Ancestral voices: The Naga King

(The following is from Spirit Worlds, my forthcoming book about Cambodian religion and belief. Part of that system of beliefs is the national myths that give meaning to being Khmer).

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In India there  lived a prince, Preah Thong by name, who was told in a dream to take a ship and sail to a golden land in the east where he would establish a great kingdom. So the prince prepared his ship and crew and set forth, and after many days he came upon a beautiful and uninhabited island. Preah Thong named it Nokor Kok Tlok, Kingdom of the Tlok Tree, after a large tlok tree by the shore. Possibly feeling he had done enough for one day Preah Thong fell asleep under the tree, and when he awoke it was night. The moon was full and he gazed on the sea, wondering about his new kingdom, and especially about the lack of people, and as he watched he saw human figures emerge from beneath the waves.

The beings spread a feast under the trees, and the men fell to sport, wrestling and sword-playing on the sand, while the women strummed musical instruments and sang sweet songs. All were comely, but in their midst was a lady more arresting than any. Overcome by her beauty, Preah Thong stepped out from his hiding place and introduced himself, asking who she was, and how it came to be that she and her people lived beneath the waves.

Preah Thong (right) and the naga princess, Cambodian classical dance-drama.

The lady graciously permitted him to know that she was Neang Neak (Lady Naga), the daughter of the naga king, that this was the land of the nagas, and that she and her court visited the beach every full moon night for their pleasure. She informed him also that it was a serious breach of protocol to speak to royalty before being spoken to, and that he had broken this rule, but as she could see he was a stranger and ignorant of naga etiquette she would permit him to inform her of his name and family before ordering his execution.

Quickly Preah Thong told the naga princess of his foreign origins and princely station and declared his undying love, and after further gentle words the proud princess melted and agreed to take him to the underwater kingdom of the nagas so that he could ask her father for her hand in marriage.

Phimeanakas temple in the royal compound at Ankor. Only the base remains – the tower stood on top of this.

And so Neang Neak took Preah Thong to the kingdom of the nagas, the prince holding her scarf. For three days they celebrated their wedding, and at the end of that time the naga king swallowed the water that had covered the land and Preah Thong and Neang Neak ruled together over the Khmers, who were descended from the arriage of the noble Indians who had accompanied Preah Thong and the beautiful naga-folk who waited upon the princess.

In another version of the legend the Indian prince is a Brahmin named Kaundinya and the naga princess is named Soma. The plot is very similar to the story of Preah Thong and Neang Neak except that the island is apparently upstream in the Mekong, and Kaundinya defeats Soma in battle before she agrees to marry him. In yet another version the prince was called Kambu, from which comes the name Kambuja, Cambodia.

The great enemy of the Khmers were the Cham, whose kingdom of Champa lay along the central coast of present-day Vietnam. In the year 657 a Cham king named Prakasadhamma left an inscription in his capital telling how the Brahmin Kaundinya ‘planted his spear’ (settled) in Kambuja and took Soma, daughter of the naga king, as his wife. Prakasadhamma mentioned this because, although a Cham king and a Cham by blood through his mother, he was a descendant of Kaundinya and Soma through his father, who was a Khmer prince. The inscription is important because it is the earliest mention in real history, as opposed to myth, of the name Kambuja.

The marriage of human prince and naga princess sounds fanciful, but the Chinese traveller Zhou Daguan says this in the record of his stay at Angkor shortly before the year 1300:

Zhou Daguan’s “A Record of Cambodia”, translated by Peter Harris with introduction by David Chandler.

Inside the palace there is a gold tower, at the summit of which the king sleeps at night. The local people all say that in the tower lives a nine-headed snake spirit which is the lord of the earth for the entire country. Every night it appears in the form of a woman, and the king first shares his bed with her and has sex with her. […] If for a single night this spirit does not appear, the time has come for this […] king to die.

The tower is probably Phimeanakas, the only structure still remaining inside the palace compound at Angkor. I climbed to the top one cloudy and tourist-free day in the monsoon season, but found no naga-maiden awaiting me. Given what happened to the mythical Leper King, husband to the naga-princess and son-in-law to the naga-king, this may be just as well. That, however, is another myth.

Samsara: childhood

Pinterest, Keith Pings.

For its first three or four years the child is surrounded by indulgence and immediate fulfilment, but the world becomes harsher with the birth of each younger sibling. The transition from infancy to childhood is not sudden, however, but a gradual increase in responsibility and socialisation. During this time also the father gradually turns into remote and authoritarian figure.

The basic lessons children learn are respect, obedience, and conformity, and by the time the child begins school it will have learned such basics as respect for elders and monks. Children’s games emphasise skill and cooperation rather than winning, and the child’s performance of its duties within the family – household chores for the girls, looking after animals and supervised farm work for the boys – attracts no praise or reward, although failure or incompetence will attract blame and scolding. The parents’ control over their children is absolute, and children do not conceive of themselves as autonomous beings.

“In ancient times, Khmer people usually shaved their children’s heads. … This tradition is called “Kaur Chouk,” which means “to shave the tufts of hair away when the child is old enough.” Copyright S. Phana

A village tradition – one rapidly dying out but not yet dead – is that a child’s head should be shaved except for a forelock. The ritual cutting of this forelock at some point between the ages of seven and eleven, in a ceremony involving the monks, an achar (expert in ritual), and the family, marked the passage to responsible late childhood.

For girls, this was traditionally followed by “entering the shade,” a period ranging from a few days to a few months during which she remained inside the house, avoiding all contact with men and boys, practicing household duties and studying feminine etiquette. There was no ritual for the entry into the shade, but the exit was marked by a ceremony in which, among other things, a man with a branch would announce himself to be an “arak (spirit) of the forest,” the achar would ask the arak not to harm the girl or to keep her pralung (soul) in the forest, and the arak would promise that the girl would be allowed to have children. The entry into the shade is rarely practiced today.

For boys, the end of childhood is marked by collective ceremony of entray in to Buddhist novitiate at about twelve years old. For a brief moment before the ordination the pralung of a naga enters the boy, and he’s referred to as a naga until the full ordination is complete. During his time as a serpent he wears a traditional female garment (the hul) decorated with scales and is made beautified with make-up, gold necklaces and earrings, bracelets and rings. Possibly this is meant to represent the costume of Prince Siddhartha as he renounced the palace, but there are also clear undertones of the naga princess who married Preah Thong, the founder of the Khmer race.

A boy gets his head shaved by his mother during an ordination ceremony. Kork Banteay village, Kandal province. Copyright Heng Sinith/AP

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Spirit Worlds, a study of Cambodian belief and society – due out October 2015.

Boys and girls rarely interact after the age of puberty. A major exception is the Khmer New Year, when mixed groups of adolescents join to play traditional games, but in general, contact between sexes in the village setting is very limited. Life for teenagers in the city is, of course, a different matter.

Preah Thong and the naga princess

(This is one version of the Khmer foundation-legend;  what they all have in common is the idea that the Khmer people spring from the union of a prince from India and a native naga princess).

In India once there lived a prince, Preah Thong by name, who was told in a dream to take a ship and sail to a golden land in the east where he would establish a great kingdom. After many days sailing the prince came upon a beautiful and uninhabited island. Preah Thong named it Nokor Kok Tlok, Kingdom of the Tlok Tree, after a large tlok tree by the shore. Possibly feeling he had done enough for one day Preah Thong fell asleep under the tlok tree, and when he awoke it was night. The moon was full and he gazed on the sea, wondering about his new kingdom, and especially about the lack of people, and as he watched he saw human figures emerge from beneath the waves.

The prince watched from behind the tree as the beings spread a feast under the trees. The men fell to sporting with wrestling and sword-play on the sand, while the women strummed musical instruments and sang sweet songs. All were comely, but in their midst was a lady more beautiful than any. Overcome by her beauty, Preah Thong stepped out from his hiding place and introduced himself, asking the lady who she was, and how it came to be that she and her people lived beneath the waters.

The lady permitted him to know that she was Neang Neak (Lady Naga), the daughter of the naga king, that this was the land of the nagas, and that she and her court visited the beach every full moon night for their pleasure. She informed him also that it was a serious breach to speak to royalty before being spoken to, and that he had broken this rule, but as she could see he was a stranger and ignorant of naga etiquette she would permit him to inform her of his name and family before ordering his execution.

Quickly Preah Thong told Neang Neak of his foreign origins and princely station and declared his love, and after further gentle words the princess agreed to take him to the underwater kingdom of the nagas so that he could ask her father for her hand in marriage.

And so Neang Neak took Preah Thong to the kingdom of the nagas, the prince holding her scarf. For three days they celebrated their wedding, and at the end of that time the naga king swallowed the water that had covered the land and Preah Thong and Neang Neak ruled together over the Khmers.

Photo from a site called Shane and Ravy: Our Wedding.

This legend provides the basis for Khmer weddings – the groom, dressed as a prince, holds the scarf of the bride as she leads him to the wedding chamber. In another version of the legend the Indian prince is a Brahmin named Kaundinya and the naga princess is named Soma. The plot is very similar to the story of Preah Thong and Neang Neak except that the island is apparently upstream in the Mekong, and Kaundinya defeats Soma in battle before she agrees to marry him. In yet another version the prince was called Kambu, from which comes the name Kambuja, Cambodia.

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.

Pythons and spirits

“Neak” is the Khmer pronunciation of the Sanskrit word “naga”. (See the article at Wikipedia). Neak are spirits, associated with water, storms, the monsoon season, and with lightning. And with snakes. Presumably the lightning of the monsoon storms is taken for supernatural serpents. According to a medieval Chinese visitor, the king of ancient Angkor slept each night in a temple with a neak-spirit – my guess is that this was a girl who in some sense had taken on the role of a neak, but that’s just my guess.

And the power of the neaks lives on. In Kompong Cham, a python in a pile of logs in a sports centre has given a lucky local some dream-advice on lottery numbers. ” I prayed to it and then I won the lottery draw.” Note that he prayed before any supernatural event – he knew about the naga/neak, the dream and the lottery win merely confirmed what he already knew. The snake has become so popular that the owner of the sports complex has asked the police to take it into custody for its own safety.

My point isn’t to laugh at gullible Cambodians: I’m interested in the survival of ancient beliefs, something I find fascinating.

From 2012 comes this piece about a little boy and his lucky 16-foot python. “In the village of Sit Tbow, 50 kilometres east of Phnom Penh, Sambath Uon, reportedly refuses to go to sleep without the company of his pet, Chamreun, or Lucky, in Khmer.” Oh Gawd! More photos here. I have no idea how this story has played out in more recent years, but I’ll go out to the village and have a look.

Meanwhile, do you know anything about Cambodian beliefs in snakes (what about cobras?) and spirits? If you’re willing to share, let me know, and if you’re in PP I’ll buy you a coffee. Or a beer – it’s cheaper.