Deathpower: Buddhism's Ritual Imagination in Cambodia

Deathpower

Deathpower

BUDDHISM’S RITUAL

IMAGINATION IN

CAMBODIA

Erik W. Davis

Columbia University Press   New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54066-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davis , Erik W., author.

Deathpower : Buddhism’s ritual imagination in Cambodia / Erik W. Davis.

   pages   cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16918-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54066-7 (electronic)

1. Buddhist funeral rites and ceremonies—Cambodia. I. Title.

BQ5020.D38 2016

294.3’43809596—dc23

2015006821

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Jacket design by Noah Arlow

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

A Buddha statue celebrates the possibility of a good death and monks are semi-dead individuals who aspire to the ultimate good-death condition…. In a sense, then, what the relic does is make the Buddha statue like the Buddha, by making it dead through the insertion of a death-substance—in the rather paradoxical sense that Buddha-hood implies death-in-life.

—Alfred Gell, 1998

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Introduction

1. Getting Sited in Cambodia

2. The Funeral

3. Rice, Water, Hierarchy: The Wild and the Civil

4. Building Deathpower and Rituals of Sovereignty

5. Binding Mighty Death: The Craft and Authority of the Rag Robe in Cambodian Ritual Technology

6. Gifts and Hungry Ghosts

7. Eating Leftovers, Rumor, and Witchcraft

8. Buddhism Makes Brahmanism

Notes

Khmer Glossary

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

Accomplishing this book has taken more time and years of my life than I intended. My undying thanks to Leah, Freeman, and Nahanni for sharing that adventure with me when we could, and dealing with my preoccupation when we couldn’t. Thanks also to my parents, Meredith and William Davis, and to my siblings, JoYi, Adam, and John, all of whom helped make the person I am today.

I have been fortunate to have had many mentors, those who made me think in important and long-lasting ways. Each bears some share of what credit exists. Special thanks go to Steve Collins, Cambodian Buddhist studies mentor Anne Hansen, and Khmer language instructor Frank Smith. Thanks also to Chan Sambath, David Chandler, Chhorm Pheap, Wendy Doniger, Martin Jaffee, Charles F. Keyes, Khun Sokhary, Judy Ledgerwood, Bruce Lincoln, Richard O’Connor, Heidi Pauwels, Martin Riesebrodt, Winnifred Sullivan, Richard Salomon, and Eugene Webb.

During fieldwork, a few people made an enormous positive difference for me. My deep thanks to Heng Chhun Oeurn, Thon Than, and their family; Aik Sokhun, Iem Sreng, Alberto Pérez-Pereiro, Alison Carter, Sor Sokny and the Folklore Research Group from the Buddhist Institute, Emiko Stock, and Trent Walker. The excellent staffs at the National Library, the Buddhist Institute, CEDAC, and the Center for Khmer Studies were accommodating and helpful beyond any expectation. I was encouraged by their engagement with my research, their hard-working competence, and good humor. Even more thanks to all those Cambodian people from every walk of life, without whose often-enthusiastic engagement and participation this work would not exist in any fashion whatsoever, and whose names I have altered in order to protect their identities.

In the various intersecting fields of Cambodian, Buddhist, and Southeast Asian studies, where I have joined a peculiarly collegial and interesting group, I’m grateful to Pattaratorn Chirapravati, May Ebihara, Penny Edwards, Kate Frieson, Jane Hanks, Ian Harris, Heng Kimvan, Caroline Hughes, Alexandra Kent, Ven. Khy Sovanratana, Kobayashi Satoru, Patrice Ladwig, John Marston, Justin McDaniel, Miech Ponn, Ingrid Muan, Richard O’Connor, Jonathan Padwe, Mick Powell, Frank Reynolds, Nikki Tannenbaum, Ashley Thompson, Alicia Turner (whose cogent suggestions for revising my first chapter felt like being thrown a life preserver), Krisna Uk, John Weeks, Erick White, Paul Williams, Timothy Wood, Courtney Work, Teri Shaffer Yamada, and Eve Zucker.

Thanks to my colleagues at Macalester College in Religious Studies, Asian Studies, and Critical Theory for their kind welcome and support. I have been fortunate in receiving the trust and financial support of many groups over the years, including the Association for Asian Studies, The Fulbright-Hays DDRA, The Center for Khmer Studies, the Blakemore-Freeman Advanced Asian Language Study Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship, and Macalester College. Thanks to Cambridge and NIAS presses for granting permission to republish portions of articles, which appear in chapters 5 and 6.

In the Twin Cities, I have found enormous support, meaning, and resilience in the Twin Cities IWW. My thanks to all my Fellow Workers.

Finally, at Columbia University Press, thanks to Wendy Lochner, Christine Dunbar, and Leslie Kriesel, who shepherded me through this process with very little pain (at least, on my part), and to Bernard Faure and the two anonymous readers whose comments and critiques, though not entirely adopted, made the book better when they were.

I have undoubtedly left some central people off of this list, whose influence has become so foundational to me that I have lost sight of its existence. Forgive me: you have my thanks.

Note on Transliteration

The Khmer language has many words of Khmer origin and many others of Indian origin, expressed in the Khmer script, which is organized according to the classical Indian system and adapted for additional vowels in the Khmer language. Khmer vowels have context-dependent values, which creates a challenge and choice for scholars publishing in roman script: to transliterate or transcribe?

I have chosen to transliterate the Khmer language using the American Library Association and Library of Congress’s system, created by Larry Ashmun. This has the advantage of properly rendering Indic-derived words so that they remain recognizable to those unfamiliar with Khmer, and accurately representing the words as they are written, to avoid homonym-based confusion. Because the vowels have context-dependent values, occasionally the ALA system does not approximate the oral value of all vowels. English-language scholars of Cambodia have historically preferred to attempt transcription of spoken Khmer, so I have included the most frequent roman alphabet transcriptions in parentheses at the first instance of a word. For the ALA/LOC romanization, see http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html. In the case of vowel-final words, I have included final vowels when the word is obviously of Indic origin and excluded them when the word is solely of Khmer derivation. Thus pāy (cooked rice), not pāya, but kuti (monastic dormitory), not kut.

When I have quoted from other scholars, I have transformed alternative transcriptions to the ALA system, to avoid unnecessarily confusing the reader.

Cambodian names are typically transcribed into roman script, rather than transliterated, and I have followed this practice, especially in order to preserve people’s own preferred spelling when they have elected to forgo my normal pseudonyms for interviewees, as well as with place names. I have also rendered a few words that have entered the English language in particular ways, such as wat, which under the ALA system should be vatta. Words like nirvana have entered the English language without the need for diacritical accuracy.

Introduction

When I moved to Cambodia in 2003 to study contemporary Buddhist funeral rituals, my wife, Leah, moved with me. She was then in the second trimester of her first pregnancy, so perhaps there was no way for me to not see fertility and new life in the human management of death. After all, we had just sold everything we owned except for a few clothes and a large box of books, bringing these with us for a planned stay of three years. We had left one form of life for a new one. While I was attempting to understand what this would mean for my academic project, both of us were also expecting a brand-new form of life to take us over, as we became three from two. Two years later we became four, while in the same time, we also lost family and friends to old age, sickness, and accident, confirming a link between the constancy of new life and the universal process of death that is no less profound for being obvious. Anthropologists have long connected these two on the basis of their conjunction in funeral ritual, but it doesn’t take an anthropologist to make the connection.

In 2003, Cambodia was already in the full swing of globalization. Ten years of Vietnamese-sponsored government (1979–1989) followed the devastation of Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1979). The conflict continued through the eighties and nineties, with remnants of the Khmer Rouge in pockets of the country. This meant that massacres remained a part of daily life, and danger from land mines increased during this period, though the terror was certainly less for most than under the Khmer Rouge. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, a UN-led transition to a free market, formally democratic state resulted in elections in 1993 and a new constitution founded on the basis of Nation, Religion, and King. The garment industry was booming in 2003, and in 2014 was the largest export industry and the second largest industry in the country as a whole, after agriculture. The creation of a large group of urban wage workers as a significant part of Cambodian social life was under way. At first, my family settled into a house on the southern edge of Phnom Penh, closer to the factories than to the riverside.

Death often seems to double life. Once there was an animate personality in a body; after death there is only a corpse. Death implies a subtraction and suggests that there was something more that must have gone somewhere. We are notoriously resistant to the idea that anything as important as a person might end. In this sense, we may imagine that death somehow multiplies life. The ability to master this paradoxically productive power, to manage that which death produces, and to put all the parts back into their proper places is at the heart of what I call deathpower. At death, Buddhist monks care for the dead and create new forms of social value. This pastoral care is backed by their ability to conquer and domesticate spirits that resist their appropriate moral stations.

When I introduced myself in Cambodia as a student interested in funerals and the things of death, I was frequently told this mildly transgressive proverb:

The treasures of man are women, wine, money, and villas;

the treasures of gods include incense and candles, while

the treasures of the Buddha are nirvana and the grave.

There was genuine laughter in response, and nervousness about its content: associating Buddhism so straightforwardly with death and the grave seemed disrespectful. No one else recited it in the presence of respected authorities like Buddhist monks; I did. They would laugh gently and change the subject, or else insist that in spite of the humor, the proverb was correct. When the proverb was told to me by laypeople, it was clearly a joke. When monks interpreted the proverb for me, however, it became a code with a correct interpretation of each element. They explained that the poem identified treasures, or things of value (sampatti, a.w. sambat) for different types of beings: humanity—explicitly gendered male—values things of temporary and pleasurable use, including women, while the gods value sacrifices of incense and candles; the Buddha’s treasure—nirvana—rests in the same category as death.

The interpretation speaks to what different beings consider valuable, and was my introduction to discussions of value and its transformations in Cambodia. The last line of the poem identifies the treasures of the Buddha with death and nirvana (a.w. nirvāṇa, nibbāna, nippean). Buddhist doctrine certainly holds up nirvana as the highest goal of ascetic practice, though it is famously difficult to explain (Collins 1998). To associate nirvana with death alludes to Buddhism’s central concern with mortality, as well as the apparent but doctrinally denied equivalence between the two states. Attaining nirvana may be understood as the conquest of death; given the apophatic nature of the concept, however, nirvana can never be fully distinguished from the mortality over which Buddhism asserts conquest. Death is simultaneously a value, and the conquest of that value.

None of these reflections was foremost in my mind as we settled into our first home in Cambodia. I leapt into my project as I conceived of it at the time: a study of the changes in Buddhist funeral ritual since the Khmer Rouge period. It took very little time to discover a problem: while ritual diversity throughout Cambodia had clearly diminished overall, current funeral practices were not significantly different from the practices that had been hegemonic prior to the civil wars. I was able to confirm this not only through many interviews with people involved in funerals both before and after but also through close examination of François Bizot’s work on pre-war Cambodian Buddhism, which, in spite of his consistent focus on heterodox initiatory practices and their possible relationship to a defunct sangha in Sri Lanka, contains close descriptions of normal funerals as well (Bizot 1976, 1981, 1994). In fact, in spite of my desire to focus precisely on the differences, novelty, and change that had occurred as a result of Cambodia’s recent and violent history, I found that funeral rituals were profoundly unchanged, and almost exclusively relied on rural traditions. The only significant difference was the increased hegemony of the already dominant funeral practices, a result of the suppression of traditional ritual diversity by the Khmer Rouge (Kobayashi 2005). While other practices were taking on new meanings—especially the communal festival of Bhjuṃ Piṇḍa (a.w. Pchum Ben)—the funeral ritual itself had been largely unaffected by the successive waves of change introduced by the various regimes of the last half century. What happened? Why were funerals so resistant to change and transformation, while other rituals were affected in the ways I’d hypothesized (LeVine 2010)? Reproducing rituals without change is itself a strategic act; that this strategy is especially evident in funerals raises the question of their social value (Bell 1992).

The value and persistence of agricultural imagery signifies that much of the force and flavor of such imaginations rely on daily embodied experience, such as that which occupies over 80 percent of Cambodia’s population: the techniques and practices of fixed-field, rain-fed rice agriculture. But this explains the persistence of particular images and practices, not the special persistence of funeral rituals over others. My answer to the question of funeral rituals’ resilience is that they are a central act in the re-creation of the sociohistorical world in which Cambodians imagine moral possibility (Castoriadis 1975, 170–220). Funeral rituals perform, and through performance institute, key values in the Cambodian imagination that map geography and human beings, along with the techniques that mediate them for good and ill. Funerals are not the only rituals that engage these cosmological imaginations, but the moralization of the techniques that manipulate the dead in funerals and other death-focused ritual events is at the core of the morality of lived Buddhism.

What I call deathpower is the social power to care for, and in so doing, manipulate, the dead. By manipulate I mean to transform the dead in either secular memory or ontological status. Deathpower implies pastoral care for the dead and transforms their social meaning through that care. In Cambodia, Buddhist monks assist in the processes of both proper reflection among the living and achieving improved rebirth for the deceased, and bind spirits into sites of ongoing value—such as relics, a spiritually defended sanctuary, or an urn of cremated remains that descendants continue to interact with for years.

Deathpower is not a private property of a priestly elite, however, and multiple actors frequently compete for access. Monks may argue for preeminence on the grounds of moral legitimacy, while magicians argue on the basis of practical assistance or technical expertise. The technical and moral dimensions of deathpower may be separated in analysis. The rituals I examine in this book associate morality with hierarchy. To live in the Cambodian sociohistorical world, oriented to life, is to be part of a hierarchy. To refuse hierarchy, in turn, reveals one as demonic, savage, immoral, and oriented toward nonexistence. In contrast to both, the Buddha and the sangha—the community of monks—are those who confront death and the lonely wastes without fear, falling into a subordinate hierarchical status, or immorality. For kings and Buddhist monks alike, moral and political sovereignty are rooted in a fearless and practical engagement with death (Stone 2005).

Against these moralized hierarchies range forms of deathpower portrayed as secretive and individualistic, including the forms of black magic examined in chapter 8. Buddhist control of spirits is technical and moral; non-Buddhist control of spirits is also technical, but deemed either amoral or immoral. The Buddhist dominance is emphasized in the funeral, where the shades of pastoral care are presented in greatest relief.

I use the term deathpower to demonstrate the ways this care for the dead contrasts with Foucault’s influential notion of biopower (Foucault 1978, 140). Foucault explicitly contrasted the power over life, biopower, with the power over death as emblematic of two different and opposed forms of sovereignty (Foucault 1997, 247–248; Agamben 1995; Mbembe 2003; Foucault 1997). Premodern sovereignty was the ability to Make die or let live, whereas for Foucault, modern forms of sovereignty and individual subjectivity were related through an inversion of this power. In the modern period, the state’s power is to Make live or let die (Foucault 1978, 138; Butler 1987). Achille Mbembe has extended Foucault’s critique of sovereignty via biopower by investigating, along with others like Agamben, how the traditional sovereign power of unleashing death is exercised in the current politics, which he calls necropolitics (Mbembe 2003; Agamben 1995).

In contrast, the concept of deathpower I develop here attempts to outline the modality of a power that Foucault would likely identify as connected to a premodern form of sovereignty and subjectivity. However, if placed within the context of his later work on the care of the self, the obligation to care for the dead, associated with a particular modality of authoritative control over the dead, is a useful point of comparison with Foucault’s interpretation of the Greek imperative to care for oneself (Foucault 1985, 1988). The fact that it exists in contemporary Cambodia, alongside factories and peasants, foreign-dominated NGOs, and the trappings of modern democratic politics, challenges either the exclusive modernity of the notion of biopower or the wholesale replacement of previous forms of power with nascent regimes. In many ways, deathpower represents a more traditional means of instituting moral possibilities than does biopower: a means reliant on the control over and care for the dead.

These moral possibilities, constructed on the basis of Buddhism’s ritual control over death, institute the repertoire of much of the Cambodian imagination, ranging from its ethnic others, personal moral discipline, the cultivation of rice, the existence and types of witchcraft, and the creative deployment of traditional metaphors, to the rapidly changing circumstances of Cambodia’s present. Buddhist domination of the legitimate ritualization of the dead—its deathpower—establishes and moralizes particular notions about fertility, social legitimacy, and morality, drawing on everyday notions and concepts from Cambodian agricultural life.

The connection between funerals and the reproduction of core social values is not new. Bloch and Parry, anthropologists who have devoted substantial portions of their careers to the investigation of funerary rituals, assert that a near-universal in such ritual symbolism is the reproduction of fertility: In most cases what would seem to be revitalised in funerary practices is that resource which is culturally conceived to be most essential to the reproduction of the social order (Bloch and Parry 1982, 7). If funerals center around the recuperation of fertility, defined as that thing culturally conceived as most essential to the reproduction of the society, then an examination of Buddhist funerals in Cambodia should tell us something about those core values.

The cosmologies instituted in funerals are not only particular values but also dispositions toward those values, especially those key to the reproduction of social order. In Cambodia, the key to the material reproduction of society has been agriculture and the production of rice. The Cambodian imagination of rice is a key site through which to examine culturally conceived notions of value. The fertility on display as recoverable value in funerals is not, however, just rice, but also the social order and techniques through which rice is materially reproduced. Rice has been the resource most essential to the reproduction of the social order. It forms the basis of everything properly considered a meal; its production organized historical Khmer village communities; and raising it is the occupation in which over 80 percent of Cambodians still primarily labor.

Core components of social value such as rice, the particular nature of Cambodian social hierarchies, and techniques of water management are enshrined in the social imagination at the heart of funerals, arguably the most important rituals in Buddhist practice. Cambodians have created an agricultural organization of this society in the imagination partly through imposing culturally instituted binaries such as field and forest; the Cambodian situation also historically relied heavily on slavery, and today depends on patron-client relationships. Finally, rice’s potency is analogized to the potency of humans, so techniques for controlling one resemble the other.

In funeral ritual, monks can be thought of as farmers of the dead; as farmers produce rice through practices of binding water into fields, so too monks produce sites of deathpower. The modes of production and the ways these sites are exchanged lend a moral dimension to the variety of practices, classifying some as moral and others as immoral.

Most of these exchanges clearly associate hierarchical social relations with morality and oppose them to secretive, individualistic actions, which are seen as forms of black magic. Historically, Khmer society organized itself for the production of rice on the basis of the social value of hierarchal relationships, ranging from the practices of upland slave-gathering to today’s ubiquitous patron-client relationships.

The Buddhist ritualization of death pulses near the heart of the Khmer imagination of the world; it generates and supports a view of the world as it is presumed to be and a moral potential that offends against it. Buddhist monks replicate in funerals the techniques associated with Cambodian rice agriculture and the social organization based on it. Slavery is important to this story, and I argue that slavery has conditioned hierarchy and morality in Cambodia, as well as characteristic modes of social interaction.

I follow the majority of Cambodian Buddhists and assume that there is no problem with the interaction between Buddhist monks and spirits. Instead, I focus on the presumed modes of interaction in ritual practice. The social organization of Khmer society—dependent on historical slavery transforming into contemporary hierarchical patron-client relationships, and based on culturally distinctive forms of bunded, paddy agriculture—confirms the ubiquity of the rebirth of fertility in rituals of death as social value. Finally, I argue that the funeral ritual is a privileged site through which to examine core institutions and values in Cambodian culture and society.

Those values associate rice agriculture and social hierarchy with morality and present the nonagricultural and non-Buddhist highlands as populated by wild and savage beings—animals, spirits, and people—who are subject to slavery in order to introduce them to the moral discipline of Buddhist civilization. These values are personal and moral as well as social and geographical: just as slaves must be captured from the wild places where they prefer to live and bound into hierarchical forms of labor in Khmer civilization, so too each individual human being is made up of multiple souls that tend to wildness and escape to the forests, mountains, and deep waters (Edwards 2006; Thompson 1996; Ang Choulean 2004). In every case of physical or spiritual flight, the ritual answer is to bind the wild spirit into place, converting its moral ambiguity—also the source of its power—into morally authorized and directed social work. In Buddhist funerals, the dominant physical act is the binding of the spirit of the deceased into place—into the corpse prior to cremation, and into the urn containing the dead person’s remains.

IMAGINED BUDDHISM

This book attempts to represent a portion of the Cambodian religious imaginary through a study of rituals involved in the management of death and spirits. I am primarily interested in how Buddhist practices relate to everyday Cambodian understandings of the world. My method has been primarily anthropological and ethnographic, and focused more on lay religiosity than on that of monks. The majority of fieldwork took place from 2003 to 2006. I began by working primarily with funerary lay-ritual specialists called ācārya (a.w. achaar) before proceeding to an examination of connected rituals. I often solicited initial responses to a subject through questionnaires, then followed up with structured and unstructured interviews.

If I describe the subject of this book as a particular part of the Cambodian religious imaginary, I should stress that I too am necessarily caught within an imagination that is almost by definition somewhat obscure to me. Aspects of it include the imaginary worlds of anthropology and religious studies, as well as of the Midwestern regions of America in which I was raised. This is partly to say that there is no reality experienced or ever even locatable prior to its encounter in the imagination, and that therefore this account, like all others, will necessarily be limited, incomplete, and informed but not fully determined by these imaginaries. Following the work of Cornelius Castoriadis on the social imagination, I deal with Cambodian Buddhist rituals as events that perform, and through performance institute, the central imaginary significations that compose the cosmology of the Cambodian world (Castoriadis 1975, 1997).

When I discuss the imaginary, I mean something rather precise: society as an institution within the imagination. A serious exploration of Castoriadis’ thought and how it informs my method and presentation at each point is impossible here; I emphasize instead the following components of his theory of society as an imaginary institution (Castoriadis 1997). For Castoriadis, the radical individual imagination is the representational flux preceding conscious sense-making (Castoriadis 1997, 281). Meaning is created out of this flux and instituted as the grounds of the social imaginary, so that many people share in the creation of norms, values, methods, practices, etc.: the sorts of meaningful significations that together constitute a society. To institute such norms, or imaginary significations, as Castoriadis calls them, is to create and reproduce society itself. Therefore, imaginary is not a slander against something unacceptably unreal, but the necessary ground of all human creativity and collective life.¹

Castoriadis’ thought is defiantly ontological, in a way that associates him broadly with a group of thinkers sometimes called neorealists. His attitude is easily grasped by scholars of Buddhist thought, and an overlapping, though not identical sense of the import is made by the first verse of the Dhammapāda, one of the oldest poems of the Buddhist tradition:

Manopubbangama dhamma manosettha manomaya

Phenomena are preceded by mind, made by mind, with mind as their chief.

Manas is a tricky word to translate directly as mind. As the sixth sense of Indian philosophy of mind, it often seems to be something like the sense manifold itself, coordinating the representational flux generated by the contact between the other sense organs and their appropriate sense objects. But manas in Buddhist thought clearly also is a sui generis sense organ of its own, with its own appropriate sense objects. It is strikingly similar to what Castoriadis refers to as the individual radical imaginary—pure representational flux—to such an extent that I am encouraged to retranslate the above as:

Phenomena are preceded by the imagination, made by the imagination, with the imagination as their chief.

Everything we do as human beings not determined by our genetics exists at the level of the imagination. As Marx put it, the difference between the constructions of bees and the social order of the human construction of buildings is that the human architect first imagines the work that he then builds (Marx 1990, 283–284). The sheer diversity of human organization is sufficient evidence of our prolific imagination, along with our ability to create for ourselves things that are not shared by all others. People live their lives in reference to social imaginations, attempting merely to succeed within, to preserve and restore, to challenge and undermine, or even to create completely new forms (Rappaport 1999, 319–323).

Societies create themselves in imagination by instituting the social imaginary through practice, in what Castoriadis calls the Socio-Historical Domain (Castoriadis 1997). This could be a form of old-fashioned idealism, in which thought creates action and ideas themselves revolutionize reality. But Castoriadis focuses on the relationship between the social imagination and the socio-historical domain of actual practice, describing particular imaginations as gaining or losing autonomy in and over society through the process of alienation; if the particular imaginary signification becomes autonomous, the society becomes heteronomous in relation to it.

What practices could mediate the reproduction of the social imagination? The answer partly depends on the imagination in question. In his book on the Pali Imaginaire, Steven Collins focuses on the imaginary worlds created and reproduced through the Buddhist world. His examination is largely limited to the Pali texts, which have been subjected to historical practices of editing and purification at Buddhist Councils throughout the history of Buddhism (Collins 1998; Hallisey 1991). For the imagination of the Pali canon, then, the practices of establishing and closing the canon and the practices that reinforce its value and centrality for Buddhists are central to the reproduction of the Pali Imaginary (Collins 1990). A canon is closed, and a code—a type of logic that Castoriadis calls ensemblistic-identitarian or ensidic logic—similarly tries to close culture (Klooger 2014; Castoriadis 2008). But even a brief glimpse at any culture over time demonstrates clearly that it is impossible to prevent change and transformation. A subsequent question, therefore, is: When imaginary significations persist relatively unchanged over time, what accounts for their persistence? As I attempt to demonstrate throughout this book, the effort to encode values—norms, practices, meanings, significations—in binary form associates stark moral choices with a whole range of socially determined practices. Moreover, as I argue especially in the first half, many of the particular—and especially the embodied—aspects of Cambodian Buddhist funeral rituals draw on similar practices in other rituals, and on physical techniques from everyday Khmer peasant life.

Rituals have often been compared analogically to texts that can be interpreted. In such an approach, one might read a ritual. This approach has been effectively challenged by performance studies of ritual, which point out that the structural-functionalist method results in an understanding of ritual as merely reflective of a society’s structure. Moreover, the functionalist approach assumes that symbols have clear or transparent meanings, equivalent to their function. In working with reformist and modernist Buddhist monks, I was frequently informed of the correct meaning of a particular symbol, number of incense sticks, etc. The existence of such an ensidic code cannot exhaust the potential of