Deathpower (Erik W. Davis)

Erik W. Davis’ Deathpower is being hailed as a major work on Cambodian Buddhism and Cambodian religion. See this review in the Phnom Penh Post, which makes it sound quite accessible. (All quotes are from the Post’s review, which is by Brent Crane):

Drawing from three years of field research … Deathpower: Imagining Religion in Contemporary Cambodia, published earlier this month by Columbia University Press, expounds on Cambodian ritual dealings with souls beyond the grave – how individuals, mostly monks, interact with and interpret the spirit world and how communities respond to those interpretations.

Buddhism is overwhelmingly about death. Weddings are mostly for the achars, the specialists in ritual, and the ancestors – the monks attend, but their role isn’t crucial. Same for birth – birth practices are all about protecting the new-born infant and the mother from the attentions of malicious spirits. But at the time of death the monks are indispensable.

Being in charge of death gives the monks immense power. Which of course is not so dissimilar to traditional Christianity – the Church tells you you need the sacraments in order to die right, and who can say they’re wrong? Oscar Wilde repented on his deathbed.

Davis is arguing against the idea that Buddhism is all about seeking nirvana. A religion that spent all its time sitting with its legs crossed and muttering mystic syllables wouldn’t have much hold on anyone outside southern California. Yet this is what many Westerners think – so many times I’ve been told that Buddhism is a philosophy and not a religion. It’s a religion.

Californian Buddhism

It has long been the prevailing academic view that folk beliefs within Theravada Buddhist practices throughout Southeast Asia, such as spirit worship, were “accretions” or additions to “real” Buddhism, based on a strict adherence to original Pali scripture.

The Post is slightly wrong there – there’s no “spirit worship”. Nor is there any Buddha worship, at least in theory – the Buddha was a man, not a god, and he achieved nirvana, which is the extinction of the self, and therefore he no longer exists, and so there’s nothing there to worship. My own take is that there’s no worship at all in Cambodian religion – people ask the gods and spirits for favours, and they thank them for favours given, but they don’t give praise.

And asking and receiving favours is, of course, the basis of Cambodian social relations – you have a patron who is wealthier and more powerful than you, you ask him for help when you need it, and you owe him a debt for what you receive. Religion mirrors society.

Cambophiles and Buddhism scholars alike have praised Deathpower. Renowned historian David Chandler deemed it “very pleasing” and a “reader’s feast”; Anne Hansen, a Buddhist Studies Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, went so far as to call the 320-page book “the most perceptive, meticulous, informative, and important study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhism to date”.

High praise indeed. Hansen points out that the idea that the spirit world is not Buddhism is distinctively Western. It comes from the Western preconception that religion is the Word – religion is what’s written, whether in the Bible or the Koran (Islam is a child of this same mindset, and Protestantism takes it to an extreme). Buddhism, like Christianity, has written scriptures, and Westerners, academics and Californians alike, have instinctively preferenced the scriptures. Non-Westerns have no such preconception. Death is real, the spirits are real, and the monks know how to deal with both.

Cambodian Buddhism. Interesting article in PPPost from 2013 explains the importance of death and funerals (click on the image)

Deathpower is published by Columbia University Press and right ow is priced on the university website at $36, which seems reasonable. That’s the hardcover. The same website lists the e-book at $59.99. On Erik Davis’ personal website there’s a code that allows you to get a 30% discount.

 

Spirit-flags

Cambodian spirit-flags have long fascinated me. Their functions are pretty clear – they’re to signal that something is going on, a festival or funeral or whatever. Aesthetically they’re genuine art, elegant and original. Their origins and symbolism, however, are totally obscure. This post is a summary of the best article I could find on the ‘net, a guest post by Dr Rebecca Hall on the blog Alison in Cambodia. The photos are also hers – I’ve not had much luck photographing banners, they tend to blow in the wind and they’re a long thin shape that doesn’t fit easily in a normal 2:3 photo.

The Khmer word for a flag or banner is tung, and the commonest type is the tung rolok. These are the ones you see in the grounds of monasteries, usually outside the main prayer hall (the preah vihear). I’ve been told that they should always go behind the hall, never in front of it – but in Phnom Penh they’re always in front of it, never behind. The friend who told me this was quite shocked.

The tung rolok announces a festival or celebration. As the photo shows, they’re huge. The number of bamboo rods through the body indicates who’s being honoured – father, mother, monks, Buddha, the teaching, etc.

Note the overall structure of the flag: a triangular “head,” a body, and two “feet” at the bottom. Note also the dark patch of cloth at the crotch, where the genitalia would be if this were what it looks like, a humanoid figure. Note also the little triangular pennons off the main body.

Next is the tung sasana, the “religion flag”. The idea of a flag for Buddhism came from an international conference in Sri Lanka in the early 1950s, and all Theravadin countries have adopted it. The colours stand for the multi-coloured rays of light that broke forth from the Buddha at the moment of his enlightenment, illuminating the entire world. They symbolise the various attributes of the Buddha; there were five rays each of a pure colour, and one of the other five mingled.

So this banner is comparatively new, but it’s become completely acculturated and is frequently seen around monasteries – and unfortunately I have no idea exactly what it’s function is.

Finally we come to the most interesting banner. Dr Hall’s informants, who were mostly abbots and achars (achars are the monastery’s experts in ritual) all told her they were called tung aphithoam. I gather that aphithoam is the Khmer pronunciation of abhidamma, which is Buddhist metaphysics. Dr Hall had been expecting to hear them called tung krapeu, meaning crocodile banner, but the abbots and achars never did. Her translators called them crocodiles, but not the experts.

Here’s the tung aphithoam/tung krapeu. It looks very like the tung rolok, but it’s always white. It’s a death-banner. It’s hung outside a house where someone has recently died, and stays up for 3 to seven days, both being significant periods in the life of the new ghost.

And their function…  Dr Hall’s informants told her it’s to tell people there’s a death and funeral. The cremation takes place at the end of the seven days, with a big funeral feast.

I wonder though. In these seven days between death and cremation the ghost stays around the house, not yet aware that it’s dead. It’s invited into a new “house” (the coffin), and the word “coffin” must never be mentioned lest it be frightened. In other words, the seven days immediately after death is an extremely risky period for the ghost, and so I wonder if the flags have something to do with it – but I don’t know for sure.

And what about the crocodile? The reason Dr Hall was expecting to be told that this is a crocodile flag is that that’s the way it’s described in the scholarly Western literature. One very famous study links the crocodile to the naga, and suggests that the original earth-spirit of the Khmers, before nagas arrived from India, was the crocodile. Crocodile and naga and Preah Torani the earth-goddess all tie together, somehow, though it’s not for me to say just how. But for sure, earth-gods combine the functions of death and fertility (those patches on the groin of the tung rolok), and when I was walking around the monasteries of Phnom Penh with my friend, the one who was shocked to find banners at the front of the prayer halls, everyone we spoke to called them crocodile flags. And those little triangular pennons make the “body” look very crocodilian to my mind, though I’ve never seen them discussed.

There’s a story. Once upon a legendary time there was a monk who transformed himself into a crocodile and swallowed a princess. Bad croc. The king sent his army to rescue the princess, but alas, when they cut open the belly of the beast they were too late, and beauty was dead. So they skinned the crocodile and hung its hide up at her funeral.

That particular story ties in with ritual human sacrifice traditions (it has to do with the pagoda where the princess’s funeral was held, and a requirement for sacrificial virgins), but this post is long enough already.