Editing Cambodia (section)

== Buddhism in Cambodia ==

Mahayana forms of Buddhism reached the territory of present-day Cambodia by as early as the fifth century CE, roughly contemporaneous with Buddhism's arrival in Japan. Over the following centuries, as occurred throughout mainland Southeast Asia outside Vietnam, these Mahayana and tantric forms gave way to Theravada Buddhism, which remains dominant among the Khmer, Thai, Burmese, and Lao sangha alike.

An early precedent for a socially engaged form of Cambodian Buddhism is often located in the reign of King Jayavarman VII (r. 1181–1215). Jayavarman styled himself a ''dhammarāja'', or ''cakravartin'' — a wheel-turning monarch whose bodhisattva-like mission was to accumulate and distribute merit on behalf of his subjects — and under his rule the construction of libraries, hospitals, and public infrastructure took on some of the character of what might today be called community development.<ref>Harris, Ian (2005). ''Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice''. University of Hawai'i Press, p. [TK].</ref> This period also coincided with the growing influence of Theravada Buddhism imported by Sri Lankan monks, a tradition forged amid earlier religious and ethnic conflict on the island and thus inclined toward a combination of doctrinal orthodoxy and pragmatic, this-worldly engagement. Peter Gyallay-Pap has described this transition as a "profound social shift" — something close to a nonviolent revolution — in which a village-based monastic system replaced an older priestly hierarchy, and monks turned their temple-monasteries, or ''wats'', into centers of education and social service as well as religious life.<ref>Gyallay-Pap, Peter. "Reconstructing the Cambodian Polity: Buddhism, Kingship and the Quest for Legitimacy", p. [TK] [venue to confirm].</ref>

From the sixteenth century onward, Catholic missionaries made largely unsuccessful attempts to convert the Buddhist population, while millenarian peasant revolts — often led or joined by monastics — periodically erupted in response to taxation, land reform, and the encroachment of foreign powers, a pattern common across early modern Buddhist Southeast Asia.

The establishment of the French Protectorate introduced a more sustained challenge to, and reshaping of, Cambodian Buddhist institutions. More conservative elements of the sangha resisted French attempts to administer Buddhist affairs directly, but a modernizing faction welcomed aspects of the colonial reform program, particularly efforts to expand monastery-based education and to "demythologize" Cambodian Buddhism by returning attention to the original Pali canon. French administrators, for their part, remained wary of these same modernizers, since a commitment to textual rationalization and reform proved easy to combine with anti-colonial sentiment. This colonial-era current of Buddhist modernism, straddling reform and resistance, forms the immediate background to the emergence of an explicitly politicized Buddhism in the twentieth century, addressed below.