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4 Colonialism and Its Demerits Bringing Buddhism to Book, 1863–1922 The identification and authentication of a national religion, or sasana-jiet, for Cambodge was a complex process. Khmer monks, sponsors of reform within the Khmer court, French-educated notables, and French scholars and museologists collectively mapped the contours of a particular type of Buddhism as the national religion in textual and material realms. The most prominent architects of this transformation were Chuon Nath (1883–1969) and Huot Tath (1891–1975). Widely iconized in Khmer temples today, by the early 1940s Nath and Tath had emerged as leading figures of the Khmer nationalist movement. Intellectual curiosity led them in unorthodox directions. They were already in their twenties when they met the Indologist Louis Finot, one of several talented French scholars who would play a major role in leading this reformist group from the intellectual margins of Khmer Buddhism into an institutional mainstream.1 Ordained in the mass-based Mahanikay sect, Nath and Tath applied their own readings of Pali scriptures in sermons criticizing what they saw as the laxness of older members of the order and their departure from the “authentic” Buddhist discipline laid out in the Pali canon.2 Nath and Tath sought to make the Buddhist dhamma intelligible and accessible to laypeople and novice monks through the translation and publication of religious texts. A critical facet of this process, and one that gave Cambodge’s nascent nationalism a linguistic dimension cordoning it off from Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, was the publication of such texts in modern print form and the linked promotion of a national language (piesaa-jiet)—that is, Khmer.3 During the 1910s and 1920s, Tath’s and Nath’s keen intelligence and moral probity stimulated a reevaluation and reform of the principles and practices of the Mahanikay. In their embrace of modern scientific methods of scholarship, their emphasis on the Pali canon, and their rejection of superstition, Chuon Nath and Huot Tath drew partly on the Thommayuth traditions of Buddhist scholarship laid down by Prince Mongkut in early- to mid-nineteenth-century Siam. In some ways, their reaction to modernity can be likened to Son Diep’s and Thiounn’s accommodations to a changing order. Emerging from within the Mahanikay , Nath and Tath’s reform movement stressed the value of personal engagement with, and reflection on, the Buddha’s teachings. Their adoption of imported media (the printed book) and accommodation of Orientalist conceptualizations of religion contrasted strongly with the shape and aims of late-nineteenth-century millenarian 96 : Chapter 4 movements: whereas modernity’s promise of other ways of seeing and being stirred Nath and Tath, others responded to it as presenting a threat. Led by charismatic religious leaders termed neak-mien-bon (those possessing merit), who linked their religious authority to prophecies and Buddhist texts predicting the birth of the epoch of the Buddha to come, Maitreya, and the ideal of the cakkavattin, or wheel-turning dhamma king associated with Maitreya’s epoch, Cambodge’s millenarian movements were born out of the cosmological dislocation associated with modernity. As Hansen writes, their millenarian nature resided in the belief that “in the midst of social turmoil, the arising of a righteous leader would usher in a new golden age of justice and dhamma, paving the way for the coming of Buddha.” As in British Burma and northeast Thailand, these movements were dismissed as banditry and were criminalized and ridiculed for their espousal of magic and amulets, but they may also be read as early organized, political responses to colonial occupation. Bloody confrontations resulted when millenarian followers armed primarily with protective tattoos, amulets , and mantras were slaughtered by conventionally armed government troops.4 Nath and Tath were quartered in Vat Ounaloum and had moved to the capital at a dynamic period in its transformation to a modern colonial city, complete with printing presses, secular schools, and monuments and buildings in the “national style.” Their movement emerged at a critical juncture in the growth of colonial education. In allowing for a synergy between the sciences taught in the colonial curriculum, in offering a more stimulating and engaged approach to Buddhist texts than that employed in traditional Mahanikay monasteries, and in making those texts available in Khmer, Nath and Tath’s reform movement provided a vital stimulus to Buddhism, most importantly through its appeal to youth. In their desire to define the “new” and fashion the future through a reversion to the purity of the past, Nath and Tath...

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