Food Supply in Cambodian Buddhist Temples: Focusing on the Roles and Practices of Lay Female Ascetics

Abstract

(ProQuest: denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)I IntroductionIn Theravada Buddhist societies, which consist of people ordained as monks and laypeople, what kinds of roles are played by lay ascetics living in temples? While there have been countless studies on Theravada regions in Southeast Asia, studies that focus on laypeople in particular, especially those based in Cambodia and Laos, are very scarce. Lay ascetics1) have mostly been described as part of the faithful lay community or just mentioned on a footnote level as temple inhabitants who are subordinate to monks.While so-called revival movements of the bhikkhuni (fully ordained female monk) order have recently taken place in Sri Lanka and Thailand, no such movements have occurred in Cambodia so far. It is believed that Cambodia has never had bhikkhuni,2) but it has female renouncers in the lay category called daun chi or yeay chi There are some research works that focus on daun chi. Nobue Hamaya (2004) has carried out fieldwork on daun chi in Siem Reap and described their temple life, including their social engagement. Elizabeth Guthrie (2004) has provided historical analyses of laypeople's based on the key word puos ... and focused on one daun chi, who was a meditation teacher. The Buddhist Institute, Cambodia (2006) has surveyed daun chi life in one district and submitted concrete data on female renouncers' attributes. All of these works have given us thought-provoking analyses and presented new findings, but we still cannot see clearly who lay ascetics are and what it means to live as a temple resident within the lay category. For example, ANLWC,4) a socially engaged Buddhist group that Hamaya wrote about, is unique to Cambodia, but its activities are very limited in region and even its name is not known widely among daun chi in general. As far as I have observed, most lay ascetics are not social workers or meditation teachers or Buddhist university students but seem simply to live in a temple. Therefore, to understand the general situation of daun chi, focusing on a particular group or prominent persons is probably not enough. What kind of human relationships do they have within a temple community? In order to understand lay ascetics better, we probably need to not only focus on daun chi but also observe a temple as a whole, including monks and other people.This article focuses on, among various aspects of Cambodian Buddhist temples, food supply for temple residents, placing an emphasis on the roles and of lay ascetics. I use the word practices here in a broad sense; it means not only, for instance, purely religious in search of enlightenment, but also daily activities in Buddhist temples. I try to analyze Cambodian Buddhist temples through the real of lay temple inhabitants in order to understand how the religion lives in today's Cambodian society.It has often been said that in Theravada Buddhist societies, temple going is part of people's everyday lives-and Cambodia is no exception. More than 90 percent of the total population of Cambodia is thought to believe in Buddhism, which is the national religion as defined in the Cambodian constitution. In fact, people have a number of occasions to visit Buddhist temples-such as during Buddhist festivals, most of which are national holidays. On a precept (p. sila)5) day, which occurs four times in the lunar calendar, temples in both urban and rural areas are crowded with people gathering to seek precepts ... from monks. As a daily practice, many families place freshly cooked rice and other food in the alms bowls of monks who come to their threshold in the morning. It is very common for laypeople to invite monks to chant at rituals held in their homes, including funerals, memorial rites for the deceased, and ceremonies wishing for a long life for living parents.Temple-goers tend to be middle-aged or elderly. The institution of the Buddhist temple has much to do with people's life stages. …