Religion in Southeast Asia: An Encyclopedia of Faiths and Cultures

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KHMER BUDDHISM

Today, some 90 percent of ethnic Khmers declare themselves to be Theravada Buddhists. Islam is practiced by the Cham minority and animist customs are followed by minority groups in the hills. However, prior to the advent of Theravada Buddhism, the Khmer kingdom operated as a Hinduized state. During the Angkorean era (classically said to fall between 802 and 1431 CE), inscriptions tell us that the king’s power was absolute; he was regarded as having unique access to divine power, which he was to channel into the world to ensure the prosperity and power of an extensive militarized empire.

It was during the thirteenth century that Theravada Buddhism took root in Cambodia. Angkorean inscriptions reveal that the Khmer king Jayavarman VII (r. 1181–1218) had been a devout Mahayana Buddhist. During his reign, around 1180, Shin Tamalinda, believed to be a son of Jayavarman VII, joined a Burmeseled mission to Ceylon to study the Pali canon. At this time, Sinhala Theravada Buddhism was gaining influence throughout the region, and by the end of the 1200s, it had spread throughout much of Cambodia.

Unlike Hinduism, which seems to have had little resonance with rural daily life and to have functioned largely as a means to legitimate domination by the nobility, Theravada Buddhism became grafted onto local traditions of ancestor and spirit worship. The new religion was preached rather than imposed upon the people. The previous monopoly on moral authority enjoyed by the king was now moderated by the fact that young village men began to ordain and thereby also to gain religious credentials. With higher ranks of the brotherhood of monks (sangha) connected to the royal court, the king’s power also became subjected to moral imperatives of the 10 Buddhist principles of right governance (Pali dasarajadhamma), that he should embody: generosity, morality, liberality, uprightness, gentleness, self-restraint, non-anger, non-hurtfulness, forbearance, and non-opposition. These new norms of non-egocentrism and considerateness applied to rulers as well as those they ruled. The security of the kingdom was now envisaged as depending upon the protection provided by a monarch who conducted himself in accordance with the teachings of the Buddha. The arrival of this humble, inclusive form of religion coincided with the cessation of the monumental building projects of the Angkorean Empire and the decline of Brahmanic and Mahayana Buddhist religious traditions.

Most of the Theravada Buddhist monks were based in the villages, and this meant that the ecclesiastical structures were decentralized into quasi-egalitarian monastic communities. The village monastery offered a field of merit for villagers, but it also constituted a center for the redistribution of wealth, a library and source of Buddhist knowledge. The pagodas provided primary schooling for boys, care for orphan boys, and a refuge for the elderly, particularly women who could be ordained as laynuns (don chee) by vowing to follow 8 or 10 Buddhist precepts. The pagodas were the foci of social and cultural activities, and although the sangha adapted and reformed over the years, the monks remained strong protectors of local culture and tradition. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Khmer sangha was a major moral and institutional force that offered steadfast resistance to foreign cultural influences. For instance, the monks resisted the French efforts to supplant Buddhist-based education and Khmer as the language of instruction with the French system and reacted vigorously against French efforts to Romanize the Khmer alphabet. From the villagers’ point of view, the pagoda and the sangha represented an important buffer to imposters or the excesses of their own rulers and provided a source of comfort and moral order until 1975.

On February 6, 2003, the Venerable Sam Bunthoeun was shot dead by two men as he was entering the grounds of a temple in central Phnom Penh. He had established a highly successful insight (vipassanā) Meditation Center at Oudong, not far from Phnom Penh. The center offered monks, nuns, and laypeople instruction in this meditation technique. It is believed that he was killed because he encouraged the monks to vote in the elections of 2003. His body was not cremated but instead embalmed and kept in refrigeration at the Oudong center for visitors to witness.

Alexandra Kent

The pivotal cultural position occupied for so long by Buddhism means it has long been an object of concern for Cambodian leaders. Earning moral legitimacy from the monkhood was important for reaching the hearts of the people—as exemplified by Sihanouk’s strategy in the 1960s. This also helps explain why Buddhism was so rapidly dismantled by the Khmer Rouge when they took power in April 1975 and began establishing their new utopian Communist order.

The Khmer Rouge era was unique in breaking apart the religious fundament of Cambodian rural life. Accounts by survivors and historians detail the ways in which the cadres broke down kinship bonds in favor of loyalty to “Angkar” (the party) and tried to erase families’ spiritual traditions. By 1978, Buddhism had been declared dead by Yun Yat, the minister of culture, information, and propaganda of the Democratic Kampuchea regime.

Prior to the Khmer Rouge era of 1975–1979, there were an estimated 88,000 Buddhist monks in the country and around 3,500 monasteries for a population of just over seven million. In general, some three-quarters of men over the age of 17 would likely have spent one or two years in the sangha as novices or monks. The Buddhist sangha was still the major transmitter of Khmer literacy and civility, and indeed, the first Khmer-language newspaper was founded by the Buddhist Institute in 1936, which later became a hotbed of Khmer nationalism.

It is believed that over one-third of monks were executed or forced to disrobe and break their vows by the Khmer Rouge, and many died of starvation and disease. Pagodas were abandoned, razed, damaged, or desecrated. The complete destruction of Buddhism (as well as the spirit realm) meant that the most important traditional resources for managing suffering and grief were no longer available. For many Khmer people, their identity, so tightly bound to Buddhism, was shaken by the inadequacy of their culture both in preventing the horror they experienced and in providing an explanation. Some older Cambodians identify this era as having extinguished the world as they knew it.

After the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 and succeeded in ousting the Khmer Rouge, they set about restarting Buddhism in a bid to earn legitimacy among the Khmers. They selected seven former Khmer monks for re-ordination but thereafter maintained strict control of the sangha. Only men over the age of 50 were permitted to ordain, and monks were forbidden from performing alms rounds. Despite government prohibition, young novitiates were observed in rural areas throughout the 1980s. This betrays something of the importance Buddhism held for rural Cambodians. After only two years, over 700 pagodas had been restored. While there was and still is a heavy investment from local people of labor, time, and resources, much reconstruction was and continues to be heavily sponsored by overseas Khmer or by powerful people from Phnom Penh.

After the Vietnamese withdrawal in 1989, the new government relaxed restrictions on Buddhism and the number of monks increased rapidly, reaching more than 60,000 by the late 2000s. However, in the absence of knowledgeable, experienced older monks, the establishment of legitimacy for novitiates was problematic, and there have been numerous scandals associated with young monks in recent years. Pagoda reconstruction also began in earnest in the early 1990s, though today’s pagodas differ widely. Some perform community services and provide a variety of facilities to their constituency, while others focus on offering “magical” services or meditation, and still others are more or less dormant.

Where lay pagoda committees are lacking, monks themselves may handle money and in so doing break their vows and hazard their reputations. Some monks cultivate their links to politicians as a means of securing donations for their pagodas instead of prioritizing the will of their constituents and pagodas that work together with international Nongovernmental organizations risk being viewed as servants of the international community.

Two factors have also deeply politicized the Cambodian sangha since the fall of the Khmer Rouge. Firstly, the youngest of the monks who were re-ordained in 1979, the Venerable Tep Vong (born in 1930) was subsequently appointed by the Vietnamese as head of a unified Cambodian sangha but was also made a high-ranking official in the People’s Republic of Kampuchea government. Vong is now the supreme patriarch of the larger of the two Cambodian Buddhist orders, but his former connection to the Vietnamese and his close ties to the ruling Cambodian People’s Party undermine his Buddhist credentials for many, who view him as a mouthpiece for the current, Vietnamese-spawned government.

Secondly, when a new constitution was drawn up for Cambodia in 1993, following the withdrawal of the Vietnamese, it included the right of universal adult suffrage, and this included monks. This meant that the Cambodian monastics, instead of representing the Buddhist ideals of equanimity and detachment, now became embroiled in partisan politics. Many pagodas came to bear party colors. However, in 2002, the supreme patriarch, Vong, prohibited monks from voting, ostensibly because this would contravene their religious vows though many understood that it was to contain monastic support for the opposition. In 2006, the patriarch lifted the prohibition but warned monks against participating in any mass movements critical of the government. All these factors undermine the monks’ independence as moral overseers of those with worldly power.

Nevertheless, many restored pagodas have once again become important centers of cultural activity for festivals, death rituals, and merit-making activities. Both the annual festival of the dead (Khmer pchum ben) and the ceremony held at the end of the rainy season retreat (kathin), when parishioners make merit by donating new robes to the monks, are popular. Similarly, the water festival, when the pagodas release their pirogues for racing on the river, is a major annual event. And inside some pagodas, there are extraordinary efforts being made to spiritually heal the disorders that have so brutally disrupted Khmer culture. Although many Cambodians lament the vacuum left by the tragic destruction of Khmer Buddhism, many of those who remember how things used to be still see Buddhism as the storehouse of power to recreate civility and order in their splintered, shared world. Whether the growing ranks of young Cambodians, who were born into a post–Khmer Rouge world of consumerist values will, as they mature, come to accredit Buddhism with this power remains to be seen.

Alexandra Kent

See also: Ancestor Worship; Animism; Buddhism; Cambodia; Hinduism; Islam; Nationalism; Spirit Mediumship; Vietnam; Water Festivals; Women’s Monastic Communities.

KOYAMA, KOSUKE

The Rev. Dr. Kosuke Koyama was a leading Asian Christian theologian during the twentieth century who is specially remembered for his sensitivity to other religions and for his conviction that Christianity should be compatible with the various Asian traditions. Born on December 10, 1929, in Tokyo, Japan, he was baptized as a Christian at the age of 15. Having graduated from Tokyo Union Theological Seminary in 1952, he came to the United States for advanced studies. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Drew University in 1954 and a doctorate from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1959. Koyama was subsequently sent by the United Church of Christ in Japan to be a missionary in Thailand. His tenure in Thailand shaped him as a path-breaking Asian Christian thinker and practitioner who theologized in the context of the local realities.

As a non-Western theologian, Kosuke Koyama outlined an Asian interpretation to world religions. He famously remarked that Buddhism and Christianity do not communicate, but Buddhists and Christians do. Accordingly, he discarded the abstract ideas of world religions and instead freely used Asian terms of ordinary folk, such as rice, banana, cockfighting, and rainy season to convey his message. About Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, Kosuke interpreted: “Looking at us, Jesus would say: you must be tired; let me wash your feet; the food is ready.”

Jesudas M. Athyal

In 1968, Koyama moved to Singapore to become dean of the South East Asia Graduate School of Theology. In Singapore, he was also the editor of the South East Asia Journal of Theology. From 1974 to 1978, he served as the senior lecturer in religious studies at the University of Otago in New Zealand. In 1980, he joined the Union Theological Seminary in New York, where he was the first holder of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Chair in Ecumenics and World Christianity, a position in which he continued until his retirement in 1996. He died on March 25, 2009, in Springfield, Massachusetts, of pneumonia complicated by esophageal cancer.

Koyama represented a paradigm shift in Christian theology that affirmed that the starting point of theology must be people’s own experience. He wrote 13 books, which outline his conviction that the Christian Gospel must communicate with the cultures and religions of each context. His most well-known book, Water Buffalo Theology, emerged out of his efforts to communicate the Christian message to the farmers in northern Thailand—who cultivate fields with water buffalo—as he served as a missionary and teacher there from 1960 to 1968. He made the book’s case in poetic, not academic, language and placed the challenge of the Gospel squarely in the middle of the plurality of Asian religions. In a climate where interfaith dialogue was becoming fashionable in intellectual circles, he noted that dialogue is not between Christianity and Buddhism, but rather between Christians and Buddhists. Beyond the Aristotelian roots of Western theology and epistemology, he discerned the everyday challenges faced by a Thai farmer as the location of theology. The “frog croaking” and “mosquito humming” in the paddy fields of northern Thailand became, for him, the context of theology. It was an intensely contextualized and particular way of seeking the meaning of faith.

Koyama’s book No Handle on the Cross is a meditation from Southeast Asia in which he argues that Asians—Christians as well as Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus—are beginning to realize that Western Christianity has preached a gospel without the cross. Jesus did not carry his cross as a businessman carries his briefcase, he noted. While we would like to domesticate and control the cross, in actuality, it is awkward and clumsy to carry. The meaning and the message of the cross, therefore, is that the broken Christ is trying to heal a broken world. This reality should be realized, Koyama concluded, in the midst of the awkward and harsh realities of Asia. His other books include Fifty Meditations and Theology in Contact (1975), Mount Fuji and Mount Sinai (1984), Pilgrim or Tourist (1974), and Three-Mile-an-Hour God (1978).

Despite his focus on the “particular” in contextual theology, Koyama acknowledged that theology’s particularity can flourish only if it maintains a dialectical linkage with the wider theological and ecumenical world. Accordingly, he became an influential voice for ecumenism, speaking at conferences around the world and teaching classes on Buddhism, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. He believed that he had a mission to teach about different religious traditions because it was the Christian thing to do.

Koyama’s lasting contribution in the Southeast Asian context can be described as helping to bridge the boundaries between East and West, between the various religious traditions. About his own faith, he had noted that while Christianity came to Asia in the garb of Western culture and philosophy, to appeal to the Asian people, the Gospel must take indigenous roots. Koyama will be remembered as an important figure in the development of a contextual Asian theology.

Jesudas M. Athyal

See also: Buddhism; Christianity; Christian Conference of Asia; Contextualization; Hinduism; Interreligious Relations and Dialogue; Islam; Singapore; Thailand.

KYAW THAN, U

U Kyaw Than, popularly addressed as Kyaw Than, is perhaps the best-known Christian from Myanmar (Burma) in the ecumenical and Christian circles in many parts of the world. He represented his country and the churches in Myanmar for well over 60 years at Asian and global ecumenical and church gatherings. His books and articles, and his lectures in many parts of the world, cover the subjects of ecumenism, mission, church unity and the role of Christians in the university.

Kyaw Than was born on December 17, 1923, in Pakokku, Myanmar. After graduating with honors from the University of Yangon, he served on its faculty while earning his master’s degree. In 1981, in recognition of the contributions he had made as professor and lay ecumenical leader, the Senate of the South East Asia Graduate School of Theology (SEAGST) conferred on him the doctor of divinity degree in church history.

Kyaw Than’s ecumenical career began when he was appointed the associate general secretary of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) in 1950, a position he held with distinction until 1956. In this capacity he traveled to universities in Europe, United Kingdom, North America, Australia, and New Zealand. He also engaged actively in ecumenical leadership training of undergraduate students in Asia.

His involvement in the Asian ecumenical scene began when he was invited to succeed the late bishop R. E. Manikam as the joint East Asia secretary of the International Missionary Council (IMC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC). He was an active participant in the organization of the first meeting, in Prapat, Indonesia, of the East Asia Christian Conference (EACC), which later became the Christian Conference of Asia (CCA). At the EACC’s first assembly in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (1959), he was elected associate general secretary, and in 1968 he succeeded D. T. Niles as general secretary and served in this position until after the fifth Assembly of the EACC in Singapore in 1973.

His global ecumenical involvement was enhanced when he was elected to the Central Committee of the WCC at the fifth WCC Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1975. He was later elected to the Executive Committee of the Central Committee and served the council until 1992. He was also invited to chair the History Working Group of the WSCF to produce a centenary publication edited by Philip Potter.

Kyaw Than served as visiting professor of mission at the Yale Divinity School in the United States and at the Vancouver School of Theology in Canada (1974–1976). Following this, he became the William Paton Fellow at Selly Oak Colleges in Birmingham, United Kingdom. In 1978, he returned to Myanmar to teach at the theological schools on Seminary Hill, Insein, until 1984. He was also appointed as director of the Training Institute for Christian Participation in National Development (TICPIND) by the National Council of Churches in Myanmar with special responsibility for the development of the Chins, an ethnic minority in the northwestern border region.

Since 1984, Kyaw Than has been serving at the Mahidol University, Thailand, the University of Oregon, and the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, Illinois. He is also active in Buddhist-Christian relations and dialogue. Very few if any of the Christians in the Southeast Asian region, have served the church and the ecumenical community for so long and so well.

S. Wesley Ariarajah

See also: Buddhism; Christianity; Christian Conference of Asia; Indonesia; Interreligious Relations and Dialogue; Malaysia; Myanmar (Burma); Singapore; Thailand.

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KHMER BUDDHISM

Further Reading

KOYAMA, KOSUKE

Further Reading

KYAW THAN, U

Further Reading