Erik W Davis

Human-fashioned boundaries transform spaces by introducing dualisms, bifurcations, creative symbioses, contradictions, and notions of inclusion and exclusion. The Buddhist boundaries considered in this book, sīmās—a term found in South and Southeast Asian languages and later translated into East Asian languages—come in various shapes and sizes and can be established on land or in bodies of water. Sometimes, the word sīmā refers not only to a ceremonial boundary, but the space enclosed by the boundary, or even the markers (when they are used) that denote the boundary.

Sīmās were established early on as places where core legal acts (kamma), including ordination, of the monastic community (sangha) took place according to their disciplinary codes. Sīmās continue to be deployed in the creation of monastic lineages and to function in diverse ways for monastics and non-monastics alike. As foundations of Buddhist religion, sīmās are used to sustain, revitalize, or reform Buddhist practices, notions of identity, and conceptualizations of time and history. In the last few decades, scholarly awareness of and expertise on sīmās has developed to a point where a volume like this one, which examines sīmās across numerous cultural contexts and scholarly fields of inquiry, is both possible and needed. Sīmā traditions expressed in the Theravāda cultures of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka constitute the dominant focus of the work; a chapter on East Asia raises questions of historical transmission beyond these areas. Throughout contributors engage texts; history; archaeology; politics; art; ecology; economics; epigraphy; legal categories; mythic narratives; understandings of the cosmos; and conceptualizations of compassion, authority, and violence.

Examining sīmās through multiple perspectives allows us to look at them in their contextual specificity, in a way that allows for discernment of variation as well as consistency. Sīmā spaces can be both simple and extremely intricate, and this book helps show why and how that is the case.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cambodia, Erik W. Davis radically recasts attitudes toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism's interactions with local religious practice and, by extension, reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself. Through a vivid study of contemporary Cambodian Buddhist funeral rites, he reveals the powerfully integrative role monks play as they care for the dead and negotiate the interplay of non-Buddhist spirits and formal Buddhist customs.

Radically recasts attitudes toward the nature of Southeast Asian Buddhism’s interactions with local religious practice and reorients our understanding of Buddhism itself.

This chapter pursues three goals: First, to describe and characterize the neakta spirit cult in Cambodia for an Anglophone readership. Within that description, It makes one contribution to the existing characterizations: that despite the description and widespread understanding of this cult as 'ancestral,' both by Khmer and others, the means of coming into relationship with these spirits takes place through an adoptive paradigm. Supplementary to that first point, the chapter characterizes the Cambodian Buddhist idea of moral development as significantly influenced by paradigms of adoption and affiliation into a hierarchical relationship, which is understood to have transformative capacities. Finally, this chapter identifies a diversity of Chinese Cambodian varieties of spirit possession cults, and in so doing modify the important typology of spirit possession in diasporic communities originated by Smith to include the possibility of a relocalized diasporic community.Keywords:Cambodia; Chinese spirit mediums; Khmer spirits; spirit possession rituals

Cambodia Buddhism in a dark age: Cambodian monks under Pol Pot By IAN HARRIS Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2013. Pp. 242. Plates, Notes, Abbreviations and Glossary, Bibliography, Index. Ian Harris passed away in late December of 2014, just as I finished this review. His passing is a loss to Buddhist Studies, and especially to Cambodian Buddhist Studies. Harris's early training was in Buddhist studies; his research into the political aspects of Buddhism led him to realise the dearth of scholarly attention paid to Cambodian Buddhism, and specifically to the impact of the Khmer Rouge revolution on Cambodian Buddhist monks and institutions. This book focuses on that problematic. This book is an important contribution as a resource, collection, and chapter-by-chapter analysis of how Buddhist monks in Cambodia fared under Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) and their successor socialist regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea. The highlights are the painstaking work of collection and narration, rather than a single sustained argument. Undoubtedly this is in part a result of the way in which the book relies on a vertiginous archive of documents of various sorts, from various perspectives, in addition to Harris's own interviews. To the extent that Harris makes an argument throughout the book, it is that 'some elements of Buddhist belief and practice were subsumed into the Khmer Rouge worldview' (p. 139). The finest contributions in the book are those in which Harris sorts through a monumental amount of material to construct several narratives of how Buddhism and Buddhist monks fared before and after Democratic Kampuchea. Although much of this material has been available in other sources, it has been scattered, episodic, and largely in specialist documents, many of which are hard to obtain. As Harris notes in his final chapter, he hopes in part to aid the process of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia) through this effort. Harris's treatment is excellent, and these chapters will help readers understand the complex and diverse ways in which Cambodian Buddhist monks interacted with --and sometimes were--Cambodian communists. Chapter 3, where the book-length argument is first presented, is less successful. As noted earlier, Harris argues that there was a subsumption of Buddhist beliefs and practices into the Khmer Rouge worldview, but it is unclear what this subsumption means, or what Buddhism Harris refers to. If he means that the previously hegemonic worldview, ritual practices, and moral discourse influenced Khmer communism and its discourse, he makes a good case: certainly the Khmer Rouge leadership employed (a distinctly Buddhist discursive tactic of) redefining words with moral values so that true morality was re-coded to mean the new moral and practical norms of Democratic Kampuchea. …

Cambridge Journals Online (CJO) is the e-publishing service for over 270 journals published by Cambridge University Press and is entirely developed and hosted in-house. The platform's powerful capacity and reliable performance are maintained by a combination of our own expertise ...

Page 149. chapter 7 Between Forests and Families: A remembered past life Erik W. Davis In an article that instituted the 'rice-field versus forest'dichotomy as an object of study among students of Cambodia, David Chandler analysed ...