Pagoda problems: the decline of Buddhism in Cambodia

By: Euan Black

In 1959, May Mayko Ebihara became the first American to write an anthropological dissertation on Cambodian village life. Published in two volumes nearly a decade later, Svay: A Khmer Village in Cambodia depicted a pre-modern agricultural idyll governed by family and religion, in which monks were seen as the “living embodiments and spiritual generators of Buddhism”. However, rapid economic development has led to a dramatic restructuring of social relations within the Kingdom. Urbanisation is siphoning people away from rural life, modernity is slowly consuming tradition, and more and more Cambodians are turning their backs on the monkhood.

“Buddhism is not strong like before,” said Bunsin Chuon, a monk since 1996 who splits his time between the US and Wat Langka in Phnom Penh. “People have happier lives now because technology is so advanced, and fewer people want to become monks because to be a monk is not a happy life.”

Before the Khmer Rouge, pagodas served as the moral, educational and cultural hub of village life and thus enjoyed a prominent position within society. Writing in Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860 – 1945, the historian Penny Edwards describes how the monkhood, or sangha, “offered one of the few paths to power outside of birthright”, with completion of at least one Buddhist Lent in the monastery considered a male rite of passage. Boys would enter the monkhood as teenagers, learn about Buddhism and Khmer culture, then return to adult life.

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