‘I am glad that I am a nomad…. I have always regarded the significance given by people to borders as ridiculous.’ Roman Polanski

Cambodian sīmā planting

In the Theravada tradition the ritual boundary (sīmā) within a monastery or vihāra (Khmer: preah vihear) must be properly laid out and consecrated before it can be used for certain monastic purposes, notably higher ordination, and the fortnightly recitation of the monastic rule and confession of its infractions. Indeed, in the absence of a sīmā the monastic order (sangha) cannot function properly. The Buddha is said to have approved the first sīmā-planting on the grounds that this had been a practice of previous Buddhas, and his two principal disciples, Sāriputta and Mahā Mogallāna, traced out a boundary or khaṇḍasīmā using special marker stones (nimitta). The term khaṇḍasīmā must be specially noted here for literally it implies a broken, punctuated or permeable line of demarcation.

In Cambodia the ritual for establishing a khaṇḍasīmā (dhvoe puṇy pañcuḥ sīmā) is held to be highly meritorious. In consequence it is one of the most popular of festivities.Footnote ²⁴ The central act of the elaborate ceremony is the positioning of eight boundary markers (nimitta), hewn spherical or ovoid stones, in the four cardinal and four intercardinal directions, in pits around the perimeter of the central sanctuary (preah vihear) of the monastery. Another stone, the so-called indakhīla (or sema kil), is then buried near the centre of the preah vihear immediately under the gaze of the principal Buddha image.Footnote ²⁵

Although monks are involved and recite relevant passages of scripture, the ceremony is led by a lay ritual specialist (achar) – there may be as many as nine officiating – who supervises the erection of altars to various directional deities at the eight positions around the preah vihear, the eastern placement sometimes having as many as three.Footnote ²⁶ The achar then proceeds to encircle the altars and their offerings with a protective thread of cotton (aṃpoḥ sīmā) before the pits are dug. Donations, such as shards of mirror, perfumed water, hair, nail-clippings, musical instruments or money may be pitched in as a merit-making exercise. Those present may also cut their finger to allow a few drops of blood to drip in before the stone nimitta, consecrated the previous night, are cut free with swift dispatch from a supporting bamboo cross member.Footnote ²⁷ The ceremony is concluded by covering the round stones with soil, after which distinctive carved boundary stones (sloek sema; Thai = bai sema) are positioned over the burial as a visible marker. The central position occupied by the indakhīla is, however, left unmarked,Footnote ²⁸ while the aṃpoḥ sīmā, now believed to possess strongly apotropaic powers, is collected by the ritual's patron and distributed to friends, supporters and relations.

This specific ritual of sīmā-planting has its origins in the Theravada Vinaya, and its commentarial traditions.Footnote ²⁹ But certain aspects of ceremony deviate from what we might expect if we relied on these sources alone. It seems, for example, that only in Thailand and Cambodia are the sloek sema not the real markers of the ritual boundary for this is the function of the buried, and hence invisible, nimitta. My own observations also suggest that sloek sema, despite having a rather subsidiary significance are sometimes venerated in their own right,Footnote ³⁰ possibly because they are often carved with images, such as that of Nang Thoranee, the Earth Goddess.Footnote ³¹ Other features of the ritual seem to point to an archaic and sacrificial provenance.Footnote ³² Paul Mus had long ago suggested that the sloek sema may derive from the liṅga, which in turn may have had its origins in the sacred stones of ancient indigenous or cadastral cults.Footnote ³³ Subsequent observers have therefore tended to conclude that Cambodian sīmā-planting represents a double cult combining both Buddhist elements consisting of recitation of texts, sermons, etc., and brahmanical features, such as the propitiation of divinities of soil and of the cardinal directions.Footnote ³⁴

Indrakhīla and kingship

One of the more distinctive features of Cambodian sīmā-planting is the positioning of the central, slightly larger, indrakhīla or indakhīla (literally, ‘Indra's stake’), a ritual object first mentioned in connection with a demarcation ceremony in the Khmer inscription at Prasat Ben Vien, near Beng Mealea (K.873), dating from 843 śaka.Footnote ³⁵ The ancient nature of the practice is indicated by Mahayanist East Asian sources, such as the great Chinese vinaya authority Daoxuan's (596–667 AD) vision of an ordination platform in which the indakhīla is specifically described as taking the form of a dome-shaped reliquary (caitya) containing relics of the BuddhaFootnote ³⁶ while the indakhīla's significance has carried down to the modern period to the extent that in northern Thailand it is often paraded around neighbouring villages in an elaborate fashion before being finally planted in the centre of a newly created monastic sīmā.Footnote ³⁷

According to Cambodian mythology Sakka, the chief of the gods and the Buddhist form of the brahmanical deity Indra, had been disappointed not to be sponsoring the planting of one of the eight cardinal and intercardinal nimitta at the previously mentioned first establishment of a sīmā by the Buddha's two principal followers. We are further told that as various dignitaries had already occupied these positions the Buddha invited Sakka and his retinue to take the central ground.Footnote ³⁸ The general pattern is confirmed by Daoxuan who held that Sakka was responsible for placing a special reliquary (caitya) at the centre of the Buddha's original ordination platform.Footnote ³⁹

But what is the indakhīla's significance? It seems to be associated with kingship, as the mythological connection with Sakka makes clear. Buddhist tradition, furthermore, holds that the site for the first monastery at Veluvana was donated to the Buddha by Bimbisāra, king of Magadha. However, the kingly connection was never straightforward for as Buddhism developed we can say that the sanctuary created through the establishment of a sīmā was effectively removed from the sphere of the king's authority. This is the reason the Pāli sources call this space visuṁgāmasīmā, for it is ‘tax-exempt’ (visuṁgāma).Footnote ⁴⁰ Its extra-territorial status also meant that it could no longer be ‘consumed’ by the king or his croniesFootnote ⁴¹ and might only be returned to those individuals – questions of ownership do not really apply in these contexts – following the performance of a valid ecclesiastical act. Even today this area within the sīmā is regarded as a place of asylum beyond the depredations of official representatives of the state. Those residing within are protected, at least theoretically, from various kinds of external interference, such as attempts to conscript them into the army.Footnote ⁴²

An intriguing tension exists here, then, for the king both cedes the land and is represented by the central nimitta. The sīmā-planting ritual effectively exorcises the immediate influence of the king's power but paradoxically retains the presence of monarchy as a symbol of protection. As such it very effectively demonstrates an enduring and antagonistic symbiosis between secular and sacred power. This fact is most eloquently underlined by the fact that in Cambodia the indakhīla was customarily dropped into position by the king. Sihanouk, for example, is known to have attended many such ceremonies in the 1960s.Footnote ⁴³

The second noteworthy feature of the indakhīla and the other eight nimitta is that they are believed to somehow pin down, or hold fast, a subterranean body. This may be conceived in the form of a snake spirit (nāga) but it may also be humanoid. The idea is clearly archaic. The notion of penetrating the earth with a ritual dagger (phur-pa) to bring the world ‘under control’ and thus preventing disorder is also found in the Tibetan traditionFootnote ⁴⁴ and probably lies at the root of the English concept of ‘staking a claim’. An invariable feature of this fastening of the subterranean creature is that the indakhīla is at its navel.Footnote ⁴⁵

City and state

In Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asia there are clear parallels between the rites for the construction of a temple, a domestic house or a state.Footnote ⁴⁶ The maṇḍala is a blueprint for all of these activitiesFootnote ⁴⁷ and is, for instance, reflected in the topology of Angkor which was regarded as being at the centre of a complex arrangement of subsidiary population concentrations, and through which wilderness space was appropriated to human civilisation.Footnote ⁴⁸ Communication between the centre and periphery was achieved by a variety of ritual acts. In particular, the king was expected to make regular pilgrimage to satellite temples dedicated to chthonian deities so that he might draw their power back to the capital.Footnote ⁴⁹

Indeed, there has been a remarkable historical continuity in the way the land has been patterned by the Khmer people. Angkorian capitals were positioned to the south of a sacred mountain and open to the east. They were also at the confluence of two rivers where the male and female serpent deities (nāga) were supposed to meet. Such an auspicious site would ensure fertility, in every sense of the term, throughout the kingdom. If the correct natural features did not exist they could be built; this partially explains the temple-mountains and reservoirs (baray) so typical of the Siem Reap region and precisely the same arrangement of space can be discerned in the more recent centres of Longvek and Udong.Footnote ⁵⁰

But it is important to bear in mind that the individual units of this maṇḍala were centres of fluctuating authority, pulsating power in some ways reminiscent of the nature annual hydraulic cycle, not specific territories.Footnote ⁵¹ Angkor, then – the capital city synonymous with the kingdom itself – was the ‘royal heart’ of the polityFootnote ⁵² and it is difficult to visualise the polity as having a bounded space, for its potency manifested itself at a maximum at the centre, the seat of the king – one might say at its indakhīla – while at the edge, a region characterised by Daniel Hemery as ‘un territoire faiblement étatisé’,Footnote ⁵³ power fizzled out. Such frontier lands were traditionally envisaged as zones of dissidence, refuge, banditry and rebellion, as well as being the abodes of dangerous supernatural beings. Penny Edwards, moreover, has offered the intriguing suggestion that the tutelary spirits (neak tā) acted in a critical role as boundary markers between the civilised and wild regions of the world before the modernist reforms kicked in.Footnote ⁵⁴ How strange, then, that today this is the region that the state wishes to control the most forcefully.

Past Southeast Asian polities do not appear to have been interested in the control of land as such. The management of people, or of ‘lived spaces’ in which primary attachment is with a locale rather than ‘abstract space’ in which one felt somehow contained within a territory was considered of far greater significance.Footnote ⁵⁵ Volker Grabowsky, for example, has demonstrated that one of the defining characteristics of hostilities between Siam and Cambodia in the pre-modern period was the regular and large-scale resettlement of seized populations rather than the capture of territory.Footnote ⁵⁶ And in any case, from the Buddhist perspective the continent (jambudīpa) was traditionally thought to be around 10,000 yojanas (c. 70,000 miles) in extent, so no king ever thought that he would be able to gain complete domination. This meant that, in the absence of extensive poaching of manpower, there was little option but to tolerate neighbouring states whose own permeable boundaries overlapped their own domains.Footnote ⁵⁷

The maṇḍala is an especially appropriate motif for the understanding of the Angkorian arrangement for it embodies both geometric and mythological dimensions. From the latter perspective Angkorian topography was ‘freighted with cosmic symbolism’ which aimed to recapitulate the sacred geography of India. As Sheldon Pollock has observed, the Sanskrit cosmopolis had a ‘mythic’ centre.Footnote ⁵⁸ The founder of the centre is Sakka, aided and assisted by Viśvakarman, the artificer of the gods. In the Theravada Buddhist reformulation of the myth, these originally brahmanical deities undergo a transformation to become pre-eminently civilising deities and the propagators of Buddhist culture.Footnote ⁵⁹ Hence their association with the construction of Angkor Wat, the earthly counterpart of Sakka's celestial city (vejayanta) and the ultimate expression of Cambodian culture.Footnote ⁶⁰

The same can be said of other important Theravada centres. The cities of Anuradhapura, Chiang Mai and Mandalay – literally, the maṇḍala – were all complex physical structures shot through with enormous amounts of cosmological significance.Footnote ⁶¹ One common feature is that such cities were enclosed by a great boundary (mahāsīmā) consisting of city walls topped with sloek sema. The existence of such walls is quite ancient. They may originally have been constructed by wet rice cultivators to protect surpluses from the depredations of mountain dwellers but permanent brick walls or fortifications around Southeast Asian cities seem to have increased in frequency with the arrival of western mercenaries who possessed powerful firearms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁶² As a result, a nineteenth-century Thai official is reported to have regarded the ‘town's walls’ as the most important of all boundaries.Footnote ⁶³

At the centre of Chiang Mai we also have a ‘city pillar’ (indakhīla; Thai = lak muang or inthakin) and this arrangement appears to have been very common in South and Southeast Asia, even though Anuradhapura itself is supposed to have had two.Footnote ⁶⁴ Symbolically the inthakin is the navel of the city (muang). Some Thai chronicle sources hold that Indra / Sakka had originally instructed humans on the setting up of these pillars,Footnote ⁶⁵ while others tell of the manner in which the inthakin was transported from Tavatimsa, the heaven of Indra.Footnote ⁶⁶ A number of northern Thai works, moreover, claim that the cult of the city's protector deity (sao inthakin) who dwelt at the base of these structures was first instituted by Indra.Footnote ⁶⁷

From the perspective of Buddhist mythology even the protective power of the gods has its limits and Theravada canonical sources tell us that Sakka's palace is not as secure as it may seem. Indeed, it is so weak that it can be shaken by the big toe of Mahā Moggallāna, one of the Buddha's two principal disciples especially noted for his proficiency with magical powers.Footnote ⁶⁸ As with mythology so with socio-political fact — the authority of the mightiest human ruler is puny in comparison with the gods and all human institutions, however mighty, are subject to the universal law of impermanence (anicca). In the Cambodian case Angkor must fall, as it probably did following a series of Siamese assaults culminating in 1431, and a highly unstable middle period of Cambodian history began to unravel.

Theravada hegemony and reform

The defeat of Angkor appears to have had an enduring power to traumatise subsequent generations of Cambodians. It also coincided with the rise of Theravada Buddhism as the major civilisational determinant among the Khmer. As a strategy for coping with relegation in the league of Southeast Asian power centres it seems that Cambodians began to develop a simplistically romantic binary which contrasted the good, gentle, smiling Theravada, pure Khmer with bad, greedy, treacherous and brahmanical outsiders such as the Thai and, somewhat later, the Vietnamese.Footnote ⁶⁹ I shall now seek to argue that, in response, the breakdown of the old galactic understanding of ‘civilised space’ gradually gave way to an understanding of bounded territory representing an ‘inviolable piece of the earth's surface where people may happen to live’.Footnote ⁷⁰

The galactic arrangement of the Angkorian period was retained in greatly diminished form into the early Theravada period with shifting centres as Cambodian men of prowess sought to establish a series of cities that could be protected against the depredations of increasingly powerful neighbours.Footnote ⁷¹ Our knowledge of the nature and organisation of the Buddhist sangha in this middle period of Cambodian history is sketchy. However, it seems that it was also modelled on the pattern of the maṇḍala, with a number of Buddhist centres emerging, led by individual chief monks (sanghareach). A total of eight sanghareach, for example, are mentioned in an eighteenth-century inscription (IMA 37)Footnote ⁷² while the traditional Codes Cambodgiens talk of five mahasanghareach, plus two assistants, who counsel the king on custom, law and religion.Footnote ⁷³

However, by the beginning of the colonial period the situation had become more complex, probably reflecting the disastrous social and political conditions of the time. In the late nineteenth century a number of largely independent apanages (samrap), 14 for the largest monastic fraternity, the Mahanikay, and 11 for the newly established monarchical and pro-Thai Thommayut, had emerged.Footnote ⁷⁴ The way in which authority was parcelled out reflected the general administrative arrangements of the court into right and left sections, rather than a more straightforward differentiation based on monastic affiliation.Footnote ⁷⁵ But the situation would soon be reformed in line with the changes introduced in Siamese administration during the fifth reign.

The apanages were suppressed by a royal ordinance of 7 August 1919, and a pyramidal ecclesiastical structure in which provincial chief monks (mekun) were appointed by one of the two national patriarchs (sanghareach), one for each of the monastic fraternities, in consultation with a newly established Ministry of Religious Affairs, was imposed. The effect of these changes reduced the authority of largely independent Buddhist hierarchs and put them under the control of a provincial and national bureaucracy. Since many of the former seem to have been strongly traditional in their outlooks, the new system contributed to the undermining of the Theravada ancien régime in Cambodia and some of the millennial movements that arose around this time must be regarded, at least in part, as attempts to reinforce the old cosmology against the onslaught of rationalisation and bureaucratisation.Footnote ⁷⁶ A wholesale re-organisation of the sangha was subsequently formulated in two official orders of 9 February and 18 September 1943Footnote ⁷⁷ and large increases of both monasteries and monks meant that national sangha administration centralised in the new capital of Phnom Penh seemed to make perfect bureaucratic sense.

Hardening the boundary – Buddhist modernism and its consequences

It seems that in the earliest period of Buddhist history monks living in various locations were able to join together to form a communal space bounded by one sīmā (Vin.i.107). Indeed, at that time there appear to have been no restrictions on the sīmā's size which was largely determined by the practicalities of monks travelling to attend recital of the monastic rule (pātimokkha).Footnote ⁷⁸ The Mahāvagga for example, accepts that a sīmā may be the same as the boundaries of a village, town or city (nagarasīmā).Footnote ⁷⁹ At a much later point an entire city like Chiang Mai was ‘consecrated [and] ordination could be conducted, technically, anywhere within the city’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In this manner, we may speak of a full equivalence of monastic and city boundaries.

But, as we have already had cause to note, the traditional Southeast Asian city stood at the centre of a ‘so-called’ galactic arrangement of inhabited space based on the principles of the maṇḍala. Now the arrangement of nine stones in the Cambodian monastic sīmā clearly follows that same pattern and if we accept that there was no theoretical limit to the extent of the sīmā, rather it was determined pragmatically, one might argue that the size may actually be determined by technological factors such as how far one might reasonably be able to travel in a given time. With modern transportation this distance has increased greatly so that the size of a sīmā could easily be equivalent to that of an average sized country.Footnote ⁸¹ It is against this background that I now wish to highlight some significant features of the Buddhist modernism that arose in Cambodia in the train of efforts to reform both the structure of institutional Buddhism and the Theravada's relationship to its foundational texts.

Buddhist modernism in Cambodia is specifically associated with monks like Chuon Nath, Huot Tat and Khieu Chum, all of whom massively benefited from the reforms in monastic education introduced by the colonial power in the early years of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁸² Both Nath and Tat had visited Hanoi between 1922 and 1923, where they received training in the critical reading of Buddhist literature from Louis Finot, director of the École française d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO). In his memoir of his great friend Chuon Nath, Tat refers to this sojourn as a period of ‘awakening’. These two monks were subsequently to become associated with the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, a colonial creation that provided wider access to western forms of scholarship while at the same time acting as a bulwark again further Siamese interference in Cambodian affairs. The intention was that the Institute's existence would negate the need for educated monks to travel to Bangkok for higher Buddhist studies, a dangerous activity that entailed the possibility of infection by seditious ideas. The Institute's establishment, then, both lessened the flow of persons and ideas between the two countries and firmed up the dividing line between them.

Other factors were also at work restricting the ability of monks to travel freely across state boundaries. Modernist considerations appear to have placed at least some practitioners of traditional Theravada ascetic and peripatetic practices (dhutānga Thai: tudong)Footnote ⁸³ under suspicion both in Cambodia and Siam. Although living a life sanctioned by Pāli sources the tudong monk seemed to typify many of the qualities that the modernisers were striving to combat. He could be the focus of a personality cult, his teachings might encourage superstition or belief in magic, he could be ill-educated in Pāli scholarship, and he might not even be able to speak the national language properly. But there was more. Khrūbā Siwichai (1878–1939), the celebrated northern Thai tudong monk, famed for living a life like Mahā Kassapa,Footnote ⁸⁴ is a case in point. His biographer assures us that he ‘was not a monk of rank, but only a monk of the people’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the 1920s and 1930s, a movement hostile to the central Thai-inspired sangha reformsFootnote ⁸⁶ appears to have crystallised around Khrūbā Siwichai. He wished to protect his previously unfettered right to ordain according to local Buddhist traditions without first getting permission from the authorities and because of this opposition to central Thai power he was held under temple arrest in Lamphun between 1915 and 1916. As a result of similar measures involving other tudong monks, the peripatetic monastic life that had been so much a feature of pre-modern Buddhist practice entered a period of rapid decline and, in so far as wandering is undertaken today – certainly by members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy – it tends to be done by car and airplane rather than on foot.

Chuon Nath and Huot Tat were both destined to become occupants of the most elevated monastic office in the land. But before they reached these dizzy heights they could be regarded as important figures in the creation of a new conception of Cambodian nationhood. Nath's composition of the first dictionary of the Cambodian language is an obvious example of the process at work, but they were also influential in drawing together a new concept of what it meant to have a bounded state. In 1929 Nath and Tat had been encouraged by Suzanne Karpelès, the French director of the Buddhist Institute, to make an official tour of inspection of Buddhist monasteries in Cochinchina (Kampuchea Krom), a Khmer populated part of the Mekong delta that had been ceded to the French in treaties of 1862 and 1874 and would subsequently be (retro-)ceded back to Vietnam at the end of the independence struggle.Footnote ⁸⁷ But this was clearly part of a wider pattern for, at around the same time, modernist monks were also active in trying to stem the influence of the Thommayut monastic fraternity that had close links with the Bangkok court in the ex-Siamese controlled provinces of Battambang and Siem Reap. Moreover, in a document written in 1934 describing the activities of a small party of Phnom Penh-based monks in a remote region of the northeast to establish a new monastic sīmā for the Pnong tribal people, we read that missionary activity of this sort was also interpreted as a means of extending the territoriality of the nation,Footnote ⁸⁸ a clear indication of the way in which monastic and state boundary concepts were beginning to coalesce.Footnote ⁸⁹

Huot Tat's short work, Sīmāvinicchăy saṅkhep (Summary of opinions on the Sīmā), first published in 1932, fits in with this effort remarkably well.Footnote ⁹⁰ In conformity with his training under Louis Finot the work is an attempt to strip away non-canonical, i.e. brahmanical and superstitious, accretions from the sīmā-planting ritual. One of Tat's prime conclusions is that the indakhīla is unknown in Pāli sources,Footnote ⁹¹ which also have nothing to say about the cult of the divinities, at least in the context of ritual boundary formation.Footnote ⁹² As we shall see, this kind of ‘Pali text puritanism’ was to be especially corrosive of the old ‘galactic polity’.Footnote ⁹³

In some senses a figure standing apart from other influential monastics of the period – he was especially critical of the trappings of ecclesiastical power that Nath and Tat accepted without demur – Khieu Chum is the most radical of Cambodia's modernising monks and a major figure in Khmer literature from the 1950s until his death, executed alongside sanghareach Huot Tat and other senior monks by the Khmer Rouge a few days after they seized Phnom Penh.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the late 1930s the French colonial government, as part of a general modernisation programme, had attempted to romanise written Khmer. The measure provoked open hostility from monks who regarded this as an attack on traditional learning. One of the leaders of the protest, Ven. Hem Chieu — a teacher at the École Supérieure de Pali, was arrested on 17 July 1942 and charged with involvement in organised opposition to the government. He was subsequently to die in prison and become a national hero but anger over his forcible defrocking led monks to demonstrate in the streets of Phnom Penh in the so-called ‘Umbrella War’, the country's first organised anti-colonial manifestation. Chum had been close to Hem Chieu and a significant participant in these events.

As a young monk in Phnom Penh Khieu Chum had absorbed powerful currents of republicanism, possibly from Karpelès and other members of the EFEO, but definitely through the activities of Son Ngoc Thanh and the circle who produced Nagara Vatta, Cambodia's first proper Khmer language newspaper, while working at the Buddhist Institute.Footnote ⁹⁵ In time he and Son Ngoc Thanh would be instrumental in the creation of the Khmer Republic (1970–75) following a successful coup against Sihanouk. The essence of his message was that Cambodia should embrace democratic republicanism because this is the form of governance that corresponds most accurately with the teachings of the Buddha. Despite the Theravada tradition's traditional emphasis on the importance of a Buddhist monarchy as the most effective means of maintaining the physical, moral and spiritual welfare of the state Khieu Chum's critical examination of the relevant canonical sources had led him to conclude that this was yet another distortion of a pristine truth.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Buddha had decisively repudiated monarchy when, as a prince, he renounced the throne and embraced the ascetic life. Furthermore, the country had suffered ‘thousands of years of absolutism, arbitrariness and tyranny’Footnote ⁹⁷ and Cambodians should reject the institutional support of this suffering on this ground alone.

It is my contention that consideration of the combined effects of the emerging Buddhist nationalist discourse, the denigration of kingship and the undermining of the indakhīla in its religio-political sense,Footnote ⁹⁸ not of course forgetting Sihanouk's own complex personality and the wider geo-political situation, is the best route for understanding the trajectory of Cambodian history after 1970 as the country slipped further and further into chaos. Sihanouk's abdication in 1955 began the process and Lon Nol's ouster of him as head of state confirmed the presence of an empty throne.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet soon Cambodia would have both an empty throne and an empty city.

The unique ‘emptying’ of Phnom Penh following its liberation by the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975 can be read as a fulfilment of the developments traced above.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ From my perspective the capital, moved by the French to Phnom Penh in the late nineteenth century, had at first remained connected to a cult of kingship. But it was the indakhīla of a sīmā that was gradually beginning to look more and more like a modern bounded state. Emerging Buddhist modernist discourse undermined the old order still further. Through their efforts to purify Buddhism of extraneous brahmanical accretions such as the indakhīla, and even the notion of kingship itself, the modernisers acted as the gravediggers of the galactic polity. They also made possible a revisioning of the state in which power shifted from the centre to the periphery. The revolutionary organisation of the Khmer Rouge (angkar padevat) simply developed these ideas to their logical conclusion.

Scholarly attempts to situate Khmer Rouge ideology within the mainstream of communist thought have never been entirely successful. The notion that they were hyper-Maoists, or that their large-scale hydraulic works were inspired purely by past Soviet civil engineering achievements rather than by the culturally and historically more obvious example of Angkor strike one as somewhat off-beam.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Ben Kiernan's suggestion that the search for parallels is pointless and that it would be better to regard the regime as sui generis also seems to ignore important indigenous ingredients.Footnote ¹⁰²

Paul Mus long ago insisted that the Viet Minh were not doctrinaire communists, but rather that they had remade Marxism into an Asian path of collective virtue and selfless spirituality, while Ho Chi Minh, ‘far from being a modernizer or a destroyer of the nation's ancient moral system … was its true fulfillment, a patriot and champion of righteousness’.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is clear that similar currents were at work in the Cambodian revolutionary context. As young students in Paris many of the Khmer Rouge's leading figures quite naturally ‘interpreted Marxism through the prism of national culture, in their case an intensely normative form of Buddhism’ and this manifested itself in a highly puritanical and ascetic outlook that existed long before the movement had properly coalesced.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In time this would manifest itself in the Khmer Rouge's rule ‘by incantation’, a ‘profound formulaicism’ that strangely encapsulated the repetitious nature of traditional Theravada Buddhist preaching.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Pol Pot instructed his information minister, Hu Nim, that radio broadcasters should deliver their announcements ‘like monks who lead the prayers at a wat’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Alex Hinton has argued that the ‘transformative knowledge’ claimed by Angkar conferred ‘on the bearer an aura of potency’ and that this secret knowledge was comparable with the enlightenment of a Buddha.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Angkar's desire to purify society was a mirror to the rule of righteous Buddhist kings who in previous epochs had claimed the power to ‘master the earth spirits’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ although in Democratic Kampuchea this role would became the sole preserve of the Angkar.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Angkar's aim was to systematically uproot all emotional ties by ‘cutting off the heart’ (dach chett). The notion of heating (tapas) oneself to eliminate impurities, a ubiquitous idea in Buddhist literature, was also widespread, for example, in the ‘tempering iron’ (luat dam) metaphor. Those deemed insufficiently malleable would have to be hammered into shape and any resistance could result in the ‘re-heating’ of self-criticism so that the individual might be eventually ‘tamed’. To serve the revolution, then, required not active heroism but renunciation of self (lak bang).Footnote ¹¹⁰

This was specifically linked to another cardinal Buddhist category, that of mindfulness (sati). Through the exercise of sati Buddhist practitioners learn to see things ‘as they are’ but in the Khmer Rouge reworking, potential revolutionaries would learn to discern the Party's line.Footnote ¹¹¹ Personnel were expected to attend regular criticism and self-criticism sessions in order to root out individualist tendencies, including those related to eating and drinking.Footnote ¹¹² This had been a traditional concern of the sangha, but the Buddhist disciplinary code (vinaya) was now criticised by the Khmer Rouge. Cadres began to observe a lengthy list of moral rules or ‘commandments of Angkar’ (viney angkar) clearly based on the monastic precepts and partly designed to prove that the revolutionaries were more worthy of the laity's respect than the sangha.

A life of sexual continence was the most appropriate means of gaining self-control. A ‘sixth moral precept’ that covered many types of inappropriate sexual activity was very harshly policed. Both women and men were encouraged to cut their hair short and the former were not allowed to use jewellery or perfume.Footnote ¹¹³ Husbands and wives, even of high-ranking individuals, were often separated and forced to live a ‘barracks lifestyle’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Indeed, the tendency to reconfigure and re-employ Buddhist symbolism and modes of thought, all the while against a background of extreme harassment of Buddhist institutions, was common throughout the period.

In a December 1975 Khieu Samphan, President of the State Presidium of Democratic Kampuchea, announced that ‘our people are working collectively to dismantle the old field embankments and replace them with new high, tall and straight structures forming a great checkerboard network throughout the country’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ On one level this is merely a depiction of rational and scientific agrarian reform. But, it should also be borne in mind that the re-patterning fits very well with traditional Buddhist cosmological speculation. John Marston has already indicated that dike building and general regeneration of the environment in Cambodia were associated with the modernist currents unleashed by the celebrations of the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment (buddha jayanti) in 1957.Footnote ¹¹⁶

The notion of ‘attacking’ the agricultural environment is another recurring theme in Angkar's putative project of control. Yet the idea of attack as a means of subjugating space is a potent theme in esotericism, an important element in the overall character of Cambodian Buddhism.Footnote ¹¹⁷ In the esoteric or ‘tantric’ imagination the general structure of the world is a direct reference back to the architecture of the palace of a deity and of his earthly counterpart, the king. From within his own imaginatively constructed palace the tantric practitioner acts as one who both conquers territory and acts as its overlord (rājādhirāja). It seems to me that this ‘imperial metaphor’Footnote ¹¹⁸ nicely mirrors the relationship between Angkar and the natural world. Against this background Khieu Samphan's statement hints at a Buddhist-inspired recreation of the country as a ‘pure land’. An obvious objection here is that the notion of a ‘pure land’ is generally thought to be a feature of Mahayanist texts, like the Sukhāvativyuha Sūtras, and, therefore, an inappropriate concept to import into the Cambodian Theravada context. Yet, as we have noted, ‘tantric’ or Mahayāna-like elements were present and operative in certain unreformed Cambodian Buddhist practices well before the Democratic Kampuchea period.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The best modern example of ‘pure land’ influence is in the consecration and demarcation of the sīmāmaṇḍala, the quintessential Buddhist sacred space in which eight stone nimitta are dropped into specially dug pits indicated by the intersections in a checkerboard arrangement made of bamboo poles laid on the ground. These pits are then activated by human blood, an act that points to the archaic and sacrificial origin of the practice.Footnote ¹²⁰ The connection between blood sacrifice and reconfiguration of the environment is highly relevant to the Democratic Kampuchea context and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that deeply rooted patterns were at work at a subliminal level.

The contemporary debate over Cambodia's borders appears to contradict Marx's opinion that the state is little more than an ‘official résumé of society’. Rather, the continual obsession with the boundary issue reinforces a growing ‘sense that the state exists as a free-standing entity distinct from society’.Footnote ¹²¹ Yet this attitude is distinctly anti-Buddhist. Without going too deeply into abstruse areas of Theravada metaphysics I would like to suggest that the notion of a reified state is at variance with one of the Buddha's fundamental insights — an insight, furthermore, that is preserved in all the major forms of Buddhism. This is the notion that we are not justified in attributing ‘self” or substantiality (atta; Skt. ātman) to conditioned things. This simple yet profoundly mistaken viewpoint makes no sense ontologically but more importantly it provides the ground from which attachment and aversion, understood psychologically, morally and politically, may arise.

It is clear that while key actors like Sihanouk and Hun Sen – and Pol Pot and Lon Nol before them – have condemned neighbouring states for eating away at the border they have also been guilty of playing the ‘abstract space’ card that makes the game possible in the first place. As Caroline Hughes has observed, they have both utilised ‘absolutist notions of power based on cosmology and destiny, but the power that they envisage is the power to bestride the nation, to unite and defend its territory, and to penetrate and exploit its resources, both human and natural’.Footnote ¹²²

Xenophobia is rife in Cambodia. Anti-Vietnamese sentiment is most all-embracing but fear of the Thai is not far behind.Footnote ¹²³ The 29 January 2003 anti-Thai riots in Phnom Penh were, in part, motivated by fears about Thai ‘land-swallowing’ of Khmer territory, exacerbated by Thai / Khmer tensions over access to Preah Vihear temple.Footnote ¹²⁴ Perhaps less well known is a curious incident involving the influential Thai-based Wat Dhammakaya movement. In early 2002 a group of Dhammakaya monks established a base in the Soriya Hotel, Phnom Penh. The group had sent a letter of invitation to their opening ceremony to the Ministry of Religions but the Ministry had responded by alerting students at the Buddhist University and Suramarit Buddhist High School. On 8 June several hundred monks from various wat in Phnom Penh led by one of the supreme partriarch's secretaries set off on a well-organised demonstration, reaching the hotel in the late morning. The Thai monks were ‘invited’ to leave Cambodia. They took the hint and left forthwith.Footnote ¹²⁵

Concluding remarks

Frank Dikötter has argued that the invention of racial identity in late imperial China emerged as the result of ‘complex interactions and fusions of different indigenous schools of thought … all of which had virtually nothing to do with Western learning’.Footnote ¹²⁶ These came about as various reform-minded thinkers sought to grapple with the ‘decline of imperial cosmology’. I want to suggest that the manner in which the old galactic model of space in Theravada Southeast Asia shifted to one based around the notion of territoriality may be explained in much the same way. I started this essay by noting the contrast between ‘pre-colonial territorial nonchalance’ and current border obsessions.Footnote ¹²⁷ Cambodia has only recently generated a border-oriented understanding of itself as a state or ‘geo-body’ to use Thongchai Winichakul's term.Footnote ¹²⁸ In the pre-modern period, on the other hand, the Cambodian polity can more properly be regarded as an urban centre surrounded by satellite populations set within a politically undifferentiated region of mountain and forest of no great concern to its city rulers. But it would be simplistic to conclude, as I think Thongchai does, that the transition to the modern understanding of a state as bounded territory resulted merely from the imposition of western concepts such as modern mapping and surveying techniques.Footnote ¹²⁹

I hope that I have convincingly argued that the seeds of the border-oriented understanding of the state were already present in the Theravada cultures of Southeast Asia. In order to germinate they just required the emergence of a political discourse that regarded brahmanical influence as effectively malign. I am aware that my approach leaves me open to challenge on a number of fronts. In the first place, I have tended to use Theravada-related evidence from Siam and Burma, as well as from Cambodia, in a manner that does not always recognise regional differences. But if my basic thesis that pre-modern mainland Southeast Asia represented some form of Buddhist cultural unity not yet fractured by nationalist ideologies is accepted then I think that I can be forgiven. I am also highly conscious of the theoretical nature of my argument. Although I believe that it can be found – and I hope that this can become the basis of a follow-up paper – I have deliberately avoided offering empirical evidence that specific political actors in recent history have talked and written in a way that demonstrates familiarity with the Buddhist concepts discussed above. My approach here has simply been to suggest that such a project is possible and that it can lead to the consequences described. I have not said that it has been done, merely that it could be done.

Some scholars have suggested that in some regions of Southeast Asia the forces of post-modernity are once more dissolving the hard boundaries that emerged under the conditions of modernity.Footnote ¹³⁰ This seems especially the case in the Thai, Burmese, Lao and Chinese borderlands of the golden triangle where Khruba Bunchum Yanasangwaror (d. 1996) a Yuan monk was recently at the centre of a revivalist Buddhist cult. According to Paul Cohen his vast complex at Wat Phra That Dornreuang, the site of an ancient reliquary that he helped to restore, near Ban Phasa was the heart of Khruba Bunchum's ‘Buddha kingdom’ (muang khong Phra Phutthacao) where he dwelt surrounded by a highly stratified ‘court’ of disciple / officials who the Burmese authorities were reluctant to conscript into their army.Footnote ¹³¹

This reconstructed ‘territory of the dhamma’, cutting across state boundaries and national regulations, is highly reminiscent of more traditional patternings of space — a ‘system of equal hubs, towns in regions that each boast different strengths, with multivalent nostalgias from varying points’ rather than a unified territory.Footnote ¹³² Yet so extensive today is the fear of violation of Cambodia's boundaries by neighbouring countries, and the same seems to apply – possibly to a lesser extent – in Thailand, that the Golden Triangle seems light years away and may, in fact, be an anomaly. The Cambodian border obsession suggests something more profoundly deep seated than a simple concern over matters of territorial integrity. While I do not deny the presence of pragmatic concerns about the need to construct a cohesive state after a long period of conflict and instability I also want to argue that the obsession contains strongly exorcistic and purificatory dimensions deriving from indigenous religious categories, and in particular the ancient concept of the sīmā. We know from the early Pali tradition that a sīmā may possess an extraordinary degree of permanency. It is not surprising, then, that any worry concerning its contamination will be met with strong emotions of violation and loss of power.Footnote ¹³³

The old Cambodian monastic sīmāmaṇḍala integrated both Buddhist and brahmanical elements. The eight outer markers delineated a broken, punctuated or permeable boundary, the khaṇḍasīmā, while the central indakhīla represented the brahmanical fascination with a king's protective power. It is only after the Cambodian sangha underwent reform along Pāli text puritanical lines, only in part deriving from the colonial environment,Footnote ¹³⁴ that this creative tension began to unravel and the ‘fluid’ frontiers of the past transmogrified into the fixed or solid boundaries of the present.

In an influential paper on Indic statecraft Sheldon Pollock made an important distinction between two kinds of political domain, one given over to the exercise of material power – a kind of vernacular politics – and another in which politics can be regarded primarily in aesthetic terms. For Pollock this second alternative represents a ‘poetry of politics’ that dominated the old Sanskrit cosmopolis, a political arrangement that never effectively emerged ‘from the domain of the liturgical…’Footnote ¹³⁵ In the Cambodian context we can understand the uprooting of the indakhīla as an unconscious effort to destroy the liturgical space of the traditional cosmopolis and substitute it with an ideological terrain in which vernacular politics finally makes sense.