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.

 

“Sprit Worlds” reviewed in Phnom Penh Post

Review of “Spirit Worlds” in the Phnom Penh Post.Book launch 8 November at the Kampot Writers and Readers Festival (click link for program of the festival), midday, Baraca restaurant, Kampot.

The evolution of the gods

20th century fairy. The older version was very different – no wings, malevolent, and more inclined to baby-snatching than wish-granting.

How god evolved. Almost all cultures believe in simple spirits who are responsible for the unexplained; only some believe in a “High” or “King” god who takes an active role in the world as the source of human morality. To put that in a Western context, spirits like the fairies would turn your milk sour or replace your baby with a changeling (a good explanation for Downs syndrome children), while God with a capital G threatened you with eternal damnation for coveting your neighbour’s wife.

Did moralistic “high” gods evolve to enforce cooperation within the group? (“do as we say or God will get you!”) Or were they a tool of the rich and powerful to control the plebs? (“God made me your leader, so you better listen up!”) The idea in either case is not that the High God was invented, but that he arose naturally, was found useful, and so thrived. (He was, in fact, a “meme,” the cultural equivalent of a gene, and subject to the same laws of natural selection).

Jehovah, the great I AM

Two anthropologists set out to test the first of these alternatives (that “high” gods foster cooperation). They examined 178 cultures to see whether larger and more complex ones were more likely to have “high” gods than smaller and simpler societies. For their purposes, “large” meant more than 1,000 individuals, and “complex” meant farming and pastoralism, since these require high levels of cooperation, although pastoral communities are typically smaller than farming ones. The results turned out as follows:

Amongst foragers – who can easily gather enough food with minimal co-operation between individuals – 88% had either no “high” god or a “high” god which did not bestow morals and did not interact with the world. At the other extreme of the scale, ~40% of groups dependent on intensive agriculture had a “high” god who interfered with the world and gave morals to the group.

The relationship between group size and belief in a high god.

To put that a different way, only 12% of egalitarian (foraging) groups had a “high” god who insisted on morality and intervened in human affairs, but 40% of societies with a class system/wealth distinctions did, rising to 80% among pastoralists (looking after animals requires even more cooperation than growing crops).

Conclusion: large societies dependent on cooperation give rise to “high-god” religions because they’re socially useful.

The article then touches very briefly on the evolution of religion in the present and future:

Co-operation will likely remain the foundation of civilisation but a “high” god may not. Secularity is rising in many countries – arguably for good reason – but we mustn’t forget that religion once played a key role in many societies. We must be sure that we do not loose the glue which binds us together and be sure to develop secular ways of ensuring humanity continues to work together.

The British bobby, suspected of complicity in the death of God.

I’m not sure that secularism is really so universal in modern societies, but I think it might be said that where the “high” god of European culture (commonly called simply God) has withered away, it’s when his function has been usurped by the rule of law and an efficient bureaucracy – in other words, in those Western countries where the citizens can rely on a police force and a public service that between them will provide the social and personal benefits once enforced by God. The one major Western society which more or less missed out on these two things is the United States. You might object, but compared to Europe, American police are violent and untrusted (think Ferguson) and the government provides nothing like a reliable social safety net.

And what about Cambodia? Some 80% of Cambodians live in villages, and the villagers rely on wet rice, which requires high levels of cooperation, which would predict the presence of a “high” god. But the villages are also pretty egalitarian, with little distance between rich and poor (this is changing with the rise of a class of villagers with urban connections – urban subsidies produce rural inequalities), which would tend to undermine “high” gods. So Cambodian village religion should be somewhere in between the “high god” model and the “spirit religion” model.

Pchum Ben at Wat Langka, Phnom Penh.

And, without having looked too closely at the evidence (meaning I might be wrong), it seems it is. The Buddha is not, of course a god, but in practice many Cambodians treat him as one. People worship and pray in front of his image, and he’s the source of a sort of morality – do good in this life or else you’ll have a bad reincarnation in your next with a nasty stint in hell in between. But his moral authority is pretty weak – it operates at the level of the individual, not the group, meaning that there’s no organised religious authority, like the Church or whatever the Muslim equivalent is called, to enforce this god’s decrees. If you disobey Buddhist morality you’ll be punished by karma in the next world or life, not by the priests in this one.

Village neak ta shrine – the neak ta are the ancestral spirits.

But the entire spirit world, or almost all of it, is equally moral – the village neak ta, the meba (family ancestors), the araks (more generalised village ancestors), even the little fairy-like mrieng kongveal who look after animals, all enforce morality. They do it very effectively, too – girls won’t have sex before marriage “because the meba are watching,” and farmers forebear from mistreating their cows for fear of being struck down with a stomach-ache by the mrieng kongveal. The monks might not come and get you in this life, but the spirits will.

And if I’m right about the link between secularism and the rise of impartial law and bureaucracy, then religion is likely to endure in Cambodia, because one thing Cambodia does not have is a police force and bureaucracy that work. But whether that religion will continue to be Buddhism, I cannot tell. All I can say with some confidence is that God and the gods will continue to evolve, as they have always done.

Cambodian nativity setting – from Global Christian Worship. The five figures from right to left rear (three wise men and two angels?) wear the traditional costume of Cambodian gods.

Gods, ghosts and demons

Offerings to the spirits on a major feast-day

A little dictionary of some of the more important Cambodian supernatural beings (my preferred spelling first, followed by alternatives I’ve come across):

Araks (areaks): Ancestral spirits that live in fields and trees around the village. Traditionally a village shaman, the kru araks, would enter a trance during which villagers could ask them for advice, but this seems to be dying out – I only came across one in six months of searching and she was 90 years old. Nevertheless, farmers will still leave some of their midday meal in the field for the araks. They are easily angered, and punish those who cross them with illness.

Arp (ap, arb): A witch, although often called a vampire. By day an ordinary woman, though identifiable by her haggard face and bloodshot eyes, at night her body waits at home while her head flies around spreading sickness and bad dreams. She has parallels in many other Southeast Asian cultures – how did this cultural meme spread so widely?

Boramey: High spirit-beings who help humans with their problems. Many villages and towns have kru boramey, shamans (usually women) who enter into a trance and are possessed by a boramey. They seem to be replacing the village araks and kru-araks throughout Cambodia.

Bray (priay): A female demon (almost all the demons seem to be female), the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. She is the most malevolent of all demons, but can be tamed by those who understand the correct ritual, in which case she becomes a powerful protective spirit. Buddha images and the boats used in the annual Water Festival boat races are protected by bray.

Chumneang pteah (in Phnom Penh dialect, ch’neang teah): The protective spirit of the house. One of very few spirits who are wholly benevolent. Her shrine is always placed on the floor, and offerings of flowers and fruit (and cans of coke) should be left there on the four holy days of each month (these days are marked on religious calendars, and every house will hang this calendar near the shrine). In village houses she inhabits a particular pillar, usually the main house pillar, and there’s a special ceremony to ask her to protect new houses.

Chumneang pteah shrine – despite the Chinese appearance, it’s Khmer.

Kmouch (kmout): The ghost of someone who died a violent or unexpected death. The kmouch is not aware of its status and wishes to return to the world of the living. Monks and kru know the ritual for sending a kmouch away, but it should never be destroyed, which would be the equivalent of murder – it’s capable of going to hell and eventually returning to another life.

Meba: The family ancestor-spirits. They take a particular interest in marriages and births: they have to be offered some of the wedding feast, and should be informed when the new bride becomes pregnant, and again when she is delivered. They are highly moral and highly conservative, and will punish any girl (but not boy) who has sex before her wedding (my informants were of parent-age – somebody really should study this in detail from the viewpoint of teenagers). An interesting point that I came across in interviews, and have never found in written sources, is that I was repeatedly told that the meba are ancestors by birth, not blood – they’re reincarnation-ancestors. This video plays meba-music from a Khmer wedding (after the ad). https://www.youtube.com/embed/_heYQhcZL8Y” target=”_blank”>

Mrieng kongveal: Little child-spirits, the protectors of most domestic and some wild animals (domestic animals destined to be killed and eaten get no protection, nor do wild animals that are hunted). They normally live in the trees around the fields, but they like to play with human children, and they have the useful ability to give gifts to adults. For this reason they often have house-shrines, in the form of a flat-bottomed basket with a little bamboo house. The shrine should hang from a bush or nail in the wall, and should never touch the ground. Their offerings are toys and sweets.

Mrieng kongveal shrine

Neak ta: The village ancestor. Almost every village will have a neak ta shrine, often with a statue of the ancestor, or possibly a rock or shiva linga (the neak ta is the only spirit who is represented in physical form – the shrines of the tevoda and chumneang pteah are empty, and although the mrieng kongveal shrine often has little toy children in it, these don’t actually represent the mrieng).  He represents fertility and social order, and once a year he has a village festival at which the village boundaries are rehearsed and his blessings invoked.

Village neak ta shrine, Takeo province – from Alison in Cambodia

In addition to the village-level neak ta there are also “wild” neak ta who own the hills and forests and other unsettled places, and anyone entering their lands must ask permission. And finally there are the “great” neak ta who have charge of entire regions and provinces. Unlike the “wild” and village neak ta these have names and histories – the one pictured below is called Red Neck. The red colours (his turban and scarf) and his beard and moustache mark his Indian/brahmanical origins – the colour or Buddhism is yellow, and Buddha and Buddhist deities are clean-shaven.

Neak ta Red Neck at the Angkorean temple of Chisor, near Phnom Penh.

Praet: A ghost that died a good death and is now in hell. Hell is far from pleasant, but it’s the right place for ghosts and the only place where they can prepare for their next life. Praet, like kmouch, are eternally hungry – they have tiny mouths and huge stomachs, and can eat only filth. Once a year they return to the world of the living and their relatives feed them at the temples – this is the festival of Pchum Ben, the most important in Cambodia.

Hungry ghosts from Thailand – they look the same in Cambodia.

Preah phum: The name means something like “holy earth,” and it represents the entire village, including its fields and ponds and groves. Its shrine is a little house on a pillar, very like the tevoda shrine but with one significant architectural difference: the tevoda shrine has a roof with a spire, indicating that this is the home of a goddess (compare to the spire on the roof of the monastery prayer-hall and on the royal palace), but the preah phum roof does not, as preah phum is not a god. Phreah phum is extremely important to the psychic health of the village, and there are special ceremonies to “centre” him in times of trouble, such as epidemics or droughts. This village preah phum involves quite a different-looking shrine made of four posts in a square with a fifth in the centre.

The shrine of a village preah phum ceremony, constructed when calling the spirit of the village land. From Khmer Renaissance

Tevoda: Like the chumneang pteah,  a protective house-sprit, but unlike the chumneang she’s a goddess. Associated particularly with the annual New Year festival, her shrine is the little toy temple on a pillar outside the house. This should be placed in a corner of the house-yard, facing the door of the house but not in front of it. The offerings vary from year to year, as there’s a new tevoda each year. I’ve also heard of what seems to be another sense of tevoda, a sort of messenger of the spirit-world, but have no information about this. The shrine itself is called rean tevoda, a “tevoda shelf.”

The first monk’s tale (Wat Preah Yu Vong)

Wat Preah Yu Vong is one of my favourite monasteries in Phnom Penh, not least because it’s utterly atypical. The main gate is on Norodom Boulevard south of Independence Monument. The gate is never closed, and indeed can’t be closed, because only the decorated arch remains. It gives on to what looks like, and is, a network of narrow residential alleys. I’m told the alleys are unsafe, the haunt of drug addicts and petty criminals, but it looks peaceful enough at mid-morning, a time when evil-doers are still in bed.

Once upon a time Wat Preah Yu Vong was just like any other monastery, neither particularly famous nor particularly obscure, housing the normal number of monks in the normal complement of buildings. Everyone, monks and nuns and temple boys and cats, lived happily together until fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975. The Khmer Rouge were the enemies of religion, and the monks of Wat Preah Yu Vong, like all others, were disrobed and sent to labour camps, where no doubt most of them died.

Phnom Penh fell again, this time to the Vietnamese and renegade ex-Khmer Rouge, on 7 January 1979, a date that continues to be celebrated as Victory Day. Traumatised Cambodians began making their way back to the city, searching for lost families and lost homes or simply for food. The first to arrive squatted in whatever houses they could find; if the true owners returned later they could either fight for their rights or just move on. Mostly they moved on. People began living in parks, along the river, and wherever else they could find a place and build a home from sheets of tin and plastic. One of these was places was the abandoned Wat Preah Yu Vong.

A former nun named Koma Pich made her home in the preah vihear. Koma Pich was the chul rup (human vehicle) for a boramey spirit, or in other words, a shaman. She installed her gods (meaning their statues) in the preah vihear and offered help and advice to anyone in need, which in those days was practically everyone. Her performance as a shaman was electrifying, and so great was the respect in which she was held, and so entrenched her position, that when monks returned to the wat they were unable to expel her. The vihear was simply divided in half, the monks on one side and Koma Pich on the other.

At first the government placed severe restrictions on the monks, not even allowing them to leave the monastery for the daily alms round, but time and the political tide were on their side. By the late 1980s religion was being viewed with official favour again, and the head monk asked the authorities to give back the temple. The authorities agreed, and Koma Pich packed her gods and vanished from history.

With the vihear back in their hands the monks installed new Buddha images (the originals had disappeared, nobody knew when or where) and painted scenes from the life of Buddha on the walls so that it became a proper temple again. But the grounds remained overrun with squatters. They’d subdivided the monastic buildings and built them into their houses, turned the paths into alleys, planted gardens and set up teashops, and generally transformed Preah Yu Vong into an urban village. Even the chedey, the shrines for the ashes of the dead, had disappeared inside people’s living rooms, ghosts or no ghosts. The monks tried to buy up the houses, but the price of real estate had started to rocket, the monks were poor, and nobody wanted to sell.

And that’s where things remain today, a single ornate roof sheltering a handful of monks floating over a sea of quite solid little houses.

Wat Preah Yu Vong now has just nine monks, a very small number for a monastery in Phnom Penh, and its history was told to me by one of them, Thach Panith. As his mixed Vietnamese-Khmer name indicates, he’s Kampuchea Krom, meaning an ethnic Khmer from southern Vietnam, although his parents settled in Cambodia long ago. They placed him in a village monastery as a temple boy when he was very young because they couldn’t afford to feed and educate him, and he liked the monastic life and became a novice at the age of 15. Eventually he became a full monk, graduated from Buddhist high school, and moved to the capital and Wat Preah Yu Vong. He’s now studying archaeology at the Royal University of Fine Arts. He enjoys the subject and wants to study more and use his knowledge to benefit society.

When he gets sick he prays to Preah Put (the Buddha) and to his dead parents. Belief in spirits and the ancestors, he says, predates Buddhism, and the people can’t forget them. For this reason he doesn’t criticise people who follow different religions or who believe in spirits, and he can’t say these people are bad or wrong, because he’s met people who say they’ve seen the mrieng kongveal and the chumneang pteah, although he never has himself, and he thinks they spoke the truth for them. He enjoys the life of a monk, the prayer and study and meditation, and has no thought of leaving the monkhood.

Pralung Pheakdey (“Spirit of Honesty”) is different. He’s 23, and he’s been a monk for six years. An orphan of sorts, he was brought up by his grandmother in a village in Kandal province and entered the monkhood because he wanted to earn merit for his lost mother, and also because a kru told him that his mother would come back if he became a monk.

His mother disappeared when he was eight years old. He can’t remember her, but people in the village have told him she might have gone to Thailand to look for work. He can’t remember her face. His father divorced his mother about the time he was born. He knows his father but has never spoken to him and doesn’t want to. His father, he says, was irresponsible, gave him life and then abandoned him. He’s not certain if will be a monk forever, because he doesn’t like public speaking, and monks have to do a lot of public speaking, such as giving sermons.

One final point about the urban village of Wat Preah Yu Vong: it’s northern edge runs along street 308, which is rapidly becoming hipster central for a certain segment of the expat community. One of the best pizza places in town is there, and an entire alley off 308 and within the Preah Yu Vong village is now lined with extremely stylish bars. Real estate values here really should rocket, but they can’t because nobody has valid land titles – they’re all squatters.

*

From Spirit Worlds, out in August at a bookshop near you, provided you live in Cambodia. If you can’t wait to hear more about monks, you can sneak a preview look at the Second Monk’s Tale and the Third Monk’s Tale.