Samsara: childhood

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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.

Samsara: birth

Visit Angkor.org

An unborn baby is an old soul. A woman might dream that a man asks her if he can come to stay, or she might be visited by her dead grandmother asking to be reborn. She should generally say yes, unless she has witnessed a fatal accident recently, in which case the visitor is probably a ghost trying to be reborn before its time.

When she becomes pregnant the village midwife and elders advise her about diet, medicines, and activities. She should avoid spicy foods, as they make the baby aggressive and bad-tempered. Goose eggs will make the baby intelligent, and rice wine, herbal medicines, coconut water and beer, will all make it healthy. She should not drink milk or bathe at night, as these make for a fat baby and a difficult delivery. As a cure for morning sickness she should step over her husband, with his permission, which transfers the sickness from her to him. (For a woman to step over a man would normally be a major breach of protocol). The gender of a yet-unborn child can be predicted by standing another baby on the pregnant mother’s stomach and watching the reaction, or by the morning sickness (bad sickness predicts a boy).

Nomad RSI – “90% of [women] give birth at home as health facilities are usually too far away, too expensive or unfriendly. Traditional midwifes, though highly regarded in their communities, are not recognized by authorities [and] are therefore denied access to training and knowledge, such as to recognize complications, and so maternal/child mortalities are far above [inter]national rates.

Most Cambodian babies are delivered at home by the village midwife, assisted by female relatives and friends – men and unmarried girls are not allowed to be present at a birth. For a period after the birth, varying from a few days to a full month, the new mother will lie on a bamboo bed with a fire constantly burning beneath her in a clay pot. This is because she is “cold”, and her heat must be restored. Drafts, which would be cooling, are excluded, and a heated tile or stone is placed on her stomach. During this period she also eats “hot” foods, which were avoided during pregnancy. A wet-nurse will feed the baby for the first three days, but after that breast-feeding is favoured as this makes the baby intelligent and strong.

Great care is taken to ensure that the baby, its mother, and the midwife, all have their full pralung (souls). Prior to the birth a popil will be turned around the pregnant mother to call the baby’s pralung, and after the birth the mother and midwife tie cotton threads to each other’s wrists and ankles to attach their own pralung to their bodies. After the baby is born the midwife will “open the eyes” and “cut the wild hair” of the newborn and call its pralung to leave the forest and enter its body, after which she will tie a cotton thread with a gold ring to one wrist and a plain thread to the other – again, this is to tie the pralung to the body. After this is done the proper offerings will be made to the ancestor-spirits and the child can be given its name.

Copyright Nigel Dickinson, (for his website click on the image) – “Yu Sokna and her baby undergoing “Ang Pleung” – Postpartum heating procedure: After giving birth a woman is carried by her husband to a wood or bamboo bed under which a fire has been built. The women has a bag of ice on her navel. Meanwhile a Traditional Healer or Birth Attendant recites Buddhists texts while walking around the bed to protect the woman from evil spirits. In the past it was considered important to use a certain mix of woods to protect against supernatural forces and produce a smoke that eased the pain of childbirth. …[M]ost women appear to prefer to use charcoal as it is smoke free, but may be more toxic.”

If the birth takes place in a hospital the newborn will be given a spirit-kit of scissors, knife and other objects, and incense will be burnt to call the spirits. When the new parents take the infant home they can draw an X on the wall or on the baby’s forehead to deter evil spirits. One or two weeks later they will take it to the wat, where the monks will say prayers and sprinkle it with holy water and tie a red thread round its wrist, all for its protection. If the infant becomes sick the parents will take it back to the monastery for further blessings and perhaps an amulet to be worn round its neck. This will be in addition to, not in place of, taking it to a doctor or clinic. In both villages and cities the infant’s fontanel will be painted with rice-flour for several months after birth to close up the skull.

World Vision – “Better and more readily available prenatal healthcare in Cambodia has led to a significant drop in deaths from childbirth.”

When the baby is a little bigger its mother from its former life will probably come to play with it. She will be invisible to the new parents, but when she’s present the baby will laugh and smile at nothing, and when she leaves the baby will be sad and cry. The former mother is generally harmless, but sometimes she loves her baby too much and makes it sick, and the new mother will need to make a prayer and ask her to spare the baby because she loves it. If the illness continues or worsens it might mean the previous mother wants to take the baby back to the spirit world; in this case the parents can hold an adoption ceremony with a third party, tricking the former mother into thinking that the infant is not hers after all. This period of supernatural visits and dangers ends at about the twelfth month, and the child enters the next phase of its life.

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

Old traditions are cute, but not necessarily desirable. From the World Vision site: “Sreymao Kun, a midwife at the health center where Sreynin delivered, explains what used to happen without care by a skilled provider.

“Before, most women followed old practices,” she says. “They showered their newborn baby with beer and put paper wasp nest dust on the baby’s navel. And the women were kept warm after delivery with hot coals. And what scared our pregnant women is that there are some women in the community who died because of improper delivery practices from traditional birth attendants at home.”

She continues with a sigh of relief. “But now, pregnant women are more keen to access services at the health center.”

– See more at: http://www.worldvision.org/news/cambodia-more-moms-survive-childbirth#sthash.Kz3NgPeb.dpuf

Samsara: the wheel of becoming

Yama, central courtyard of the National Museum in Phnom Penh. The figure is also known as the Leper King.

Yama, god of death and judgement, attended the Buddha at his Enlightenment. He was there because enlightenment means an end to samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth over which Yama presides.

Yama is present when every man dies, holding up a mirror to the dying soul. In the mirror the soul sees the Six Realms – the three worlds of men, gods and asuras, from which rebirth into a higher realm is possible, and those of animals, demons and hell-beings (ghosts). Death therefore comes before birth, because death is not the end. The soul is about to undertake a journey to the realms of Yama.

What exactly is the soul? The Buddha’s answer is told in the Vacchagotta Sutta. The sage Vacchagotta asked whether the Buddha held that the immortal soul exists. The Buddha remained silent.  Vacchagotta then asked whether the Buddha held that the soul does not exist. The Buddha still remained silent. Vacchagotta got up and went away. Ananda, the Buddha’s favourite disciple, asked the Buddha why he had not answered Vacchagotta. The Enlightened one replied:

“If I had answered, There is a soul, would that be in accordance with my knowledge that all dammas are without Self?”

“Surely not, Sir.”

“And if I had answered: There is no soul? That would have created greater confusion in the already confused Vacchagotta, for he would have thought: Formerly I had a Self, but now I do not.”

Vacchagotta questions the Buddha about metaphysics: “Do you hold that the universe is eternal or not?  Do you say it is finite or infinite?” To each question the Buddha answers “no.” From Metta Dharma Refuge

Buddhism teaches that the cause of rebirth is vinnana, meaning consciousness, or more precisely still, consciousness of self. So long as this exists, rebirth continues, but consciousness of self is a false consciousness, and a self built upon it is a false self.

Popil, a ceremonial candle-holder essential to many ceremonies – the candle is stuck to the disc with its own wax,

Vinnana is a rarefied notion. Ordinary Cambodians talk about pralung. Pralung is that which animates. It is not uniquely human. Animals have it, as do plants and even certain objects. Pralung is multiple – every individual has nineteen, according to the classic texts. Each night the pralung leave the body and each morning they return, and our dreams are the records of their wanderings. A person who has lost consciousness is said to have lost his pralung, and a folktale tells how some little girls lost in the forest are scared out of their minds “as if they had lost their pralung.”

The pralung seem to be rather simple-minded, even gullible. Evil spirits seduce them into the forest with lying promises of a life of luxury and ease, although in fact the wilderness is a place of great danger. If the pralung listen to the voices and wander off their human owner becomes psychically weakened, prone to bad luck and illness.

Hau pralung ceremony – an achar (specialist in ritual) is reading the hau pralung poem.

There is therefore a ritual for calling the pralung back to the body. It involves the incantation of a poem called the Hau Pralung (“Calling the Souls”), one of the oldest works in Khmer literature and the most widely-performed non-Buddhist work in the Khmer language. The poem itself is the most important ingredient in the ritual, but it also involves various symbolic props which appear over and over in Khmer religious ceremonies: balls of sweet sticky rice, cones made of rolled banana leaves, sticks of black sugarcane, and candles tied to leaf-shaped candle-holders called popil. Some of these, like the rice and sugar cane, are symbols of domestic life, but the popil, which is a modern version of the ancient Shiva-linga, is plainly phallic.

Tying threads to an infants wrists to keep its pralung in its body.

A full hau pralung is extremely dramatic. It begins by invoking the protection of the Buddha and all the gods and the tevoda in streams and hills, then warns the pralung of the ghosts and evil spirits in the forest. It appeals to them to come home to “silk mattresses and wool carpets, cushions and pillows,” and ends by welcoming them back to the family. “The nineteen pralung have arrived and are entering their home. After three days of calling I am tying strings around your wrists to unite you with your relatives, old and young, grandmothers and grandfathers. May you recover as of today.”

The two photos above are from Reyum, part of an article reviewing a publication on the Hau Pralung.

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