Buddhism in Cambodia

The main hall of Wat Botum in Phnom Penh

Buddhism in Cambodia is mainly Theravada Buddhism, the state religion under the 1993 constitution and the faith of about 97 percent of the people.

Origins

Theravada Buddhism was taken up across society at Angkor from the 13th century. The archaeologist Andrew Harris traces the change through wooden prayer halls, which replaced the long tradition of building stone Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist temples there. The anthropologist Charles Keyes wrote that monks of this tradition had lived in Wats in almost every community in the country for at least six centuries before 1975.

The two orders

The Cambodian sangha, the community of monks, has two orders: the Mohanikay, by far the larger, and the Thommayut. The Thommayut came from Siam in 1855, when King Norodom brought in the newly founded order through the monk Maha Pan, and the king had Wat Botum in Phnom Penh built as its headquarters. The scholar Ian Harris wrote that the two orders differ little in doctrine. They disagree on points of discipline, such as how robes are worn, the use of sandals, how the alms bowl is carried and whether drinks may be taken after midday. A survey of 1959 counted 1,725 Mohanikay Wats and 106 Thommayut ones, and Harris cites figures published in 1996 that put the Thommayut at about three percent of all monks.

In the French period, monks led a movement to modernize Buddhist learning. Its leaders included Chuon Nath, head of the Mohanikay from 1948 to 1969, and Huot Tath, who followed him. Both had studied in Hanoi in 1922 and 1923 under scholars of the École française d'Extrême-Orient.

Under the Khmer Rouge

By the late 1960s there were about 65,000 monks and novices in 3,369 Wats. Keyes wrote that more than a third of the Wats were destroyed in the war of 1970 to 1975. The Khmer Rouge, in power from 1975 to 1979, called Buddhism a "reactionary religion". Keyes cited an estimate of 1980 that five of every eight monks had been executed under the regime, and wrote that the survivors were forced to leave the order. Wats were turned into storehouses and prisons, and many images of the Buddha were damaged or buried. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum writes that the regime labeled monks as parasites and seized their Wats. Harris records that Huot Tath was executed in April 1975, within days of the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge.

Revival

Keyes wrote that probably fewer than 100 Khmer monks were left in 1979, most of them in exile in Vietnam. Early that year, after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, a group of Theravada monks from Vietnam came to reordain some former monks. Harris dates the ordination of seven senior former monks to September 1979, and the new government placed all monks in a single Unified Sangha. An official count of 1982 gave 2,311 monks. From about 1981 the government of the People's Republic of Kampuchea restricted ordination to men over 50, and it lifted that limit in 1988. Official figures gave about 2,400 Wats restored by 1989, some two thirds of the number before 1970. In December 1991 Norodom Sihanouk again named a head for each of the two orders.

Today

Article 43 of the 1993 constitution makes Buddhism the state religion. In the 2019 census 97.1 percent of the people gave Buddhism as their religion, against 2.0 percent for Islam.