Khmer funeral rites

Khmer funeral rites are the Buddhist ceremonies with which Cambodian families care for their dead, from the deathbed to cremation and the memorial days. Many Cambodians believe that the rites, done properly, help the dead move on to rebirth.

The stupa at Wat Phnom, Phnom Penh, 2012. Photo: Anilakeo, CC BY-SA 3.0

Tradition details
Also known as	Khmer funeral; Cambodian Buddhist funeral
Practice type	Life passage
Usual occasion	Funerals and memorial days
Subjects	Celebrations & Life Passages

Beliefs

In the Buddhism most Cambodians follow, every being is born, grows old, reaches the end of life and is born again, in a cycle that repeats. Death is not an end but the close of one stage in that cycle. If the rites are not done in the right way, the dead may be unable to go on to the next stage, so families are deeply upset when they cannot hold them. Cremation is thought to free the soul from the body, so that it can go to heaven or hell and wait there to be reborn.

At the deathbed and at home

Families often invite a monk to chant at the bedside of a person near the end of life. If possible a monk is there at the moment of death, when the soul is thought to leave the body in fear and confusion, so that he can calm it.

The family takes care of the body. It is brought home, washed, dressed and laid in a coffin. Custom forbids embalming, and forbids cutting the body or taking out its organs, which is thought to harm the person's rebirth. The body used to stay in the house for seven days or more before cremation; three days has become usual. Each evening monks come to the house and preach beside the coffin.

Procession and cremation

On the third or seventh day a procession takes the coffin to the Wat for cremation. An achar, a lay ritual leader, walks with monks, the family and other mourners. The dead person's husband or wife and children shave their heads and wear white, the Khmer color of mourning. In the United States, guests and the wider family usually wear black. The crematorium usually stands in or beside the Wat grounds. For the funeral of a well-known person a crematorium may be built elsewhere to hold the crowds.

Charlie Dittmeier described a cremation he attended in Cambodia in 2011 on his website, Parish Without Borders. That morning monks chanted over the body at the family home for a few minutes, then shared the meal of rice porridge served to everyone who had come. At the crematorium, in the Wat compound, the family and mourners walked three times around the furnace before the fire was lit. Once the ashes had cooled, they picked out teeth, pieces of bone and other remains and put them in an urn, to be kept at home or in a tomb.

At the height of the funeral a monk slowly draws a white cloth off the body, chanting the Pali verse on impermanence that begins anicca vata sankhara. The rite is called bangskol, from the Pali paṃsukūla, the cloth that early Buddhist monks took from corpses to sew their robes. The scholar Trent Walker reads the cloth as the skin of the dead, whose removal marks the passage to a new life.

Ashes

After the cremation the family gathers the bones and ashes and cleans them. Most keep them in a stupa in the Wat grounds, and some keep them at home. Some families have a piece of bone or a tooth set in gold and worn as an amulet, out of love or in the hope that the dead will protect them.

The vessel for the ashes is an urn, in Khmer kaod. Urns are made of ceramic or metal and end in a pointed finial. The point stands for a mountain or high place, the sacred destination of the dead and their journey toward rebirth. Families may bury an urn with the dead person's belongings, or place it in a shared or single stupa at a Wat or in the village. Senior monks, high-ranking lay people and members of the royal family often have a stupa of their own.

Memorial days

After the cremation, Buddhist custom calls for a remembrance ceremony on the seventh or the hundredth day, usually at the Wat and sometimes at home. Because bodies are not embalmed and are cremated or buried soon after death, many people cannot come to the funeral, and the seventh-day ceremony gives them a chance to take part. As at the funeral, monks chanting prayers are at its center. EthnoMed, which writes for health workers in the United States, notes that families there often hold these ceremonies for parents, children or other relatives lost in Cambodia. Families also remember their dead each year at Pchum Ben, when food is offered at the Wat to ancestors and to souls with no living relatives.

Differences by region

In the lowlands Cambodians cremate their dead, while people in the highlands of the northeast bury them. In towns the cremation is usually held one to three days after the death. In the countryside the funeral may begin with a burial, and the bones are later dug up and cremated.

In a 2022 interview, Im Sokrithy, an archaeologist and historian with the APSARA National Authority, described this practice around Angkor. He counted funerals among the rites of chlorng vei, or "age transition". In villages of the Siem Reap area the dead are not cremated at once. They are buried for a time in a part of the village kept for the dead, the kork kmouch, or "ghost dryland". When the elders or priests decide, the bones are dug up and cremated, often those of many people together, in a large ceremony with dancing and performances. The ashes are then buried for good, by tradition near ancient temples and Wats, or by old ponds and streams, places where the gods are thought to live.

History

Paul Pelliot studied Chinese chronicles of the Funan period, from the 1st to the 7th century. They describe four ways of dealing with the dead: casting them into fast rivers, cremation, burial in pits or leaving bodies to wild animals. Cremation graves of the Oc Eo culture in the Mekong Delta date from the 3rd to the 6th century. In the 13th century the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan wrote that the kings of Angkor were buried in towers, while the bodies of ordinary people were laid on mats and taken far from the towns. He also noted that cremation was spreading. More than 200 urns holding cremated remains were found at Kuk Patri, a temple of the post-Angkor period, from the 15th to the 19th century.

Royal cremations

The rites for the former king Norodom Sihanouk followed the same pattern on a national scale. On January 26, 2013, for his hundredth-day ceremony, about 20,000 monks gathered before the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh to chant and pray, led by the supreme patriarch Tep Vong. The cremation followed on February 4 in a crematorium built for the purpose. Monks led the rites before his widow Monique and his son, King Norodom Sihamoni, lit the pyre. Half of the ashes were to be scattered in the Mekong and the rest kept in an urn at the palace, as he had wished.

Tep Vong, the Great Supreme Patriarch, was cremated in Phnom Penh on June 3, 2024, in a royal ceremony led by King Norodom Sihamoni. The procession set out from Wat Ounalom, where he had been abbot, passed Wat Phnom and the Independence Monument, and ended at the cremation site in the park facing Wat Botum.

See also

• Khmer wedding ceremony

References