Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860–1945

8. Holy Trinity: Chuon Nath, Huot Tath, and Suzanne Karpeles

8 Holy Trinity Chuon Nath, Huot Tath, and Suzanne Karpelès It is the first time Cambodian monks have gathered in Paris in such numbers . They are seated in the inner hall of a temple, where barefoot men and women also sit, dwarfed by a statue of Buddha in beatific pose. Their heads are bowed and palms joined in a samp’ea, a gesture of respect that European onlookers will readily translate as prayer. A row of bowls laden with fruits and other offerings separates them from some thirty men, women, and children seated on a rush mat. The women wear crocheted lace tops and silk sampots, the men a mixture of checkered sampots, the cotton scarves known as kramas, and crisp white jackets. Garlands of flowers encircle the sleek black topknots of several girls in the audience—topknots referred to by Thiounn in an early piece he wrote for the Revue Indochinoise on the haircutting ceremony , topknots whose passing from urban Cambodge is mourned in several colonial accounts. A fresco from the Ramayana stretches across one wall, its scenery punctuated by a window overlooking twisted tree trunks and Lake Daumesnil. Drifting through this window, over the tiled rooftops of nearby Vietnamese temples and Angkorean towers, sounds vary daily. On Tuesday it might be a Vietnamese marching band; on Wednesday, Cambodian musicians striking up a tune for the Ramayana procession. Over it all comes the boisterous hum of the crowd, the occasional hollering of a lost child, and, on and off, solemn moments of silence, the sound of a car engine , the slam of a door, and official speeches followed by rapturous applause. There is never a whisper or a fidget from the Cambodians. In their place they stay, partitioned by space and design from Annam, Tonkin, and Cochinchina. Ropes cordon them off from the curious crowd. They have been assembled here to represent Cambodge ’s national religion. They are made of wax. Like many other displays at the dazzling Exposition coloniale of 1931, the neatly bounded scene of waxworks at worship belied a far more complex reality on the ground. Le Cambodge: Intérieur de temple Bouddhiste, reads the caption.1 But in Cambodge , tensions within Cambodge’s sangha are now rife, sparked in part by clashes between the purification campaigns led by Nath, Tath, and other reformists within the Mahanikay and the apparent aspirations among sections of the laity and the sangha for the perpetuation and expansion of a more physical, bodily participation in religion, with the retention of supernatural elements. Since 1927, the establishment of a dynamic, pantheistic, transborder religious movement in the form of the Caodai 184 : Chapter 8 presented an alternative religion to which thousands of Cambodians began to turn. The Caodai embraced a pan-temporal pantheon, situating modern figures—Charlie Chaplin, Victor Hugo, and Joan of Arc—whose name and imagery had circulated in French Indochina, alongside Jesus Christ and Sakyamuni. Part of the attraction, and subversive potential, of the movement resided in its regional character. While FIGURE 8. Le Cambodge: intérieur de temple Bouddhiste. J. Trillat, L’exposition coloniale de Paris, Librairie des Arts Decoratifs, 1931, Plate 15. Holy Trinity : 185 the leadership of Cambodge’s sangha objected to the Caodai movement’s heterodoxy, nationalists objected to its pan-ethnic character, and colonial administrators were chiefly concerned about the movement as precisely that: large movements of people across Cambodge’s cultural and territorial borders. Next to such challenges to European authority and colonial boundaries, the freeze-frame of Cambodian Buddhists at the 1931 exhibition was a more accurate depiction of elite visions of Buddhism-asnational -religion than the contemporary scene. The display of the Parisian tableau roughly marked the first anniversary of a new forum in Cambodge, the Indigenous Institute for the Study of Buddhism of the Little Vehicle. Established by government decree in January 1930 and inaugurated to full ceremony that May, the institute’s mandate was the study of Theravadan Buddhism among the populations of Laos and Cambodge, and among Khmer communities in Cochinchina. Its council included delegates of Lao and Cambodian royalty and the French administrations in Laos, Cambodge, and Cochinchina. But its positioning in the Royal Library, inclusion of the director of the École supérieure de Pali (ESP) on its council, and the appointment of Karpelès as its secretary ensured a strong focus on Cambodge. This impressive array of councilors and the institute’s...