 |
 |
 |
|||
|
Through a “Divine Eye”: Learning Buddhist Ethics in Cambodia Anne Hansen “During the first watch of the night he remembered his previous existences, during the middle watch he purified the divine eye, and during the last watch he established his knowledge of dependent origination.” -Therigatha-atthakatha[1] “Thus with the divine eye, which is purified and surpasses the human, he sees beings passing away and reappearing, inferior and superior, fair and ugly, happy or unhappy in their destiny; he understands beings as faring according to their deeds.” -Visuddhimagga[2] “The study of letters is equivalent to having a divine eye… All types of texts, including geographical and historical texts, and so on, extend back in time. Those of us who are literate can read them, understand their contents and discuss them together. In this respect, it is as though we possess a divine eye.” -Gatilok[3] While the Buddhist histories, ideas, figures, movements, and religious art of Japan, China, Korea, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and even Burma are standard fields of study for scholars of Buddhism, Khmer Buddhist history has received relatively little attention. We know less about the detailed history and development of Khmer Buddhism than we should, and there are few if any contemporary or historical Khmer Buddhists who are well-known outside of Cambodia and Cambodian Studies in the same vein as Buddhadasa Bhikkhu or Angarika Dharmapala or Ryokan or Bodhidharma. Until very recently, beyond the significant oeuvre of François Bizot, the historical study of Khmer Buddhism has been dominated by colonial-era scholarship, which – while composed of towering figures such as Louis Finot – was characterized by a tendency to privilege the “ancient” and to regard contemporary religious practices and ideas as derivations or even corruptions of ancient traditions.[4] To fully understand the history of Khmer Buddhism during the modern period we need to examine it both on its own terms, as a modern, local vernacular tradition, and in relation to wider religious modernizing trends in the region and across the Buddhist world during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I want to talk today about “Buddhist education in Cambodia” in this larger frame. But first, let me simply comment that the absence of new work on Cambodian Buddhism in the latter part of the twentieth century is of course not an indictment of the rich and interesting annals of Cambodian Buddhism but obviously, the legacy of genocide and on-going social turmoil in the seventies and eighties. The work of reconstituting Cambodia’s historical, literary and archival culture has been arduous – and is still on-going in post-revolutionary, post-socialist Cambodia. It’s well known that during the Khmer Rouge reign from 1975-1979, intellectuals and scholarly Buddhist monks were targeted for execution and many other monks forced to disrobe. Among the monks lost was the great scholar and one of the architects of modern Buddhist education in Cambodia, Venerable Huot Tath, who was apparently executed shortly after the capture of Phnom Penh in April 1975.[5] Beyond the loss of lives, many secular and religious libraries were destroyed. By some estimates, 97% of Cambodia’s very rich collection of Buddhist manuscripts – many from the nineteenth century – were destroyed. Cambodian scholars and librarians who survived the Khmer Rouge years tell stories about cadres throwing books and precious manuscripts out the windows. In the National Library, I was told, the stacks had been emptied of books and the Khmer Rouge – who are known for having attempted to re-turn Cambodia into a late twentieth century version of an agrarian society – had used the library to store items they had confiscated from empty houses in Phnom Penh: alarm clocks on one floor, radios on another, and so on. The Cambodian National Archives was used similarly, and the Buddhist Institute – one of the richest sources for studying Buddhism in Southeast Asia – was used for livestock. While many books and other documents were eventually recovered at the National Library and the National Archives, almost all of the manuscripts and texts at the Buddhist Institute were lost forever.[6] Cambodia is about 97% Buddhist, and most of the Buddhist monasteries in Cambodia also had their own libraries, many of which contained old and rare local chronicles, as well as a variety of Buddhist scriptures. These scriptures included texts that monks had obtained through arduous journeys to the Buddhist educational center of Bangkok during the nineteenth century. The texts were inscribed on ritually softened and prepared palm leaves with a sharp stylus and then rubbed with soot to darken the inscriptions. The monks who wrote them did so as devotional acts, to make merit for themselves and others, and to attend to the liberation of human beings from suffering by disseminating the teachings of the Buddha. The manuscripts, copied from the holdings of monastic libraries in Bangkok and carried back to Cambodia over riverways and through forested mountains on a journey that could last months, were specially wrapped, decorated and presented in elaborate dedication ceremonies to individual monasteries, and celebrated with great fanfare by local villagers. The texts were understood to aid them spiritually – even if they couldn’t read the Pali language in which they were often inscribed, or understand the words spoken. Simply by seeing or touching a sacred text, Buddhist monks and laypeople could absorb some of their special spiritual potency. Besides their status as venerated sacred objects, these manuscripts served as the basis of learning for their sons in monastic schools – until at least the 1920s, when printed books and more secular forms of education began to slowly emerge in the Khmer countryside. Monastery libraries also housed epic poetry, the work of Buddhist scholars such as Ukna Suttantaprija Ind, the great Khmer poet I will discuss today, who lived from 1859-1924. Ind was well-known in Cambodia for his verse-novels, epic poems, travel poetry, stories, grammar and poetics manuals, and Buddhist treatises, in addition to his translations of Buddhist scriptures from Pali into the Khmer language. When I traveled to Ukna Suttantaprija Ind’s home province of Battambang a few years ago to interview his descendents, they told me that before printed texts became prevalent, his poetry had been preserved primarily through oral memorization. A rare written copy of an epic work such as his Rieung Pathamasambodhigatha, Ind’s verse biography of the life of Prince Siddhattha before he became the Buddha, was kept in a regional monastery library. Young men from surrounding villages would come to the library and copy a portion of it on a smooth wooden slate with chalk or a burned charcoal stick. When all the young men in a village monastery school had finished memorizing this portion, someone would hike back to the library and copy down the next set of stanzas, and the young men would learn together how to recite its complex meters and rhymes. One very elderly man I met in Battambang could still remember many of the poetic stanzas he had memorized in this fashion as a young novice-monk. Given the rarity of manuscripts of works like these, the destruction of so many monastic libraries between 1975 and 79 must have resulted in the loss of many such local histories and literary texts. Another famous source of conveying Buddhist teachings in Cambodia – and throughout Southeast Asia – has been the murals painted inside the viharas or “chapels” of monasteries. Often, the walls and ceilings are covered with episodes from the life and many previous births of the Buddha. Particular incidents in the Buddha’s biography have been especially important in Cambodia, such as his birth in northern India or the night of his Enlightenment when he fought off the armies of Mara, symbolically understood as the temptations presented by worldly power, riches and sensual pleasures. While many Khmer temple murals have been repainted in vivid modern styles since the 1980s, a lot of the older, historic murals were covered over with cement by Khmer Rouge cadres – and could not be restored.[7] Obviously, the destruction of so many rich sources for understanding Khmer literary, educational and religious culture and history has been a sad loss for scholars in and outside Cambodia. In the rest of my talk, I am going to first give a brief sketch of the history of monastic educational learning and reforms in Cambodia during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and then try to fill in the void of our knowledge about Cambodian Buddhist history by bringing to life the writing of one vivid thinker who has been an important voice in Buddhist education in Cambodia throughout different periods of the twentieth century: Ukna Suttanta Prija Ind. Ind’s work was celebrated in his home province of Battambang in the late nineteenth century and later during the advent of Buddhist educational reforms in Phnom Penh in the teens and twenties, where he lived and worked as a government official. Shortly after his death in 1924, his narrative ethical work Gatilok (Ways of the World) was serialized in a new Buddhist periodical, Kambujasuriya. After his death, his work (which was issued as a small paperback book in ten volumes) came to be viewed as a true expression of Khmer-ness in the 1930s, during the rise of Khmer nationalism. Later, in post-independent Cambodia, literature authored by Ind was incorporated into secondary school curricula. Among Ind’s work, the Gatilok in particular was reprinted many times in colonial, post-colonial and later post-socialist Cambodia. It was one of the works chosen for reissue by the Khao I Dang refugee camp press, and it appeared in a shortened English translation by the diasporic monk Venerable Kong Chhean.[8] There is currently a discussion forum on Ind, run by one of his great-grandsons, who has also created entries on Ind for Wickipedia and elsewhere on the web.[9] Ind’s modern Buddhist voice, appreciative of the humor, ironies and tragedies of the human predicament, bridges the transition between Khmer “traditional” Buddhist learning and new modes of knowledge. His greatest concern in the Gatilok was with the cultivation of education and knowledge itself, to enable persons to live moral lives in a world full of potential harm and evil. Let me start my examination of Ind by first placing him within the larger context of Buddhist education and training in his literary milieu of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. I’ll then turn to a discussion of Ind’s ethical writings on education. The history of modern Buddhist education in Cambodia can be said to have its origins in the Buddhist reforms that emerged across the Theravada world beginning in the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. While in the contemporary world, we often tend to view Buddhist histories in national terms, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Theravada Buddhism was no means “national.” Although travel was sometimes very difficult during this period, Buddhist influences and ideas are better viewed regionally. Warfare during the period meant that troops, military leaders, war refugees, captured prisoners of war, monks, and sometimes members of the royalty were moving across boundaries of the early modern states in Southeast Asia. During the late eighteenth and through much of the nineteenth century, Cambodia was caught up in this kind of intra-regional warfare. The day-to-day violence experienced by Cambodians of the nineteenth century has been well-documented in historical sources.[10] Because of the nature of warfare during this period, in which villages were often ransacked and burned and captured populations were marched away with the looting army, much of the existing Buddhist material and educational culture was also simultaneously dismantled. After 1848, a new Khmer king – Ang Duong – came to the throne, bringing with him a short period of relative stability. One of his greatest contributions, in the view of many Khmer historians, was to initiate a Buddhist renovation in Cambodia, which also drew on the royally initiated reforms that were being introduced in Siam during this same time by King Rama IV.[11] From the mid nineteenth century through the next century, Cambodian Buddhist education went through a series of far-reaching reforms that were significant in both institutional and pedagogical terms. The destruction of much of the Khmer educational culture in the wars of the previous half-century led numbers of Khmer monks to travel to Bangkok during the nineteenth century to recopy manuscripts, replenish libraries and study Pali. By the early twentieth century, then as subjects of a colonized state, some educated Cambodian monks had begun to initiate their own fairly dramatic reinterpretation of traditional Buddhist learning in Cambodia. Championing the study of the Buddhist Vinaya, the monastic codes for monks and lay people, they introduced Buddhist printing presses and periodicals, produced new translations and printed editions of Pali and Khmer scriptures, and called for greater lay participation in the work of “purifying” the religion and the Sangha in Cambodia.[12] The reconstitution of literary collections in nineteenth century Cambodia represented a classic Theravādin form of religious reform, synonymous with purifying Buddhism. A monastery, like the kingdom, was understood to be better off – stronger and purer – if it possessed a strong collection of Buddhist texts. A prevailing view of texts was of physically potent objects that affected the spiritual well-being of the individuals who handled them, while their exact contents were of lesser importance. Texts were understood to be sacred in much the same way as relics, which embodied physical elements of the Buddha. Being in physical contact or proximity with texts, touching them, seeing them, or hearing them, connected one with the Buddha and his teachings devotionally. These acts generated merit first, and led to greater intellectualized form of understanding only as a secondary aim, if at all; rather, devotional acts generated a different kind of insight, more akin to meditational understanding. For most non-scholarly monks, little distinction was drawn between different types of texts, nor was an effort made to attach greater authority to some types of texts than others. The sacred physical and devotional aspects of texts were in many respects diminished and altered with the transition to print culture that occurred during the 1920s. The nineteenth century preoccupation with purifying and strengthening the Buddhist sasana in Cambodia through text collecting was not simply lost, however. Rather, Khmer monks began to reinterpret and redirect the notion of purification itself. This altered understanding arose in large part through the influence of monks who went to Bangkok to retrieve texts and Pali knowledge. Ideas about purification that had been connected to copying, collecting and maintaining Buddhist texts in general became increasingly intertwined with the interpretation and study of a particular part of the Tipitaka, the rules and discussions of conduct and monastic discipline found in the Vinaya and its commentaries. As these monks returned home, their notions of purification became the basis for the articulation of a modern Buddhism that sought to separate the idea of the authenticity of texts from the materials on which they were written, and through the veracity and potency of authoritative interpretations of texts, to reorient the conduct of every Khmer Buddhist. Along with the tenets of scripturalism, [13] Khmer monks who studied in Bangkok imported a sense of the value of education in general, and of a new, reformed Buddhist educational methods in particular. For some Khmer intellectuals, the exposure to new representations of the modern geographical and physical world current in Siam under Mongkut and Chulalongkorn, and the more cosmopolitan culture they encountered there, seems also to have fostered a heightened awareness of the distinctiveness of Khmer culture and identity. Finally, as a result of their studies in Bangkok, the returning scholars had – as their biographies tend to describe it – experienced an “awakening” or “illumination,” a transformation in vision and understanding that took hold in their “hearts and minds.” [14] While we don’t have records of Ind’s own travels to Bangkok as a monk, we can compare him to others of his contemporaries. The biography of Brah Meas-Kan (1872-1960), for example, recounts the experiences of a young provincial man who traveled to Bankgok at about the same time. As a young monk who was studying at a monastery in Kompong Cham in Cambodia, Meas-Kan realized that he was not going to be able to progress any farther in his knowledge of scripture if he remained in Cambodia. A year after his ordination as a bhikkhu, in 1892, he left for Siam.[15] Meas-Kan’s studies at Vatt Jetabhan, a Mahānikāy monastery in Bangkok where Ind too may well have stayed, involved grammatical and translation training.[16] Altogether, Meas-Kan spent ten years as a monk-student in Siam, returning to Kompong Cham in 1901 to serve as a monastic teacher. Meas-Kan’s biography recounts the insights he had gained as a result of his education in Bangkok in this way: His heart was filled with joy toward the Dhamma-vinay that he had learned and studied in Siam, and that he had come back to train other monks, novices and young boys to understand. He wanted to teach them to recite and translate from the Three Refuges, the 5, 8 and 10 precepts [sikkhapada-sila], to translate Pali homages [namassakar] on the qualities of the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha for morning and evening worship at the vatt. At this point in time, the Sala Pali in Phnom Penh had not yet begun educating people about the Dhamma-vinay in this manner. Thus, the upasak-upasika [lay people] on the whole had yet to achieve freedom and purity because they lacked opportunities for hearing and truly understanding the [Dhamma-vinay]. Since the practice of translating Pali into Khmer was not yet wide-spread, they had never been able to achieve the happiness that came from the freedom and purity of understanding [the Dhamma-vinay]. Monks and lay people of the time merely transmitted the same traditions that they had themselves been taught, such as the vatt jayanadi [asking for blessings and protection], and so on.[17] In addition to the training in Pali grammar, textual translation and monastic conduct that young Khmer monks such as Mas-Kan and Ind received, Bangkok introduced them to an active literary world in which print was being popularized and simultaneously, disseminating new views of Buddhism. Under Rama V, the new Buddhist print culture introduced by Rama IV continued to flourish, with seventeen different newspapers and forty-two periodicals appearing in print during his reign, including one introduced in the 1880s by the staff of the newly constituted national library.[18] A full printed version of the Tipitaka appeared in Bangkok in 1888, while a new Siamese translation was completed in 1893 and available in print by 1896.[19] In the 1890s, a Dhammayut monk who was Supreme Patriarch at the time, wrote a new more de-mythologized version of the Pathamasambodhi, which was serialized in a periodical called Dhammachaksu, and later re-edited and printed as a single volume in 1905.[20] A popular series of periodicals, gazettes and newspapers circulated in the latter decades of the nineteenth century in Bangkok that incorporated translations from the Jataka and Hitopadesa in translated prose versions, and which led to the growth of modern fiction genres in Siam.[21] Ind later incorporated many Jataka and Hitopadesa stories (as well as works by the French writer La Fountaine) into his ethical compendium Gatilok. Even though we lack biographical data on Ind’s years in Bangkok, the Bangkok literary influences are clearly evident in his work. Ind spent the years 1881 to 1888 in Bangkok, probably in a Mahānikāy monastery such as Vatt Jetabhan, before returning to Thai-controlled Battambang. His earlier monastic training in Phnom Penh at Vatt Unnalom under teachers with Thai training perhaps also contributed to his appreciation for Siamese Buddhist intellectualism. Literate in Thai, French and Pali in addition to Khmer, by the years 1914 to 1921 when he was collecting and compiling Khmer, Thai and French folklore into his highly original modern work Gatilok, he wrote, extolling literary life, that “…literacy is equivalent to possessing a divine eye...”[22] The “celestial” or “divine eye” was an image often used in older Theravadin canonical and commentarial texts for depicting the Buddha’s ability to see his own and others’ past lives; Ind gave it a highly rationalized, modern interpretation, equating it with education, especially in literature: All types of texts, including geographical and historical texts, and so on, extend back in time. Those of us who are literate can read them, understand their contents and discuss them together. In this respect, it is as though we possess a divine eye.[23] In the rest of this paper, I will turn to examining Ind’s work on ethics and education, as representative of the modern turn in Buddhist education in Cambodia. The course of Ind’s written work from his late nineteenth century Ryang Pathamasambodhi to his turn-of-the-century “Battle of Ta Kae” and Nirās Nagar Vatt to his 1921 Gatilok shows an increasing attention to the history, acts and conduct of his own countrymen and women, whom he terms “yoen Khmaer,” “we Khmer,” or “jati Khmaer.”[24] In keeping with the intellectual Buddhist concerns of the day, one of his primary concerns was with reforming popular Khmer Buddhist practices and beliefs he found cultish or superstitious. For example, he admonishes Khmer Buddhists not to take part in the worship of Brah Ko [Lord Ox or Cow], a legendary black bull venerated in northwest Cambodia. After dissecting the elements of the Brah Ko legend as mythological, he attacks cults of this sort on the further basis of its inappropriateness to the Khmer “cultural group.”[25] “By contrast” with the Khmer, he asserts, … there are cultural groups who do hold cows sacred… in India…. But what about we Khmer who venerate the fully enlightened Buddha Gotama as the Foremost Teacher? Why should we venerate a cow? Why should we take the name “ko” [cow] as holy…? When we feel an attachment to “Brah Ko” or uphold the [sound of the] word “ko” [cow], it should be for the name of Lord “Go-tama,” because the Lord Buddha is our master from the lineage of “gotama-gotra,” and this is what we should rightfully associate with this sound “ko.”[26] Aside from purifying Khmer Buddhist ritual, Ind’s other preoccupation was Buddhist education. His ethics compendium, Gatilok, was intended by use for monastic students and teachers to guide students to think and discuss appropriate moral behavior. Education was the first important priority for a modern Buddhist. A “person without knowledge,” Ind writes in the Gatilok, is like someone blind reaching into a trunk full of pieces of gold, silver and copper. The blind person is unable to distinguish between the three gradations of coins. He has no idea what he is grasping. But the person with the “divine eye” of knowledge, can not only discern the difference between the coins, but possesses “a key to unlock and open up the trunk.”[27] For Ind, the nature of knowledge was not simply intellectual but also deeply moral. Knowledge can be divided into two categories, he wrote, depending on its spiritual value: beneficial knowledge, suvijjā and non-beneficial knowledge, duvijjā. Only knowledge that leads to happiness and well-being for oneself and others is beneficial knowledge. Ignorant actions spread harmful effects such as anxiety, discomfort, unhappiness, and embarrassment, which Ind illustrates with the story of a rabbit who falls asleep under a beel tree.[28] In the story, the rabbit awakens with a start when a ripe beel fruit falls down next to him. Not looking around, he jumps to the conclusion that the earth has fallen and he springs up and runs away in a panic. As he runs, he shouts that the earth has fallen. A cow hears him and starts running after him. A pig and an elephant, in turn, see the panicked animals running and without even knowing why, they fearfully follow after them. The procession of frantic animals runs past a lion who happens to be a Bodhisatta. He causes them all to halt and with his powers of discernment, he pieces together what has happened. He leads all of the animals back to the beel tree to inspect the fallen piece of fruit. At the sight of the beel fruit, they recognize their foolishness and begin to praise his wisdom. The story ends happily because of the intervention of the Bodhisatta. Had he not been on the scene, it seems likely that the stampede of panicked animals would have grown in size until some type of crisis ensued, possibly giving rise to still greater calamity. The spread of non-benefit or akusala functions in the same way. Any harmful result or reaction gives rise to further harmful results and actions. Unless it is stopped or rooted out an action based on foolish thinking generates greater and greater harm. In Ind’s tellings of Buddhist stories, a common result of actions that are not malicious but are ignorant is that they cause the actor to experience “angry-heartedness”[29] within him or herself, which is a source of dukkha.[30] In one case, for instance, an exhausted servant blames a rooster for his lack of sleep.[31] As time goes by, the angry-hearted servant becomes obsessed with the idea of killing the rooster in order to extend his sleep. Finally, he manages to get rid of the rooster. To his dismay, without the rooster to signal the start of the work day, the master feels no compunction to let him sleep at all, and begins to wake him up day and night to do his bidding. In the analysis of the story, the servant’s misplaced anger has thus led him into an even unhappier situation than before, into a condition of dukkha. One of the problems of ignorant people, Ind comments, is that they are usually unaware of their own ignorance. He amplifies this point with the story of a shrimp who is inadvertantly transferred by way of a human with a bucket from the ocean into a nearby freshwater puddle. There, he encounters a frog who asks him where he is from since he has never seen anyone like him before. The shrimp politely tries to explain the vastness of the ocean and the immensity and diversity of the creatures who live there. But the frog, who has always lived in the puddle, shrieks out violently that the shrimp is a liar. Never having seen such things himself, he concludes that they cannot exist. Frightened, the shrimp falls silent and tries to swim as far away as possible from the frog.
The frog, Ind writes, exemplifies the ignorance of people with little wealth of experience who, when they encounter someone who comes from another country or someone who possesses specialized knowledge, are unable to believe or understand that person. They acknowledge only the viability of their own narrow perceptions for interpreting the world. The conclusions that such ignorant people draw, based on their own limited powers of analysis, are both a source of humor and a danger to themselves and others in various stories in Ind’s Gatilok. Unfortunately, this type of ignorance can also lead people into physical and moral danger, particularly in connection with choosing friends and teachers, since the ignorant person with limited experience has difficulty recognizing true and false friendship and distinguishing between right and wrong knowledge. This consideration appears to address the well-known Buddhist maxim of understanding through one’s own experience and not relying on the testimony of others. Although not disputing this idea, Ind suggests that it can be carried to an absurd extreme.[33] Part of the cultivation of knowledge is learning how to appropriately receive guidance and instruction from others, learning how to differentiate between those who are wise and worthy of respect and those who are not. Wise people are thus represented in Ind’s stories by their ability to respond quickly and if need be, sharply, to the wicked people who threaten them or others. They are neither naïve nor withdrawn but rather worldly, engaged and in particular, discerning of the intentions of others. In one story, a “wise chicken” quickly outwits a deceitful civet-cat[34] who threatens him. Spotting the chicken in the fork of a tree, the civet-cat comes up under the tree and addresses him effusively, “Hey, chicken, my friend! I am now following the decree of the king, who has issued a proclamation that all groups of animals who are enemies will come together and agree to be friends. Starting from this day forward, animals will no longer threaten each other, and dear chicken, we will have so much happiness because the Lord of the World has kindly established this new law that enables us to be friends. Now, I think that you and I can become really close, like family. Please come down so we can hug and kiss and get this friendship off to a good start!”[35] The chicken replies at once: “Oh, Brother Civet-cat! You are following the decree given by the king that we should all become friends, and I see that you have already developed a loving heart. I really want to accept the intimacy and love you are offering, but first there is another matter that I want to resolve because there is a certain dog who has been living together with me in this place. Right now he has gone to find food in the forest and has not yet returned. Let us wait for him and then when all three of us are together, we can all throw our arms around each other and embrace...”[36] The civet-cat, hearing that his mortal enemy is about to return, runs off into the forest at once, claiming lamely that the decree is too “hot” to wait around. The chicken, with his quick intelligence, was able to respond “at once” because he was instantly able to discern the intentions of the civet-cat. In like fashion, other characters in this portion of the text obstruct wicked people from carrying out their malicious intentions because they are able to analyze and interpret signs, and respond appropriately and quickly to the circumstances. This quickness is reflective of the sharp and clear perception of the wise. It emphasizes the way in which many moral decisions must be enacted in the context of social life. Only in the abstract can one take time to ponder the chain of cause-action-result, deliberating on right and wrong responses. A final story that I’ll share exemplifies Ind’s insistence that students must seek out the guidance of wise teachers to advise them. Here, Ind draws on the Buddhist ethical conception of the kalyana-mitta, the wise or virtuous friend. The “Story of the Deer, the Crow and the Jackal”[37] raises a fundamental dilemma. Those without fully-developed moral identities are in greatest need of a guide and friend, but lacking discernment, they lack the ability to distinguish between those who are trustworthy guides and those who are not. The narrative depicts the contrast between the kalyanamitta and the papamitta (evil or wicked friend) or mitta-dubbha (one who injures or does harm to his friends),[38] and the plight of the third individual in the story, who lacks the moral discernment to distinguish between them. There was a deer and a crow who had been very close friends for a long time. There was a jackal who met the deer and talked to him as a close friend, and the deer became very friendly with him.[39] The two animals met together often. The crow was an animal who possessed prajña. He recognized the behavior and characteristics of the jackal as those of a false animal who was not truthful, and he said to the deer, “You should not attach yourself to that jackal. He is not kind and should not be your friend. He is only flattering you and pretending to be your friend so you will fall into his trap. He will molest you without doubt.” But the deer had been under the power of the jackal’s ruses for so long that when he heard the crow’s advice he did not pay any attention. He was accustomed to going to find the jackal, and the jackal invited the deer to go out very often. One day, the jackal saw a snare that a hunter had left in the forest and got an idea of how he could do his friend harm. He would invite the deer to go out for food in this place and deceive him so he was caught in the hunter’s snare, and then he would kill him and eat him. The jackal thought thus and then went to the house of his friend to talk with him and invite him to go out. “Dear friend! Let us go find food together over on that side of the forest. I am eager to go find some easy meals and there is abundant grass and shrubs for you to eat. You can have as much as you want to eat.” The deer heard the jackal invite him thus and went with him. The jackal led the deer straight toward the hunter’s snare. The deer never suspected the scheme of his friend. He thought only of walking around, and walking, he tread on the snare and the snare was then thrown around his legs. The deer was greatly afraid and screamed in panic to the jackal to come and help him. The jackal then made his behavior seem as though he were getting up in panic because a human was coming toward him. He leapt up and ran away from his friend into the forest and quietly waited and watched the deer move about frantically, lying on his back and then jumping up and down, waiting for the deer to eventually tire himself out and fall over. And then he would go and eat him. [Meanwhile] when the crow saw that the deer was not home, he went looking for him, heading toward the edge of the forest, all the while searching for him, until he reached the edge of the forest. At last he saw the deer caught in the hunter’s snare and flew down to land on the branch of a nearby tree. He spoke to the deer, saying, “Dear friend! How did you come to be trapped in this human snare?” The deer said, “This is all my own fault! That terrible jackal deceived me into coming here to this place to find food! He led me to be trapped in the snare and then he ran straight away from me. I don’t know where he has gone. Oh dearest friend! Please take pity on me and free me from this snare!” The crow said to the deer, “When the hunter comes please pretend you are dead. Make your body go completely stiff and don’t breathe. Let the hunter think you are really dead. When the hunter frees you, wait until you hear my call, and as soon as you hear it, leap up and run away into the forest as fast as you can and get out of the reach of the human.” And the deer agreed to everything the crow advised him. When the time came for the hunter to come and check his snares he perceived only that the deer was lying dead and he believed that he had been dead for quite a while already. He went to untie the deer from the snare, one side at a time, and then he stood up, looking to the right and to the left. As soon as the crow saw that the hunter was being careless, he shrieked the call that was the sign. The deer leapt up and galloped away into the forest with the crow leading the way. When the hunter saw the deer galloping away in this manner, he jumped to grab his spear and run after him, throwing his spear straight into the thick of the forest. The spear fell down right in the neck of the jackal and he died there in the forest where he was hiding. And the crow led the deer to his house, free from the danger of the hunter. Friendship and the moral importance of associations are examined in this story in relation to the two extremes of the crow and the jackal, the kalyanamitta and the mitta-dubbha. The social bondedness of individuals to each other means that the relationships individuals develop are integral to their possibilities for moral development. For this reason, Ind sees virtuous friendship as a key strategy for trying to live morally, in so far as one can choose with whom to associate. The problem this model raises is that the recognition of a true kalyana-mitta requires discernment. For ordinary persons lacking moral insight, who are blinded to the characters and intentions of others, to the causes and outcomes of actions, to understanding and interpreting the right and wrong, and to understanding themselves, it becomes difficult to recognize whether or not another person is a friend. The story, which examines the moral categories of friendship in idealized ways, takes the naive and undiscerning deer through the process of learning to recognize and understand the benefits of virtuous friendship. This ethical relationship is what Ind sees as the ideal model for student-teacher relationships. The crow surveys his friend’s situation from a vantage point of heightened vision. His ability to clearly discern actions and their results, as well as the moral intentions of others, makes him a kalyana-mitta, a virtuous friend or teach whose advice one should follow. These Buddhist stories, Ind suggests to students: have a great many things to relate….. We have only shown enough, with abbreviated interpretations, to use as models to enable you to think and understand how our behaviors in the world follow from causes which arise and which in turn give rise to [results] later in the future.[40] For Ind, one of the leading educators of his day, the point of Buddhist education was to learn to see how moral actions and effects shape our world, and to live as a good person no matter the circumstances of harm and evil in which we find ourselves having to act – and sometimes, to respond to circumstances very quickly. Or, to sum up his message in his preferred narrative terms: like the shrimp and not like the frog, we must strive for the greater vision of the “divine eye.” [1] Acariya Dhammapala, Therigatha-atthakatha Paramattadipani VI, translated by William Pruitt (Oxford: Pali Text Society, 1999), p. 5. [2] Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga, translated by Bhkkhu Nanamoli (Seattle: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 1999), p. 419 (XIII, 72). [3] Ukna Suttantaprija Ind, Gatilok, volume 1 (Phnom Penh: Buddhist Institute, 1970), pp. 4-5. Hereafter GL. [4] Charles Hallisey, “Roads Taken and Not Taken in the Study of Theravada Buddhism.” In Curators of the Buddha, edited by Donald S. Lopez Jr., pgs. 31-61 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Patrick Jory, “Thai and Western Buddhist Scholarship in the Age of Colonialism: King Chulalongkorn Redefines the Jatakas,” Journal of Asian Studies vol. 61, no. 3 (August 2002), pgs. 891-918; Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge 1999). [5] From field notes, Phnom Penh, 2000 and 2004. [6] Personal communication from Judy Ledgerwood, summer 2000, Phnom Penh, and staff members at the Buddhist Institute summer 2004. [7] Personal communication from Venerable Chuon Bunsim, Vatt Lanka, summer 2004. [8] Muriel Paskin Carrison, Cambodian Folk Stories from the Gatiloke, translated by Ven. Kong Chhean. (Tuttle Publishing New Ed edition, 1993). [9]http://angkorthom.us/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=46 http://khmerization.blogspot.com/2008/01/lok-oknha-suttantaprija-ind-1859-1924.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Okhna_Suttantaprija_ind [10] David Chandler, “Songs at the Edge of the Forest: Perceptions of Order in Three Cambodian Texts.” In Facing the Cambodian Past (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1996), pgs. 76-99. [11] David Chandler, “Going Through the Motions: Ritual Aspects of the Reign of King Duang of Cambodia (1848-1860).” In Facing the Cambodian Past (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1996), pgs.100-118. [12] Anne Hansen, How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 1860-1930 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007). The summary of changes in Buddhist education between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries is excerpted from chapter three of my book and used with permission from the University of Hawaii Press. [13] Stanley Tambiah, World Conqueror, World Renouncer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pg. 211-212, 401, 405-406. [14] Khmer, citt. [15] Maen-Suy Saddhammappanna Bhikkhu, Jivapravatti nai Brahtej Brahgun Meas-Kan [Biography of His Excellency Venerable Meas-Kan], 1961, National Archives of Cambodia 16 b.27, pg. 3. Hereafter JMV. [16] Ibid., pg. 6. [17] Ibid., 10. [18] P.J. Bee, I. Brown, Patricia Herbert, Manas Chitakasem “Thailand.” In Southeast Asia: Languages and Literature, a Select Guide, edited by Patricia Herbert and Anthony Miller (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), p. 30. The library was founded in 1882, in memory of Mongkut whose monastic name was Vajiranana. It was later expanded and re-opened as the Vajiranana National Library, in 1904. George Coedès, The Vajiranana Library (Bangkok: Bangkok Times Press, 1924), pgs. 3-6. [19] Tambiah, World Conqueror, pgs. 225, 468. [20] Craig Reynolds, “The Buddhist Monkhood in Nineteenth-Century Thailand.” PhD dissertation, Cornell University, 1972, p. 134. [21] Wibha Senanan, The Genesis of the Novel in Thailand. (Bangkok: Thai Watana Panich, 1975), pgs. 30-44. [22] Ind [1921] 1971, vol. 1, 16 [23] Ibid. [24] Penny Edwards, “Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 1860-1945.” PhD dissertation, Monash University, 1999, pgs. 253-255; Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pgs. 134-135. On the growing complexity of this word “jati” in Khmer usage, see S. Tandart, Dictionnaire cambodgien-francais (Hong Kong: Imprimerie Mission Etrangers, 1935), pgs. 807-808. This dictionary was originally researched and written at the turn-of-the-twentieth century by Tandart working together with Ind, and was originally published as S. Tandart, Dictionnaire cambodgien-francais (Hong Kong: Imprimerie Mission Etrangers, 1910). [25] GL, vol. 3, pg. 41. [26] GL, vol. 3, pgs. 37-41. [27] GL, vol. 1, pgs. 14-17. [28] Khmer, bnau, a kind of fruit tree. GL, v. 8, pp. 64-70. This story has a well-known Western parallel in “Chicken Little.” [29] See “Story of the Young Man who Raised a Bear,” (GL, v. 8, pp. 23-26), p. 25 as well as the story below. [30] Jacob translates the Khmer word “dukkh” as “sorrow.” (Judith Jacob, A Concise Cambodian-English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 86). In the context of the Gatilok it seems evident that Ind usually uses the word with all of its wider Pali implications. [31] GL, vol. 8, pp. 6-11. [32] GL, vol. .8, p. 42. [33] Ind relates a series of stories on “guessing” based on one’s own narrow experience in volume 8, beginning with “The Story of Cau Vaen Who Wanted to Buy Glasses for Reading Letters.” See GL, v. 8, pp. 43-55. [34] Ind’s translation for “fox.” This is a La Fontaine story. [35] GL, vol. 2, p. 83. [36] GL, vol. 2, p. 84. [37] GL, vol. 5, pp. 45-52. Ind has drawn this story from the Hitopadesa. [39] There is no indication of the gender of the animals attached to the pronouns used in the story, which in theory could make them either male or female. But within the text as a whole, Ind always indicates when an animal is female, so I am assuming that these animals should be rendered as male. Apart from this convention imposed by the text, the original language of the narratives is more gender-neutral than English permits. [40] GL, vol. 3, p. 24. |
 |
||||
 |
|||||