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1 introduCtion In the course of writing this book, I began to realize that it was, in part, a semiconscious homage to Holmes Welch’s very fine Buddhism under Mao. While I cannot claim that author’s experience or breadth of knowledge, I intend that this offering will, however imperfect, stand as a memorial to the many Cambodian Buddhist monks and laypeople, both named and unknown, who lost their lives or had their futures traumatically altered by the tragedy that overwhelmed their country in the 1970s. The choice to present periodic lists of personal names and places in the form of a litany reflects this. Although this may appear repetitious, it has been done for a specific purpose and, I hope, will require no apology. The period covered in this study extends to either side of Democratic Kampuchea, the catastrophic regime that exercised power in Cambodia from April 1975 until January 1979. Early in my research Ven. Tep Vong, the country’s most senior monk, sought to convince me that any inquiry into the crimes committed on such a massive scale by the communists should not neglect the significance of the overthrow of Sihanouk in March 1970.1 This perspective derives, in part, from Tep Vong’s own role as a significant participant in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), Democratic Kampuchea’s successor regime. But it would be remiss of me to ignore another essential ingredient in his thinking. This is linked to a traditional Buddhist perception that the security of the state requires the protective presence of a monarch carrying out his responsibilities in accord with the Buddha’s teachings. Whatever members of the international community and the Cambodian intelligentsia of the late 1960s may have thought, the vast bulk of the Cambodian population, especially those living in the countryside , regarded Sihanouk as precisely such a righteous ruler. His ousting as head of the state, then, was envisioned in cosmological terms, and Buddhist traditionalists interpreted his downfall in an apocalyptic manner. Through 2 Introduction this one act the entire structure of Cambodian political life, together with the natural environment in which it was situated, would be fatally disrupted. As a scholar of Buddhism, I am not unsympathetic to this reading of Cambodia’s recent history, but I think that there are other equally important reasons for beginning a study of Buddhism under Pol Pot at a much earlier stage than the start of the Democratic Kampuchea period. The most significant of these is that almost immediately after Sihanouk’s fall the new government of the Khmer Republic began to lose large swaths of the country to the communist insurgents who would come to be known as the Khmer Rouge. As the Lon Nol–led regime continued its fitful existence, so the proportion of the country under Phnom Penh’s control shrank rapidly to little more than some of the major towns and the road corridors connecting them with the capital. Meanwhile, in the “liberated areas” controlled by the Khmer Rouge the extreme policies that were to come to the outside world’s attention in the late 1970s were already being tried out. Manipulation and repression of the Buddhist monastic order, allied to a cruelly antipathetic attitude to the faith and practice of the laity, commenced in some regions of the country almost five years before the beginning of Democratic Kampuchea. If we are to understand the regime’s mature policy on the question of religion, we must begin our study at its very inception. The Democratic Kampuchea period was relatively short-lived. It came to an end, at least as far as the control of Phnom Penh and the apparatus of national government was concerned, in early January 1979, when the National Front for the Salvation of Kampuchea, supported by the military and political resources of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, invaded the country. The PRK was established soon after and lasted until the end of the following decade, when, largely as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vietnam was obliged to withdraw its economic support. Given the horrors of the previous period, it might be supposed that the PRK would have garnered an overwhelming degree of popular support. But this was not so, for the new government was backed by a neighboring state that had come to be regarded by many as Cambodia’s traditional enemy. For this reason the PRK had to work hard to establish its legitimacy, and one of the...

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