vana. There remains only Buddhism – as a teacher instead of the
actual Buddha – up until the present time.

(Institut Bouddhique 2001: I)

Later in the preface there is an extended discussion of how events taking
place in Cambodia, and the 2500  celebrations, relate to a prophetic
text, the Puttumneay, and it is striking how this is interpreted specifically in
medical terms.11

Whoever is able to live at the halfway point of the religion and has
fulfilled the injunctions of dharma on three points – 1) by not threat-
ening his/her father or mother, and thus destroying the Buddha, 2)
by not stealing the possessions of others, 3) by never killing or des-
troying life – this person will have great well-being, for there is the
prophecy that, in the future, a golden mountain and a mountain of
silver, crystal, bracelets of cat’s eye gems, and sourikan will arise, and
among all humans there will be no more diseases. When it is time to
die, death will come at the end of one’s life. Does this mean that, in
the near future, this will really occur in our Cambodia? Because we
have seen some of this dimly starting at the present time – namely
that in our country, the two-year projects for dike construction,
both general projects and those for the pier at the ocean-front in
Kampong Som – all could be regarded as mountains of gold and
silver for all Cambodians. One should note that all these dikes can
permit Khmers to farm rice during two seasons in one year, and that
the planting of crops will generate increases, and the production that
will be born from the Khmer earth (preah thorani) will be carried by way of the ports of the Khmer fleet to be sold in world markets,
bringing gold and silver to Cambodia to the extent of meeting the
heart’s desire of the Cambodian people.

Not only that, Khmer health organizations have received great
amounts of aid in the form of effective remedies from the health
organizations of the world, in order to do away with the diseases of
the people, and can relieve the disease which our nation has believed
cannot be cured. We see that the truth appears little by little in
sequence; one should regard it indeed as the truth.

(Institut Bouddhique 2001: vi)

I have found no concrete evidence that the building of the monks’ hospital
was planned to coincide with the Buddha Jayanti, but the implications of
passages like this, and the fact that Buddha relics were used to raised funds
for it, is suggestive. What is clear is that, at this particular historical moment,
the hospital was used as evidence that Cambodia was a Buddhist nation and
a distinguished if not even auspiciously marked member of the community
of Buddhist nations.

A sermon given on the one-year anniversary of the hospital emphasizes
this point:

[The association was formed] in order to build a separate hospital for
monks in a way that was appropriate to the honor of a Buddhist
country . . . And this hospital for Buddhist monks, precisely in the
form you see here, was born out of the spirit of compassion of bene-
factors, both from among the monkhood and the lay community,
from the entire kingdom, demonstrating that our Cambodia has a
generous heart well-filled with dhamma in Buddhism, flowing with
willingness (satthea) to generate the signs of dhamma, such that it
may be seen clearly that it is no less than any other Buddhist country.

(Pang Ka ̄t’ 1957: 6)

The movement to build the monks’ hospital reflected a particular strand
of Cambodian Buddhism. Since the 1920s, there had been a major division
within the Mohanikay Order between traditionalists (the ancient or boran
tradition) and reformists. The latter were at the time called Dhammakay, a
term which emphasized the degree to which they drew on elements from the
Thommayut as well as the Mohanikay tradition; at the present time, the
reform movement is generally simply remembered as the “modern” or samey
practice (Marston 2002).

The reform movement is most commonly associated with two scholar
monks, Huot Tat and Chuon Nath, who rose to greater and greater promin-
ence within the Cambodian monkhood (Edwards 2004; Hansen 2004). At the time of independence, Huot Tat was the head of the Pali school and
Chuon Nath was the Mahanikay patriarch. Chuon Nath, in particular, is
enshrined in Cambodian national consciousness as the icon of the great
monk, an image that probably has less to do with awareness of his contribu-
tions as a scholar or a reformer than the fact that his prominence crystallized
at the moment of independence. (Many wats at the present time which con-
sider themselves “traditionalist”, and thus theoretically in opposition to the
reforms that Chuon Nath promoted, still display his picture prominently.)

One should keep in mind that many of the reforms promoted by Chuon
Nath and Huot Tat now seem somewhat arbitrary, and they were important
not so much because they were truly more faithful to Buddhist principles,
as they claimed, or because they were inherently “modern” in any absolute
sense, as because they came to define what at that moment was considered
modern in Cambodian Buddhism. They thereby in effect demarked cate-
gories within Cambodian Buddhism, giving direction both to those who
supported them and those who opposed them.

Sources of tension between traditionalists and modernists had to do with
the pronunciation of chants, the details of rituals, and ways of wearing robes.
More profoundly, perhaps, they had to do with modes of instruction for
monks – whether that of a disciple at the feet of a master or students seated
at desks in a modern classroom, and the principle of whether Pali chants
should be learned by rote and recited in the original language, or, instead,
there should be systematic instruction in Pali and translation into Khmer.
Reformists were devoted to the principle that the textual tradition of the
Buddhist scriptures should provide the basis for all practice and tended to
reject texts and rituals that had no clear scriptural foundation. They believed
that, by eliminating extraneous non-scriptural elements, one could arrive at a
form of Buddhism consistent with modern science and technology.

The Buddhism of the reformists was also one that interfaced well with
colonial administrative structures – and a locus of opposition among tradi-
tionalists was that it was associated too much with the French. We might add
that the vision of Buddhism promoted by the modernists was one that could
easily interface with the Buddhism of other countries, some of which were
undergoing similar reforms.

The prominent public events associated with Buddhism which took place
near the time of Cambodian independence were all very much projects pro-
moted by Chuon Nath and associated with his vision of Buddhism. This is
especially obvious in the case of the creation of the Buddhist University and
the publication of the Khmer version of the Tripitaka. While to a Western
observer, the enshrinement of a Buddha relic seems less “modern”, it was
also a project enthusiastically promoted by Chuon Nath and was in its own
way a product of his vision: in sharing the body of the Buddha, Cambodia
demonstrated that it was an integral part of the body of international
Buddhism.

I see the monks’ hospital as intimately associated with this strand of
reformist Buddhism. Chuon Nath was one of the figures closely identified
with the project from the beginning and may have been the person to origin-
ally give the idea circulation in Cambodia. In a 1950 speech he mentions
having seen a hospital for monks in Laos and praised it upon returning to
Cambodia. The idea of a hospital for monks suggests a vision of Buddhism
consistent with science and technology and which, in more general terms,
was not afraid of innovation. It also represented a vision of Buddhism oper-
ating on a national level and in a strong degree consistent with the system-
atization of the monkhood as an institution. It was a symbol of Cambodian
Buddhism that could be represented to the larger Buddhist world, even, per-
haps, something that other Buddhist countries could look to as a model.
Khuon Nay’s emphasis that the monks’ hospital would help make the discip-
linary practice of monks consistent with Buddhist scriptures is also very
typical of the reformist way of looking at Buddhism, which gave stress to
scriptural validity over tradition.

Pamphlets with the articles of incorporation of the Societé d’Assistance
Médicale aux Religieux Bouddhiques were published in 1950 and 1954,
apparently for fundraising purposes. The covers of the Khmer versions of
the pamphlets had illustrations of the planned hospital. The 1950 picture,
drawn before construction had actually begun, was an idealized building in
a classical European style, vaguely antiquated, with its Greek columns in
front of a box-like three-storey building with curtained windows; a pair of
monks standing in discussion in front of the building convey an iconic,
school-book quality. Perhaps the most Cambodian element of the building is
a pyramid-like pointed roof rising above the box-like structure, pinnacled
with a small turret.

The 1954 picture, published when the building was actually under con-
struction (and during the year Cambodia achieved independence), resembles
the final building and was probably based on the architect’s drawings. The
building is bigger and more self-consciously modern in design – even, per-
haps, “heroically” modern. A flag now appears conspicuously on the roof of
the hospital. The artist no longer thought to include pictures of monks on
the grounds; the picture to that extent is less human in scale. The religious
element of the hospital is instead depicted by an angel-like male deity
(devata) in royal garb who hovers over the hospital at the pinnacle of a
rainbow. From his hands fall written Khmer syllables which with difficulty
can be seen to fit together in expressions of blessing: “May you have no
disease, no suffering, and be happy”; “Long life, good complexion, happi-
ness, strength . . .”12 The sequence of the two pictures suggests that the hos-
pital was conceived more and more in terms of a heroic modernity; even so,
that modernity was consciously linked to spirituality.

On the occasion of the inauguration of the hospital, the Minister of
Public Works, Meas Yang, made the very measured statement that, “This handiwork, added to many other handiworks completed since the Khmer
people have achieved independence, proves clearly our value and demon-
strates once again that our country has indeed entered a new era” (Kambuja ̄
Suriya ̄ 1956b: 493–494).

One should not exaggerate the modernity of the building in architectural
terms. It was not in the same category as what would be called the New Khmer
Architecture, which flourished soon after this, and was closely associated
with the work of the architect Vann Molyvann, who would combine with
great sophistication a modernist aesthetic with motifs from ancient Khmer
architecture; the hospital was a much more modest project.13 What it had
in common with the New Khmer Architecture was that it was an imposing
new building in a heretofore undeveloped part of the city, which seemed to
capture the momentum of the construction of the newly independent country.

Some of the later buildings associated with the Sihanouk period would be
in the vicinity of the hospital. A 1967 article in French, quoted by Sihanouk
in 1969, lists the hospital as one of the glorious buildings lining the road
from the airport to the centre of town.

The traveler, pressed for time, must think that this concentration of
beautiful edifices is nothing but a façade, and that it provides an
imaginary view of what is inside the wrapping paper. But that is
nothing of the case, because one observes after a short time that the
whole capital reflects the same concern for beauty and equilibrium.

(Sihanouk 1969)

New construction near the airport since the 1980s means that the hospital
is no longer easily visible from the road. But one can imagine that part of the
effect of the building in the 1950s and 1960s was that of a glistening modern
building situated at some distance from the road behind well-gardened
grounds.

The hospital also, obliquely, demonstrates the relation between kingship
and socio-political developments in the country. Sihanouk’s political move-
ment, established in 1955, was called Sangkum Reastr Niyum, which translates
roughly as “Popular Socialist Community”. From the beginning, Sihanouk
stressed the idea of a socialism existing in interdependence with monarchy.
While some might say the modernization entailed in socialism was under-
mined by its link to monarchy, one might also, more from the perspective of
Sihanouk, say that what was being worked out was a peculiarly modern
permutation of monarchy. In 1965, Sihanouk had written an editorial for the
review Kambuja called “Our Socialist Buddhism” which would be later
published as a pamphlet by the Cambodian Ministry of Information. The
original article was composed a few months after Sihanouk had broken dip-
lomatic relations with the US, and in part represented the gesture of declar-
ing that Cambodia’s path was neither that of the US or of communism, both of which he criticized at length. The editorial was also a way of recalling the
Sangkum Reastr Niyum path of development up to that point and framing
its accomplishments in Buddhist terms.

Much like Khuon Nay’s 1950 speech, it spoke of the Buddhist recognition
of the universality of human suffering and of a socialist obligation to
address suffering. The “socialist” effort to resolve the problem of suffering
was very much conceived in terms of the bounty and the generosity of the
monarchy.

The editorial drew heavily on a book by Alexandra David Neel, who had
written, using strikingly militaristic images, that “Buddhism is a school of
stoic energy, of resolute perseverance and of very special courage, the aim of
which is to train ‘warriors’ to attack suffering.”14 Sihanouk wrote that:

Transposed to the plan of our national politics, such a doctrine
makes of us ‘warriors,’ convinced and energetic, fighting for our
national ideology, which is, in regards to internal politics, the fight
against under-development, against social injustice, the raising of
our people’s living standard, their happiness, and their joie de vivre in
fraternity and concord.

(Sihanouk 1966: 8–9)

In the essay, Sihanouk makes scattered references to Asoka as the model
of Buddhist kingship, such as when he quotes Neel that, “On the pillar
which Emperor Asoka had constructed for the edification of his subjects,
one reads: ‘I consider the well-being of all creatures as a goal for which I
should fight,” and adds his own comment: “It is the goal of the Sangkum”
(Sihanouk 1966: 19).

More striking, perhaps, are two other analogies. Sihanouk makes reference
to the story of Prince Vessantara, the immediate previous incarnation of
Gautama Buddha, who embodied the perfection of generosity to the extent
that he was willing to sacrifice all his possessions and his family. The analogy
hints that Sihanouk himself was a Vessantara figure (an idea which, taken to
its logical extremes, would also make him a bodhisattva). What he actually
states is that the Cambodian people have been generous to Sangkum Reastr
Niyum projects because of the example of Vessantara.

The foreigner must come to know that 80% of our schools and
infirmaries and a large percentage of our other accomplishments are
nothing but the generosity – I should rather say the Buddhist charity
– of innumerable admirers of Vessantara.

The other analogy he draws on is the Angkorean King Jayavarman VII – a
patron of Mahayana Buddhism and the ancient Cambodian monarch most
associated with Buddhism in popular Cambodian consciousness. The model of Jayavarman VII – a world conqueror who, depicted iconically in medita-
tion, was also a world-renouncer – is a theme running throughout the
Sihanouk period. In addition to being Buddhist, Jayavarman VII was also
the Angkorean king most massively engaged in building projects. In 1969,
Sihanouk would liken the building projects completed in the Sangkum
Reastr Niyum period to those of Jayavarman VII, calling Phnom Penh “the
new Angkor Thom” (Sihanouk 1969). In the 1965 editorial, Sihanouk uses
Jayavarman VII to explain Buddhist socialism, citing the ancient king’s
numerous temples and monuments, his thousands of kilometres of roads
and canals, and his hundreds of hospitals (Sihanouk 1966: 8; emphasis
mine). What I would like to emphasize is the degree to which the vision of
a new and “modern” society was constructed to echo the iconography of
Cambodian Buddhism.

In a provocative recent article about Cambodian kingship in relation to
the icon of the leper king, Ashley Thompson (2004) argues that, since the
time of Jayavarman VII (and the inscriptions know as the Hospital Edicts),
kingship, by means of its association with Buddhahood and its metonymic
extension to the body of the population, has been associated with healing.
The physical and moral well-being of the king is intrinsically tied to the
physical and moral well-being of the kingdom. The Hospital Edicts use
imagery of war to describe the king’s conquest of suffering and disease.
This association between kingship and healing, she argues, extends to the
reign of Sihanouk. The public emphasis in the 1950s and 1960s that the
hospital projects of Jayavarman VII paralleled Sihanouk’s own projects
supports, to a degree, the thesis that this idea was operative in Cambodian
popular consciousness and adds a dimension to the “modernity” of these
projects.

The monks’ hospital was completed early in the period of the Sangkum
Reastr Niyum, and we cannot assume that all the ideas in the pamphlet on
Buddhist socialism were fully developed at that time. The hospital project did
anticipate Sihanouk’s vision of socialism in the degree to which it was pre-
sented as a combination of popular will and royal patronage. Speeches at the
inauguration credited to Sihanouk the fact that there were government dona-
tions to the hospital and the arrangement of foreign aid in its support. We
do not know whether these speeches reflect his active involvement in the pro-
ject or simply the fact that at the time the social body was so deeply associ-
ated with kingship that all public projects tended to be seen as in some sense
Sihanouk’s handiwork.

What we do know is that, already, at the time of the hospital dedication,
speeches depicted the building of the hospital as in the tradition of Jayavarman
VII. The representative of the Thommayut Order stated on the occasion,
“Buddhism in our country has encountered a glorious resurgence. One can
almost compare it with the glorious growth [of Buddhism] in the era of
Jayavarman VII – simply because our king is a Buddhist of the highest order” (Kambuja ̄ Suriya ̄ 1956: 394). The representative of the Ministry of
Religion cited a famous quotation of Jayavarman VII when he stated:

The building of this hospital for monks is an indication that it was in
accordance with the policies of the government headed by the prince
[Sihanouk], under the sovereign authority of the king and the queen,
who have continuously had the desire to eliminate illness among
monks and eliminate illness among the people – because the illness
of the people is the illness of the king.

(Kambuja ̄ Suriya ̄ 1956)16

One more regional hospital for monks would be built in Takeo in 1957,
and an infirmary was built on the premises of a large Phnom Penh wat, Wat
Mahamontrey, at around this time. After that, as far as I have been able
to determine, the idea seems to have lost momentum. Sihanouk would
not, in fact, be known for sponsoring the building of Buddhist temples or
schools.17 If we see the hospital as a gift to the Sangha, so much in the
Theravada tradition of generating merit, no similar pattern would emerge.
What would be more characteristic of the Sihanouk period were “gifts” to
the people. Initially, many such projects supported with foreign aid, such as
the Soviet aid towards the construction, near the monks’ hospital, of the
Soviet-Khmer Friendship Hospital; they later represented significant civic
mobilization. The monks’ hospital, and a medical school building com-
pleted the year before near what would be the site of the Sakyamunichedi,
did anticipate the fact that there would be much hospital construction
during the period of his political power. A US report from the late 1960s
states that:

. . . many of the new medical facilities are reported to have been built
largely by popular subscription and with labor furnished by the
people of the village or district. Reports of civic participation come
from official sources, and there is corroborative evidence that people
in urban areas have contributed substantial sums toward the build-
ing of hospitals and that villagers furnish volunteer labor in building
their local infirmaries.

(Munson et al., 1968)

This was part of a campaign organized by Sihanouk. According to Martin
(1991: 74), the project began in 1964, when Cambodia was rejecting US aid.
“The state supplied iron to reinforce concrete; villagers had to supply sand
and bricks and do the construction work.” As she describes it, the pro-
gramme was very successful in terms of the sheer numbers of buildings con-
structed, but had a Potemkin village quality in remoter provinces, since there
was no money for medicine or furniture. She describes how communities would borrow medicine and furniture from the capital or nearby towns for
the inauguration ceremonies, then ship them back. Certainly there was an
element of theatre to Sihanouk’s projects of “modernity”. It is interesting
that this theatre of hospital construction consciously cultivated parallels
with the reign of Jayavarman VII.

In conversations with people in Phnom Penh at the present time, I have
found a widespread belief that the monks’ hospital was built under the direct
sponsorship of the Queen, Sisowath Kossamak, for which it is named, even
though I have found no documentary evidence of her involvement. This
reflects, I believe, a tendency of popular Cambodian conception to forget
institutions of civil society as such, and to conceive of projects from that
period instead as part of a general royal mandate.18 It may also reflect the
fact that donations to the monkhood by high-ranking women have particular
cultural resonance.

I have so far been able to find very little information about the actual
running of the hospital, how it was different from other hospitals, or what
impact it had on the Cambodian monkhood. One of the current adminis-
trators of the hospital says that before 1975 it primarily treated cases of
tuberculosis or of complications related to tuberculosis. In addition to
monks, a few lay persons received treatment in the hospital, perhaps lay
ritual specialists (achar) closely associated with Buddhist wats; they were
housed on the ground floor so they would be at a lower level than the monks.
Khuon Nay’s granddaughter recalls that his younger brother, Khuon Kim
Seng, was the principal doctor. “He lived within the premises with the whole
family in a wooden house built near a lotus pond”.19 (The pond circled the
hospital as a sort of a moat. The house was outside the wall behind the
hospital, near a small bridge connecting the hospital grounds to the outside.)
There were apparently at times some foreign medical personnel working at
the hospital. A French-language booklet giving the internal regulations of
the hospital states of the nurses that:

Their role is the same as that of nurses in other hospital establish-
ments, with, however, a small difference in regards to the status
of the patients. Here, in fact, it’s a question of monks who are
ill, toward whom it is necessary to comport oneself with great
tact, patience, and consideration. In a word, it is necessary to know
how to treat them with particular respect and deference, while
nevertheless not neglecting discipline and internal regulations.

(Hôpital des Bonzes 1956: 4)

A 1964 fundraising booklet states that the hospital received 2 million riel a
year from the Cambodian government, but that this had to be supplemented
by money pledged by donors on an annual or monthly basis, and fundraising
through the selling of flowers and plants. Appeals for funds were regularly broadcast on holy days (thngay sel) on the national radio (Kaev Sa ̄ret
1964: 6–7).

In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge evacuated the population of Phnom Penh
to the countryside and in the course of the Pol Pot period, practically all
Cambodian monks were forced to disrobe. The monks’ hospital would never
again be a hospital for monks per se, although it was apparently used for
medical purposes during the Pol Pot period and would be one of the first
hospitals to be put to use after the fall of Democratic Kampuchea.

In the People’s Republic of Kampuchea period, the hospital was opened
again for the general public with the name April 17 Hospital. It was not until
the early 1990s that it would again be called Preah Kossamak Hospital.
Around this time one of the most senior Cambodian monks, Ven. Oum
Sum, once closely associated with Chuon Nath, made two separate attempts
to set up hospital units for monks, both doomed to close after short period
of time. When he travelled to the US with Mohanikay patriarch Tep Vong,
money donated to them was earmarked for two projects, one of these a
building for monks at the Calmette Hospital.20 This building was constructed
later that year, but soon diverted by the hospital to other uses, although
a sign still identifies it as the monks’ unit, and a plaque acknowledges
the contributions of Cambodian-Americans.21 Ven. Oum Sum later, in
1994, organized the construction of a small hospital/infirmary on the
grounds of his own wat, Wat Mahamontrey, under the authority of muni-
cipal health authorities. Municipal health staff proved reluctant to work at
the unremunerative hospital for monks, and this also fell by the wayside, with
the building converted to a monks’ residence at the time of Ven. Oum Sum’s
death. These incidents perhaps demonstrate that a hospital for monks, ori-
ginally so much associated with new-found independence and the project of
modernity, cannot capture public imagination and support in the way it
could before the war.

The most vivid reminder of Preah Kossamak Hospital’s past is a mini-
ature preah vihear that still stands on the grounds, a stone building with
Angkorean-style decorations built on an elevated platform of land. After a
period of use as warehouse in the 1980s, it was returned to its original
religious use. When I visited it in the summer of 2003, it was being used by a
small group of female and male lay ascetics, six doun chi and four ta chi.
They said they resided in the vicinity of the wat and had for the past four
years been coming here to do meditation during the rainy season. Every
other day they receive instruction by a monk from a wat associated with Ven.
Sam Bunthoeurn, a charismatic meditation teacher who was assassinated the
previous year under circumstances that remain unclear. A portrait of Queen
Kossamak is situated conspicuously in conjunction with the principle shrine
to the Buddha, and the lay ascetics tell me that she was the principal donor
of the hospital. I was struck by the great beauty of the small temple and the
calm sense of spirituality it evoked in relation to the hospital grounds, the larger hospital building, and the small group of women and men in retreat.
Later I learned that, among patients in the hospital, it is still believed to have
great healing power.

Conclusions

The significance of the monks’ hospital lies in the fact that it is so quintes-
sentially a product of the period of Cambodia’s independence and the way
the project of modernity was conceived at that time. What I would want to
emphasize is the degree to which that project of modernity was imbued with
references to what might sometimes be called Cambodia’s “pre-modern” cul-
ture: to kingship and Buddhism and the mobilization of personal networks.
Insofar as we can generalize about Cambodian religious building projects, we
can see that some of the same concerns that inform neo-traditional religious
movements I have written about elsewhere also inform state-sanctioned pro-
jects very much labelled as “modern”.

These issues have wider relevance in that they parallel processes that were
taking place in other Theravada Buddhist countries at the same time, espe-
cially insofar as countries newly emerging from colonialism were redefining
themselves as Buddhist countries, and in different ways making the attempt
to adopt types of reformed Buddhism consistent with specific visions of
modernity. My research suggests that these issues were more salient in
Cambodia than is acknowledged in the standard histories of the period. In
particular, I see the Buddha Jayanti festivities in Cambodia, with their paral-
lels with what was happening in other Buddhist countries, as much more
significant than has generally been recognized.

Notes

1. 1  Research for this essay was supported by a grant from the Center for Khmer
   Studies with funding from the Luce Foundation. My thanks to Michele Thompson
   for encouraging me to pursue this topic.
   

2. 2  Personal communication, Julio Jeldres, 6 Feb. 2004.
   

3. 3  Personal communication, Dina Nay, 10 Feb. 2004.
   

4. 4  The word used here, koun chau, literally “children and grandchildren”, could refer
   

   either to offspring or those serving under him.
   

5. 5  Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.
   

6. 6  One reference to the long life of Ba ̄kula Thera is the Ba ̄kula Sutta (M. iii. 125).
   

   See Malalasekera (1983: 261–2).
   

7. 7  Edwards (1999) indicates that many of the associations formed in Cambodia in the 1930s had fundraising goals. She suggests that in addition to the fundraising
   activities of Cambodian wats, these organizations may have drawn on the model
   of Chinese self-help and fundraising associations, which probably existed in
   Cambodia since the late nineteenth century. Some Chinese fundraising was for
   hospitals.
   

8. 8  The prophecies of the coming of a dhammically powerful king, who will usher in
   an era of millennial greatness, should be considered as separate from prophecies of the coming of the Maitreya, although in practice the two concepts sometimes
   blur, with the implication that Preah Pat Dhammik will lead the way to the coming
   of the Maitreya.
   

9. 9  The relic was in 2003 moved to a huge newly constructed stupa at the old capital
   of Oudong. Various reasons are given for the transfer to a new location. The
   general consensus was that the site in front of the railway station was not auspi-
   cious, perhaps because of prostitution in the vicinity, and that this may have
   affected Cambodia’s history since independence.
   

10. 10  The celebrations were in May. Osborne (1994: 105) and Chandler (1991: 91–2)
    describe how in July 1957 Sihanouk resigned as prime minister and went into a
    retreat for two weeks at a wat on Phnom Kulen, assuming a white robe and a
    shaved head and announcing his permanent withdrawal from public life. While
    Osborne attributes this to Sihanouk’s “physical and emotional exhaustion”, and
    both authors see the immediate precedent to this as political wrangling within the
    National Assembly, the conjunction with the Buddha Jayanti is probably more
    significant than they acknowledge.
    

11. 11  Scholarly work on the Puttumneay has been done by Smith (1989) and de Bernon
    (1994, 1998).
    

12. 12  My thanks to Sath Sakkarak for helping decipher the messages in the shower of
    syllables.
    

13. 13  Personal communication, Helen Grant Ross, 14 Feb. 2004. One source for infor-
    mation on Vann Molyvann is Reyum (2001).
    

14. 14  Ian Harris (personal communication, 22 Jan. 2005) suggests that David Neel may
    have been influenced by the vitalistic ideas of Julius Evola.
    

15. 15  This refers to King Suramarit.
    

16. 16  The actual quotation in the Hospital Edicts, as given by Thompson (2004: 97)
    

    is: “The illness of the body of the people was for him the illness of the soul – and
    that much more painful: for it is the suffering of the kingdom which makes the
    suffering of kings, and not their own suffering.”
    

17. 17  Personal communication, Helen Grant Ross, 14 Feb. 2004. Nevertheless, it is clear
    that he participated frequently in their ritual dedication.
    

18. 18  The idea that Queen Kossamak sponsored the building of the hospital is also
    stated in Sam (1987: 9).
    

19. 19  Personal communication, Dina Nay, 9 Feb. 2004.
    

20. 20  Because of the US trade embargo at the time, the funds had to be sent to
    

    Cambodia via an NGO, the American Friends Service Committee, which was
    licensed by the State Department for humanitarian activities in Cambodia. I
    accompanied the two monks during the Washington State segment of their visit
    and visited the site of the hospital building under construction later that year.
    Details of the financial arrangements were clarified for me in personal communi-
    cation by Susan Hammand of US-Indochina Reconciliation Project (12 Jan. 2004)
    and Dave Elder of American Friends Service Committee (22 Jan. 2004).
    

21. 21  Guthrie (2002: 63–4), drawing on field research by Sek Sisokhom, makes reference
    to the monks’ hospital project at Calmette. Although the total picture remains far
    from clear, her data do give some indication that the decision to use the building
    for patients other than monks generated controversy at the time.