In this luminous, challenging, closely argued book, Ashley Thompson offers a new set of readings of early Cambodian history, connecting them in her final substantive chapter to certain ritual practices in Cambodia today. Thompson seeks “to develop theoretical paradigms out of locally determined, culturally idiomatic materials” (p. 64). She also writes that “this involves thinking again and again about ways to access the ‘Cambodian’ perspectives on Cambodian history” (p. 141). To achieve these goals, she draws on a range of postmodernist writings, anthropological theories, and her own fieldwork in Cambodia.
Throughout Engendering the Buddhist State, Thompson explores the interplay between Sanskrit and vernacular culture in Cambodia's past. In doing so, she draws admiringly, but with some caveats, on Sheldon Pollack's notion of a Sanskrit cosmopolis whereby South Asian alphabets, deities, and forms of governance entered Southeast Asia in a process that earlier writers called “Indianization.” In the Cambodian case, what happened was a bloodless, millennium-long, negotiated mission civilisatrice that imposed a certain kind of sovereignty (kingly, literate in Sanskrit, and empowered by “Indian” gods) onto specific territory (subaltern, Khmer-speaking, and crowded with local spirits). The process also involved what Thompson calls the “inventions” of Angkor. This process began in the early ninth century CE, discussed in detail in pages 21–70, which deal with the ritualized constitution of Angkor under Jayavarman II (r. 802–35 CE).
More than one thousand years later, the process resumed in a different form when colonial-era French savants “discovered” Angkor and bequeathed their readings of it, almost devoid of women, to the world and the Cambodian people. Over the years, these scholars deciphered more than one thousand stone inscriptions written in Sanskrit, Khmer, and (rarely) Pali to construct a sequence of otherwise unremembered kings. They studied the temples and sculpture to establish a sequence of artistic styles and officially sanctioned religious practices and beliefs. By and large, they privileged the Sanskrit inscriptions that dealt with kings, religious matters, and high officials and neglected or underplayed the Khmer-language ones that dealt with mundane issues, local gods, and ordinary people. As they did so, the French informed the Cambodians under their protection that they were descendants of the people who had built Angkor, but they did not look for any connective tissue between the “children” whom they governed and the “vanished” empire that they admired.
In chapter 2, “Sculptural Foundations: The Linga and Yoni” (pp. 23–71), my favorite in the book, Thompson works at close range with Paul Mus's iconic essay “India Seen from the East” (1933) to demonstrate, among other things, that the sculptured linga yoni ensemble, rather than the linga by itself, as stressed by Mus, is crucial to understanding early Cambodian history and certain rituals during and after the Angkorian interlude. For Thompson, the ensemble provides some of the connective tissue I have mentioned as well as a continuous, powerful image of “a god exercising dominion over the land [and] the earth womb giving birth to the community” (p. 100).
Mus was often ahead of his time and in his 1933 essay, he sensed continuities between the distant past and the vestigially Hindu Cham people in central Vietnam with whom he worked in the early 1930s. Near the end of his essay, he writes: “Beside their huts the womenfolk still recount the exploits of Indra, although sometimes in unexpected guise” (quoted in Thompson, p. 101). Thompson singles out this sentence and its womenfolk for special praise. In doing so, she benefits, without saying as much, from a sea-change that overtook Angkorian studies in the early 1990s, when Cambodia reopened to the outside world. At the time, many scholars turned away from elite-sponsored inscriptions and imposing buildings toward multidisciplinary work—including substantial digs—that moved the inhabitants of Angkor and their accomplishments onto center stage.
The process accelerated when scholars connected with the University of Sydney and the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient mapped the Angkorian landscape. Using radar-enhanced aerial photography or LIDAR, they came up with the thrilling finding that in its twelfth-century heyday, “Angkor” was a low-density urban complex that was home to almost one million people, including some 4,500 living on gridded streets within the moat of Angkor Wat. These are the people who built the Angkorian temples, dug the reservoirs and canals, carved the linga-yoni ensembles, dealt with local spirits, raised their families, and grew rice. Their descendants inhabit Cambodia today. The welcome efforts to repopulate Angkor provide a backdrop and a rationale for Thompson's empathetic longue durée approach.
In chapter 3, “Bodily Remains” (pp. 71–110), Thompson examines a fascinating, badly damaged inscription from the twelfth- or early thirteenth-century temple of Phimeanakas, composed in Sanskrit by Indradevi, a senior wife of King Jayavarman VII (r. 1178–1220?). The inscription contains an impassioned, devoutly Buddhist eulogy of Indradevi's younger sister Jayarajadevi, a pious princess who had also been married to Jayavarman VII. The inscription is the only one in the Cambodian corpus that was written by and about a woman. Thompson's close analysis of the text, presented in full, forms an imposing centerpiece for her book.
Chapter 4, “The Fate of the Linga-Yoni Ensemble” (pp. 145–73), takes us into the middle period of Cambodian history that stretched from the demise of Angkor in the 1400s to the colonial era that began in 1863. This connective, poorly documented era saw the Cambodians abandon Jayavarman VII's Mahayana Buddhism, which may never have struck deep roots among them. They also stepped away from the state-sponsored, priestly Hinduism that had preceded the Mahayana era. What Thompson calls Pali Buddhism, known to many as Theravada Buddhism, emerged to take their place. Cambodia continued to teem with indulgent and malevolent local spirits. Much of chapter 4 deals with contemporary ritual practice and works from Khmer-language texts traceable to the middle period if not before. Thompson points to striking linguistic, decorative, and performative echoes of the linga yoni ensemble in some present-day rituals, including weddings, and especially in the ceremony known as “summoning the souls” (hau bralin), which she has studied in depth for many years.
In her concluding chapter (pp. 174–88), Thompson revisits the arguments of her previous chapters. She also suggests in passing that psychoanalytic theory, used with care, might be helpful in discussions of engendering the Cambodian state. At that point, Engendering the Buddhist State comes to an end, but happily for me, it does not reach “closure,” a fragment of jargon that I abhor. Indeed, on page 5, Thompson had already sidestepped the notion of closure by foreshadowing a sequel to this book, described as “an expanded interdisciplinary study of the Buddhist remaking of ‘Cambodia’ in the early middle period.” I am sure that such a second volume, when it appears, will be at least as welcome and rewarding as this long-awaited, passionate, and tightly woven book.
