Ian Harris passed away in late December of 2014, just as I finished this review. His passing is a loss to Buddhist Studies, and especially to Cambodian Buddhist Studies. Harris's early training was in Buddhist studies; his research into the political aspects of Buddhism led him to realise the dearth of scholarly attention paid to Cambodian Buddhism, and specifically to the impact of the Khmer Rouge revolution on Cambodian Buddhist monks and institutions. This book focuses on that problematic.
This book is an important contribution as a resource, collection, and chapter-by-chapter analysis of how Buddhist monks in Cambodia fared under Democratic Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) and their successor socialist regime, the People's Republic of Kampuchea. The highlights are the painstaking work of collection and narration, rather than a single sustained argument. Undoubtedly this is in part a result of the way in which the book relies on a vertiginous archive of documents of various sorts, from various perspectives, in addition to Harris's own interviews. To the extent that Harris makes an argument throughout the book, it is that ‘some elements of Buddhist belief and practice were subsumed into the Khmer Rouge worldview’ (p. 139).
The finest contributions in the book are those in which Harris sorts through a monumental amount of material to construct several narratives of how Buddhism and Buddhist monks fared before and after Democratic Kampuchea. Although much of this material has been available in other sources, it has been scattered, episodic, and largely in specialist documents, many of which are hard to obtain. As Harris notes in his final chapter, he hopes in part to aid the process of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal (Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia) through this effort. Harris's treatment is excellent, and these chapters will help readers understand the complex and diverse ways in which Cambodian Buddhist monks interacted with — and sometimes were — Cambodian communists.
Chapter 3, where the book-length argument is first presented, is less successful. As noted earlier, Harris argues that there was a subsumption of Buddhist beliefs and practices into the Khmer Rouge worldview, but it is unclear what this subsumption means, or what Buddhism Harris refers to. If he means that the previously hegemonic worldview, ritual practices, and moral discourse influenced Khmer communism and its discourse, he makes a good case: certainly the Khmer Rouge leadership employed (a distinctly Buddhist discursive tactic of) redefining words with moral values so that true morality was re-coded to mean the new moral and practical norms of Democratic Kampuchea. But the significance of this point is unclear. Harris is a highly respected scholar of Buddhism, and has literally ‘written the book’ on Cambodian Buddhism: History and practice (also from University of Hawai‘i Press). But the ‘Buddhism’ he invokes in this book is not always clear, and a key argument in Chapter 3 relies on speculative assertions of Mahāyāna Pure Land influence in Cambodian Buddhism (pp. 61–2). Harris justifies this in a footnote on page 186 (fn. 59) with a reference to François Bizot's work on tantric or Mahāyāna influences in Cambodia. Indeed, the only substantiated clear influence of Pure Land Buddhism in Southeast Asia of which I am aware is in Vietnamese Buddhism. If the argument is that the revolutionary regimes of Southeast Asia are influenced by the ideas of preceding Buddhism, and that Pure Land Buddhism and Year Zero are important to the Khmer Rouge, then a more compelling argument would be that this Pure Land influence came to the Khmer Rouge, like the vast majority of the rest of their policies, through their imitation of the revolutionary Vietnamese Communists. But it seems more likely that the inspiration of starting from scratch in the Year Zero is more directly a result of their French Revolutionary influences.
If the argument in this chapter doesn't hold, the exemplary work done in other chapters, which does not rely on this argument, does. An example is the excellent work Harris does in chapter 6, on monk mortality. This chapter on the demographics of monastic death during the Democratic Kampuchea period is a wonderful piece of work that not only reviews the various and contesting numbers often adduced, but makes its own argument skilfully, and includes important evidence about the role of the illegal bombings by the United States (1965–73) in monastic mortality prior to 1975.
This book is a major accomplishment for Cambodian Studies, as it skilfully compiles and narrates in one place the experience of Cambodian Buddhism under the various socialist regimes from 1975–1989. For graduate students and scholars of Cambodia, Southeast Asia, and modern politics, this book will serve as a central resource on the topic and period. For students of Buddhism, the book will fill a critical need in the study of Buddhism's continuity across revolutionary disruption, accomplished with scholarly distinction. Additionally, this book could easily be used in undergraduate courses. I'll be using it in one of mine.
